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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 0.166

30 Sep 2015

MAME 0.166 is now available.

MAME 0.165

26 Aug 2015

MAME 0.165 is now available.

MAME 0.164

29 Jul 2015

MAME 0.164 is now available.

MAME 0.163

24 Jun 2015

MAME 0.163 is now available.

MAME 0.162

27 May 2015

MAME 0.162 is now available.

MESS is now integral part of MAME and will be distributed as such.

Thanks to everyone that contacted us regarding licenses for their part of project
we have managed to cover more then 96% of source to be under some of open source license.
We are still in the process of contacting past contributors in order to sort this out.
If you have contributed and we have not contacted you yet, please contact us

Note that output XML is changed so rom managers and frontends need to get updated too.

MAME is going open source

20 May 2015

After lot of years being under MAME own license (prohibiting any commercial use) and therefore not open source, we are finally moving towards becoming officially open source project. Idea is to keep core under BSD3 license and rest is up to developers that created code (drivers and devices emulation). (options are BSD3, LGPL2 or GPL2)

Hopefully this will bring more new developers to MAME project and give more life to project itself.

Please note that MAME trademark is still valid the "MAME" name and MAME logo may not be used without first obtaining permission of the trademark holder.

If you have contributed in past and we still did not contact you please contact us at mamedev@mamedev.org.

MAME and MESS 0.161

29 Apr 2015

MAME and MESS 0.161 are now available.