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.
Fixing one of the remaining issues was a bit too invasive to risk going straight to 0.105, so u9 is now available. Please make sure existing save state functionality still works (though the save states are likely to be incompatible due to a limitation in the current architecture).
Sadly there are still a few outstanding issues, so we have a u8 update instead of a full 0.105 release. Soon, though!
The 7th update to MAME 0.104 is now avaialble here. As far as I know, all newly-introduced bugs due to the core changes have been fixed. If you find anything else that is broken, please let MAMETesters know right away. Barring any significant issues, we should have a MAME 0.105 soon.
Another week, another update. Keep those bug reports flowing!
Another update release is now available for download. Most of the code churn should be behind us now. Make sure you report problems to MAMETesters.
I've recently been in contact with Duncan Brown, the guy who wrote Alien Arena, which was recently added to MAME. Alien Arena was an entirely new game (in 1985) that was designed to run on the classic Williams hardware. Duncan owned an arcade at that time, and he actually put the game on location there with the hopes of making it into a more widely distributed conversion kit for arcade operators.
Duncan has been kind enough to allow us to make his game available free for non-commercial use, just like the other games in the ROM Images section. So I invite you to check it out, read more about the history of the game, and enjoy playing something new. Duncan has even provided his email address in the enclosed readme, so feel free to drop him and line and let him know what you thought about it!
Get the latest release here.