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.
A new release of MAME is now available. If you want to play with multithreading again, it is now a runtime option you can control with a command line option. Also, probably the most explicit arcade game to date has been added, and a bunch of Lethal Enforcers clones have been unearthed.
The first 'u' release of 0.108 is now available. Biggest change this time is a major NES PPU rewrite courtesy of Brad Oliver. Should improve the accuracy of the NES-based games; report anything odd or broken at MAMETesters.
A new full release of MAME is now available. Beginning with this release, an official debug binary is being posted so that folks who wish to use MAME for examining what's going on in the code can do so without needing to set up for compiling MAME itself.
A new release is now available. Major changes in this one include new output support and new built-in primitives and rendering layouts. I'm hoping to close out and release 0.108 shortly, so if there are major outstanding issues still lurking, make sure they are logged over at MAME Testers.
The new release is finally here. This version adds proper Bubble Bobble MCU support, some impressive Virtua Racing improvements, a working Limenko driver, and other good stuff!
The MAME 0.107u2 update is now available. A few bug fixes, some nice Sega driver cleanups, and a WIP Zaxxon driver rewrite are all part of the fun.
The first post-0.107 update is now available. This should fix some of the biggest issues that were reported in 0.107, and cleans out a whole pile of code that is no longer needed.