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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.

Now Featuring Some Games

02 Feb 2006

Just added to the left side here a link to a new section of the site, hilighting the various games that kind folks have made available for free download. I'm still holding out some hope that there might be a few more additions to this list in the future!

MAME 0.103u5

02 Feb 2006

Get it while it's hot over at the Source Code page. Note that due to the makefile changes, it is recommended that you delete your obj directory completely before starting a new build.

MAME 0.103u4

26 Jan 2006

0.103u4 has just been released. Go to the source code page to download it.

Developer Docs Update!

24 Jan 2006

After realizing it was hopeless to write a comprehensive set of documents on how MAME works, I've reorganized the developer docs section so that it hosts a collection of shorter articles about various aspects of MAME. Most of these are taken from my blog, but hopefully the shorter format will be more enticing to other devs who want to help out. Look for a series of articles on adding save states to drivers coming soon!

Welcome to mamedev.org!

23 Jan 2006

After experiencing too many bandwidth issues with my previous host, I've decided to move the MAMEDev site over to a new hosting service. The content should be identical for the moment, though I am hoping to expand it in the future. If you experience any strangeness or problems, feel free to drop me a line.

I've decided that MAMEDev is more of an 'org' than a 'com', so I'm trying to encourage the use of mamedev.org as the primary site name. For the moment, mamedev.com still points to the old site, though I will be redirecting that shortly to point here as well.

MAME 0.103u3

19 Jan 2006

The latest updates are now available on the source code page.

MAME 0.103u2

10 Jan 2006

I'm currently in the midst of switching servers at home, so Haze has assembled a u2 release. Hopefully I'll be back online to do u3 next week!