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Welcome to The Official Site of the MAME Development Team

What is MAME?

MAME is a multi-purpose emulation framework.

MAME’s purpose is to preserve decades of software history. As electronic technology continues to rush forward, MAME prevents this important "vintage" software from being lost and forgotten. This is achieved by documenting the hardware and how it functions. The source code to MAME serves as this documentation. The fact that the software is usable serves primarily to validate the accuracy of the documentation (how else can you prove that you have recreated the hardware faithfully?). Over time, MAME (originally stood for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) absorbed the sister-project MESS (Multi Emulator Super System), so MAME now documents a wide variety of (mostly vintage) computers, video game consoles and calculators, in addition to the arcade video games that were its initial focus.

License

The MAME project as a whole is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, 2 (GPL-2.0), since it contains code made available under multiple GPL-compatible licenses. A great majority of files (over 90% including core files) are under the BSD-3-Clause License and we would encourage new contributors to distribute files under this license.

Please note that MAME is a registered trademark of Gregory Ember, and permission is required to use the "MAME" name, logo or wordmark.

MAME 0.120u2

01 Nov 2007

A new update to MAME 0.120 is now available on the Latest Release page. This update features an overhaul of the Mad Alien driver from Stefan Jokish, improved SCSI and I2C emulation from smf, a new 6850 ACIA implementation from Curt Coder, some progress on the Mortal Kombat 4 front, and some additional architecture-specific optimizations that are useful for 3D rasterization.

As always, report issues over at MAMETesters. And have fun!

Brief Downtime

27 Oct 2007

Sorry for the brief downtime. It appears that the devwiki traffic causes too much CPU load on the server we're hosted at, so I'm going to disable it for the time being. Sorry for the inconvenience. It will be back eventually.

MAME 0.120u1

24 Oct 2007

Time for the first update to MAME 0.120. Grab it from the Latest Release page.

This update features a number of nice enhancements. Phil has submitted his System 21 changes, so all those games should be looking significantly better this time around. In addition, a more generic polygon rendering system has been added which makes it much easier for games to offload their rasterization to a second CPU. So far, the Voodoo emulation, Gaelco 3D system, Midway V-Unit, and Namco System 22 have been updated to take advantage of it. Some games do better than others, but if you have a multicore machine, this release should show some noticeably improved framerates for those games.

MAME 0.120

15 Oct 2007

Come and grab the latest official "stable" build of MAME from the Latest Release page, or from the ZTNet Mirror. As of this release, I am officially producing a 64-bit native Windows binary along with the usual 32-bit builds to help encourage more testing of the 64-bit native code. For the most part, games run at least as well as the 32-bit versions, and some run significantly better thanks to the architectural improvements of native 64-bit mode.

Another notable change with this release is the movement of some core shared files in the source tree. A number of files in the mame/machine and mame/video directories were really more core shared components, and so they have been given a new home in the emu/machine and emu/video directories.

As always, report bugs with this version over at MAMETesters. Have fun!

MAME 0.119u4

11 Oct 2007

Time for a new update; grab it from the Latest Release page. A number of new games and clones are enabled in this release, thanks to Haze and Luca Elia (and all those who helped dump the games). We also have support for Player's Edge Plus Double Bonus Poker, contributed by new contributor Jim Stolis, who has been documenting his progress on his blog. This release also contains some updates to the multithreaded 3dfx support, hopefully making it scale better above 2 CPUs and simplifying the implementation for those working on other ports.

MAME 0.119u3

05 Oct 2007

This just in... a new update for MAME 0.119 in now available for download on the Latest Release page. This update features some nice Sega Model 2 improvements from Ernesto Corvi, fixed colors in Dynamite Duke from David Haywood, and a number of multithreading changes that enable the 3dfx Voodoo emulation to take advantage of multiple CPUs. Please note that this new code falls into the "mostly works" category; you may encounter some deadlocks or other glitches along the way, but please give it a try and report your success/failure over at MAME Testers.

MAME 0.119u2

29 Sep 2007

The second update to the 0.119 MAME source is now available. Go grab it from the Latest Release page. Some nice SCSP and Model 2/3 sound improvements from R. Belmont are included as well as more Mahjong madness and the usual collection of internal changes and fixes. Have fun!