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.
Along with a growing list of Open Source and Free Software projects and other communities, we’re moving our official IRC presence off freenode. Our new home is #mame on Libera.Chat. Drop by and say hello if you have a chance! For more information, see our IRC page.
It’s time for MAME 0.232, and do we have a surprise for you! The incredibly rare Universal game Mrs. Dynamite has finally been found and dumped! This is an early example of a game where you place bombs to kill enemies that walk over them, showing Universal’s flair for cute characters and cutscenes. Mrs. Dynamite is believed to have performed poorly on location tests, and never had a widespread release. The graphics in the version that has been dumped don’t match what’s shown on flyers. Other arcade additions include Dokaben 2 and a prototype of Spinal Breakers.
Namco racing games have taken a leap forward this month. Final Lap has its sprite chip hooked up subtly differently to later games on the System II platform, which had been causing graphical issues on the title screen. Lack of playback status register emulation in the C140 sound chip was causing issues with engine sounds in Final Lap, Suzuka 8 Hours, and Four Trax. The horizontal position of the road layer has also been adjusted to better match videos made using original hardware.
A number of bug fixes allow previously unplayable Japanese home computer games, including µPD7220 issues affecting the Madou Monogatari games on PC-98, the missing 1-bit DAC sound on PC-98, broken sprites in Asuka 120% Burning Fest. on FM Towns, and background bugs on Sharp X68000. Mac media support continues to improve, with working CD-ROM drives on more Macs, and fixes for high density floppy drives. The V.Smile Smart Keyboard is now supported, in US, French, and German variants. Tim Lindner has continued to fix long-standing bugs in Tandy CoCo 3 emulation.
Software list additions include Taiwanese Game Gear cartridges, Master System prototypes, a big batch of software for the Australian MicroBee series, and quite a few add-on ROMs for the Acorn BBC Micro. We’ve also got the latest Apple II floppy dumps and cracks, FM Towns floppies and CDs, and PC floppies.
You can read all the development activity this month in the whatsnew.txt file, and the source and 64-bit Windows binary packages are right there on the download page.
MAME 0.231, our April release, is out now! The Yamaha FM synthesis rewrite is progressing, with the OPL family (including YM2413, YM3526, YM3812, YMF262 and Y8950) done this month. A number of regressions reported against the previous release have also been fixed. Most things should be improved, but if you notice something wrong with a system using one of these chips, be sure to let us know. Warp-1, a very rare Sun Electronics game from the late ’70s, has been added this month. This is an early example of an “into the screen” space shooter.
For as long as it has been emulated, the “3D” stages in Contra have been too easy. This comes down to the functionality of the Konami 007452 chip, which Konami calls a VRC&DMP. Now we know that VRC stands for Virtual ROM Controller, and controls ROM banking. However, the DMP part has been more of a mystery, assumed to be some kind of protection. This month, furrtek worked out that it’s apparently some kind of Divide/Multiply Processor, for 16-bit maths operations that would be unacceptably slow on the games’s pair of 6809-family CPUs. The great news is the game now runs correctly, the bad news is you’ll probably die a lot more.
David “Haze” Haywood is back this month with fixes for several arcade games that have never been quite right. He’s fixed graphical priority issues in SNK’s Beast Busters and Mechanized Attack, improved timing in Seibu Kaihatsu’s Shot Rider, and corrected layer offsets in Mitchell’s Funky Jet. He also added support for a couple of protected Mega Drive bootleg games from Argentina. Recently, David has been streaming MAME gaming sessions, often highlighting under-appreciated games. You can watch the recorded streams on his YouTube channel. Still on the topic of things that have never been right, sasuke has been busy this month. He’s improved the Nichibutsu 1412M2 DAC playback rate and timer period calculation, most noticeable on the Mighty Guy soundtrack, and made Taito’s unicycling game Cycle Maabou playable.
That’s all we’ve got time for here, but you can read about all the additions, bug fixes, and enhancements in the whatsnew.txt file. As always, the source and 64-bit Windows binary packages are available from the download page.
Fasten your seatbelts and get ready for MAME 0.230! There are big changes this month, but before we get to that, let’s highlight some of the more routine additions. Several TV games featuring adaptations of popular Hasbro board games are now supported, as well as a couple of VTech systems featuring Dora the Explorer. Several electronic toys and handheld LED game from Mattel and Invicta have been emulated this month. There’s a big update for the Apple II software lists this month, with clean cracks of lots of educational software from MECC.
If you’ve been following along with development, you’re no doubt excited about the new Yamaha OPM/OPN (YM2151, YM2203, YM2608, YM2610, YM2610B, YM2612, and YM3438) sound emulation core. This addresses numerous subtle and not-so-subtle issues, particularly in Sega and Data East games. Windy Fairy and Jennifer Taylor have continued to improve MAME’s support for Konami rhythm games, making beatmania IIDX, Beatmania III, Keyboardmania and ParaParaParadise games playable. Thanks to Happy, a couple more graphics issues with the Hyper Neo Geo 64 have been fixed.
There’s been a lot of work on the Apple IIgs and 68k Mac drivers this month. As well as the flood of machines promoted to working, Apple 3.5" floppy support has been revolutionised, and improvements to ADB GLU microcontroller simulation make the IIgs control panel usable. On the console side, save EEPROM support has been fixed for several Mega Drive games.
Of course that’s not all, and you can read about all the additions, bug fixes, and enhancements in the whatsnew.txt file. You can get the source and 64-bit Windows binary packages from the download page and start playing.
It’s been an eventful month, culminating in the release of MAME 0.229 today. One change that you’ll notice straight away is that the “64” suffix is no longer added to the file name for 64-bit versions of MAME. If you’re unsure, you can see the data model at the end of the window title.
One very elusive Argentinian title has finally made it into MAME this month. We’re very proud to present Ms PacMan Twin, an extensive hack of Ms. Pac-Man with simultaneous two-player cooperative gameplay. Another rarity you can now experience is Midway’s unreleased Power Up Baseball – the NBA Jam of baseball. On the topic of prototypes, Wayne Gretzky’s 3D Hockey Fatality Edition is now supported.
Several TV games for preschool age children from JAKKS Pacific’s Sharp Cookie line have been dumped and emulated, featuring popular characters like Dora the Explorer, Scooby-Doo, Spider-Man and Thomas the Tank Engine. Travelling back a little, Mattel’s representations of Basketball, Hockey, Soccer, and Tag as electronic toys are now supported. Elektronika Autoslalom has arrived from Russia (with love). Another batch of JPM IMPACT fruit machines have been promoted to working this month, making use of new artwork engine features for their internal layouts.
Updates to the Win32 and Qt debuggers add a context menu to debugger views with an option to copy visible text to the clipboard, improve behaviour when views are scrolled to the bottom, and fix a crash when right-clicking some memory views. We’re lucky enough to have received another shader update from cgwg, improving the appearance of the popular crt-geom and crt-geom-deluxe effects. We’ve added support for the NEC/Renesas V850 family to unidasm.
That’s all we’ve got time for here, but there are lots of software list updates, newly dumped bootlegs, bug fixes, and other enhancements that you can read about in the whatsnew.txt file. As always, you can get the source and 64-bit Windows binary packages from the download page.
In case you missed our presentation at FOSDEM ’21 (FOSDEM - Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting) on Saturday, February 6, 2021, we've uploaded the video that MAME's development and release manager Vas Crabb ("cuavas") contributed to our very own YouTube channel!
(Don't worry, it’s not all that technical - Vas created the presentation to be approachable no matter the skill level or whether the viewer is new to MAME or not.)
Thanks go to FOSDEM's organizers for a great weekend's worth of presentations embracing and supporting the open source community.
Due to technical issues early on Saturday, our live Q&A was not recorded.
Slides are available on FOSDEM's website.
Update: We've now also added a playlist where you can view most past presentations (CAX 2008, Summer Assembly 2009, Revision 2012, BalCCon2k15, CppCon 2016, Ekoparty 13 (2017), Ekoparty 14 (2018), FOSDEM '21) to our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMof4txXwGz3g_WJOtsX3FlGq_KT7WCeg
MAME developer Vas Crabb will be giving a talk at FOSDEM ’21. Due to the ongoing pandemic and associated movement restrictions, FOSDEM ’21 will be held online. This is great news for a lot of us, because it means we can attend without having to travel to Belgium. Vas will be speaking in the Emulator Development room, on Saturday 6 February, from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM, Central European time (UTC+1). The hour will include a presentation followed by a live Q&A session. There’s information on how to attend and participate here.