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.
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.
At long last, a "final" MAME release. This is the first full release with the new renderer. If you're new to the way things work now, please read the newvideo.txt in the docs folder on the new release to get a sense for how you should configure your video.
If you rely heavily on a frontend, you might want to wait on updating this release until you are sure your frontend can handle configuring things with the new options.
Lucky 13.... Barring major issues, this should be the last u release for this cycle. Time to move on to other good stuff.
Getting close now. This update includes a newly rewritten windows.txt describing all the options in their new arrangements, and some updates to the -listxml output to represent multiple displays and input controls. If you are a frontend author, this release is something you will want to pay attention to!
Time to grab the latest release. We're up to 11, and as with previous releases, the amount of testing is slowing with each subsequent release, as are the number of contributions from other developers. I expect there will be a u12 release to fix up remaining issues with some of the new things that were added this time, but look for a 0.107 release shortly thereafter.
A new release is now available. I've also created a "mega-diff" from the baseline 0.106 if you need to catch up from scratch, since applying 10 u updates is a bit of a pain.
Another update is now available on the releases page.
This release cycle will definitely go to 11, I'm sure! The 8th update is now available. Many bugs and other issues have been squashed in this version, and a lot of drivers updated to proper multi-screen support. Please check them out!