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.
Take two of MAME 0.124 is now available on the Latest Release page. This update supplants the previous release. If you downloaded a binary previously, you'll need to grab a new one. If you downloaded the sources, you can either grab a fresh copy or apply this patch to the ones you downloaded. You can identify the fixed one in that it reports version 0.124a if you run it with -help, or in the version.c file.
Apologies for the excitement today! :)
Turns out a seemingly inncouous compiler fix that was included at the last minute in 0.124 busted the sound on quite a few games. For now, the release is recalled. Updated sources and binaries will be posted later this evening.
After a long development cycle, MAME 0.124 is now ready for release. Grab it from the Latest Releases page. Have fun!
Grab it from the Source Updates page. This is the "big pile o' bugfixes" release prior to MAME 0.124, which will hopefully happen this weekend or early next week. There are also a few other nice goodies included this time around.
Please report bugs over at the new MAMETesters bug database. As you can see, we are paying attention!
Another week, another big update. Grab it from the Source Updates page.
There have been a number of substantial internal changes recently. A lot of this is related to some long-term plans I have around unifying the various device types, removing arbitrary limits, getting rid of hacky old systems, and implementing some core features that have long been requested. I want to extend a special thanks to Zsolt Vasvari who has been doing a lot of the dirty work involved in these changes.
Consider the most recent changes a bit of internal "spring cleaning", and keep an eye out for bugs that might creep in as a result. As you can see from the whatsnew, we are tracking new bugs on the new and improved MAMETesters site, so please make sure you register with the bug database and log anything that seems to be amiss.
A new update to MAME 0.123 is now available on the Source Updates page. A few big changes lurk in this update, so please give your favorite games a whirl to make sure we sift out any bugs before we start closing in on 0.124! Report what you find over at the new MAMETesters bug database.
Time for another update to MAME 0.123. Read the whatsnew file for a full rundown of what's changed.
Also, thanks to Fujix's hard work over at MAMETesters, they will shortly be unveiling a new bug database to track issues in. This will allow for more distributed tracking and will hopefully make it easier to sift through the piles of bugs going forward.