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3b) The Arcade Emulator

  MAMEHomebrew Arcade
Thu, 03/22/2007 - 06:31 — steve

The Emulator - MAME and all of it's incarnations

MAME, or Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, is the software that makes this whole thing possible. From the MAME website:

On December 24th, 1996, Nicola Salmoria began working on his single hardware emulators (for example Multi-Pac), which he merged into one program during January 1997. He named the accomplishment by the name of Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, or MAME for short (pronounced as the word 'maim' in English, other languages may differ).

The first official release was MAME 0.1, which was released on the evening of February 5th, 1997. Using a modular and portable driver oriented architecture with an open source philosophy, it soon grew into immense proportions. The current version recognizes over six thousand ROM sets. Because MAME releases happen whenever they are ready, at one point the wait between new versions was almost 4 months. To help the agony of the users, a public beta system was used, with a beta release happening every 2-3 weeks on an average. However, now the beta designation has been removed in favor of a good old 0.xx version number. Also a work-in-progress -page exists, if you really want to know the latest information.

Even though MAME allows people to enjoy the long-lost arcade games and even some newer ones, the main purpose of the project is to document the hardware (and software) of the arcade games. There are already many dead arcade boards, whose function has been brought to life in MAME. Being able to play the games is just a nice side-effect. The huge success of MAME would not be possible without the talent of the programmers who joined to form the MAME team. At the moment, there are about 100 people on the team, but there is a large number of contributors outside the team too. Aaron Giles is the current coordinator of the project.

The MAME website is available Here.

There are literally hundreds of ports and minor spin-offs of MAME available. I have tried a lot of them, but very few meet my specific needs; most importantly, I need a solution which can work in an arcade cabinet without requiring a generic keyboard or mouse. My all-time favorite MAME release is called AdvanceMAME; Not only does it meet my primary need of working without a keyboard, but as a bonus it offers a very nice game selection frontend (AdvanceMENU) AND provides support for "Perfect" graphics modes (graphical mode switching for multisync monitors runs the games at the resolution and frequency that the games were originally designed for) as well as very nice scaling modes for running the games full-screen. The author, Andrea Mazzoleni, lives in Italy and has done an incredible job of developing, supporting, and continuing to update his application. Simply amazing. I highly recommend this release, and would urge you to donate some cash to Andrea should you decide to use his distribution, as it is an incredible piece of work.

AdvanceMENU configuration

My AdvanceMENU configuration can be downloaded Here. I make a few minor changes to the defaults, most notably changing the location of the ROM files and snapshots; I also change the appearance slightly to tweak things for my monitor and personal liking.

AdvanceMAME configuration

My AdvanceMAME configuration can be downloaded Here. I make a few minor changes to the defaults, most notably changing the location of the ROM files and snapshots; I also change the appearance slightly to tweak things for my monitor and personal liking.

Obtaining MAME ROMs

This, alas, I won't help you with. Google and BitTorrent are your friends. This is one of the most challenging aspects of building your own arcade cabinet, and is an exercise left to the reader. Don't call, write, or email me looking for these, I WON'T send you any, nor will I tell you where to find them.


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