Description

MAME is a computer software program for personal computers. The purpose of MAME is to faithfully and precisely emulate as many arcade games as possible, with the intent of preserving gaming history and preventing vintage games from being lost or forgotten. The name is an acronym for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator.

MAME has been ported to many different platforms. The X11 port for Unix-like systems is named XMAME. The Mac OS X port is named MacMAME.

According to the official MAME web site, the first public MAME release (0.1) was on February 5, 1997, by Nicola Salmoria. As of version 0.104 (actually the 148th proper release), released February 5, 2006, MAME now supports 3270 unique games and 6024 actual ROM sets (each game may just have the original or have one or more clones as well - see below) and is growing all the time. However, not all of the games in MAME are playable; 677 ROM sets are marked as not working in the current version.