Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator

MAME (Originally an acronym for "Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator", in Spanish "Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator") is a free and code multipurpose arcade machine emulator open, which replicates the hardware of these computers for operation on home computers and other types of devices. The goal of the project is to preserve decades of software history, which would otherwise be lost or forgotten. Over time, MAME absorbed its sister project MESS ("Multi Emulator Super System"), so today, MAME documents a wide variety of systems including computers, video game consoles, calculators, as well as the arcade machines for which it was created. originally created. Digital media Joystiq has referred to MAME as an application that every Windows or Mac gamer should have.

The first version was published on February 5, 1997 by Italian software developer Nicola Salmoria. Currently, MAME supports over seven thousand unique games and about ten thousand ROM images, although not all supported games are playable.

History

Prior to the creation of this emulator, the enormous diversity of arcade machine hardware made emulating its games a very complex and messy task.

To make it easier to emulate arcade machines, Nicola Salmoria created MAME by merging several emulators he had been working on. It based its structure on a modular architecture, in which each hardware component was emulated by means of a specific driver, in such a way that for the emulation of a machine, it is enough to provide the information of what components it has, and how they are related.

The objective of the development of MAME is to contribute to the conservation of games that, otherwise, would disappear forever when the machines that contained them disappeared, contributing to preserve the history of videogames.

The development of the MAME project has been hampered over the years by various factors:

• The difficulty of accessing the plates (hardware) of the original recreational, to study and extract the ROMs (copy of the machine software, which contains the game itself).
• The encryption used internally by many recreations, as a means of avoiding piracy.
• Possible legal problems that could occur if too recent games were emulated, still marketed.

Emulated Games

MAME currently emulates most of the arcade games of the 20th and early 21st centuries, in total more than 5000 different emulated games, most in multiple versions.

You cannot legally use MAME, or any other emulator, with the ROM file of a game whose physical ROM you do not own, or the corresponding emulation permission. This means that games of any kind are never distributed with the emulator, because they could cause serious legal problems, even in the case of games that are more than 20 years old. However, this is not to say that there are no ROMs that can be legally emulated; Several games have been released voluntarily by their creators at the request of developers of the M.A.M.E.

At a darker point are the licenses that have not been released for games developed by companies that are now defunct, because in this case it is not possible to determine who owns the license.

Equally, despite the prohibition of the use and distribution of many of the ROMs, these ROMs can be found illegally distributed on Internet pages for download.

ROM compatibility

One of the problems that users experience when using this emulator program is the compatibility of the ROMs (files that contain the games) that exist in each version of MAME: a ROM that works on an older version of MAME doesn't always work on a newer version of MAME; This is because, for example, new, better-quality copies of the ROM file can be created, making the old version obsolete.

Open source

MAME has always been distributed under its own Copyleft license called the "MAME-like license" in which the source code was available as long as it was not used for commercial purposes, this made it impossible for arcade owners to install MAME on their furniture to avoid possible retaliation by game owners. Said license was therefore incompatible with the OSI and the Free Software Foundation.

On May 20, 2015 it was announced on the MAME website that the emulator was transitioning from being open source with the idea of licensing the code in BSD-3. Finally on March 4, 2016 MAME as well MESS becomes 100% open source, while 90% of the code is licensed on BSD-3, the project itself is released under the GPLv2 license.

Even though MAME is free software, the brand name still belongs to Nicola Salmoria.

Versions

MAME is developed in Windows and DOS versions, but there are versions for other platforms, such as Linux, Mac OS, AmigaOS, QNX, and even unofficially for Nintendo DS, Nintendo 64, Dreamcast, GP32, GP2X, GP2X Wiz, Dingoo A320, Nokia S60, Android, PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable, XBOX, iPhone, Motorola A1200, ROKR E6 and Wii.