About MAME

Introducing MAME

MAME is a free, community run project, created to preserve arcade machines, consoles, handhelds and computer systems and their software. It achieves this through a process called emulation, which means that it recreates the original functions of it's supported systems based on real hardware. This involves analyzing and examining original hardware and checking against schematics and manufacturer documentation. Once done, code is written that replicates the chips and circuitry from the system's circuit boards. This leads to an accurate representation of the original hardware, preserved and runnable on a computer system. A by-product of this is that it allows software written for the machine to run exactly how it ran on the original hardware. For the user, it means that you get to use the software as the writers intended, with original graphics, sound and more importantly gameplay!

The project was started back in 1996 as a Pac Man emulator called MultiPac which was released by an Italian programmer called Nicola Salmoria. In February 1997, more machines were added and the name was changed to Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (M.A.M.E.). The initial release of MAME supported five games which were Pac Man, Ms Pacman, Crush Roller, Lady Bug and Pengo. Over time, more and more machines were emulated and added to MAME and the project grew along with the team that contributed towards it. Now, after over 20 years of continual development, the MAME project is huge. MAME now supports tens of thousands of machines and the software that runs on them. It is in constant development with new machines and software being added all of the time.

As with every large project, there are hundreds of people who regularly contribute to it. Contributions range from the guys in the development team who do all the coding, all the way through to the guys who make the support files and artwork. All this work is done completely free of charge, motivated by the desire to preserve old computer and gaming hardware. If you are interested, a complete history of MAME can be found here.

In 2015 the MAME development team integrated MAME's sister emulator M.E.S.S. (Multiple Emulator Super System) into it's source code, adding computer, console and handheld emulation to the arcade machines that it already supported. With the integration of the two emulators, the project dropped the M.A.M.E. and M.E.S.S. acronyms and renamed itself just to MAME. The final pivotal year (so far!) was 2016 where the old, clunky user interface was finally replaced with a far more user friendly UI based on the frontend MEWUI.

MAME isn't exclusive to Windows PC as it has been ported to several other systems. These include Apple Mac, Linux, Raspberry Pi as well as other operating systems and smart devices. There are also several custom builds of MAME that refine or enhance what it does. In terms of performance, MAME doesn't need a powerful system to run most machines, though there are a lot of more modern machines that won't run at full speed, even on the fastest CPUs. MAME's system requirements are listed here.

ROM and software images are a fundamental part of MAME and due to the thousands of machines it support, a complete set of ROMs and disk images now take up over 3TB of disk space. Add all the media and support files and you'll pretty much fill a 4TB drive. This huge figure is rising all the time as each update adds more and more systems.

MAME is a brilliant resource that captures the nostalgia of retrogaming. If you're an old school arcader or a console fan, even if you've never used a classic system before, MAME has something for you! You will find machines made by many familiar manufacturers including Sega, Sony, Taito, Capcom, Atari, Konami and Nintendo. In the games list, you will find all the classic titles from these manufacturers which can be played exactly as they were intended. With the huge selection of games and systems that MAME supports, there are many thousands of hours of enjoyment to be had.

This Guide

This EasyEmu MAME guide is designed to make this great project slightly easier to use and hopefully try and explain some of the more complex stuff in a way that anyone can understand. To keep things simple, the guide will only cover the standard Windows version of MAME as it is by far, the most popular version available. Most of the information on the guide pages should translate to other versions as well.