MAME is the short for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. As the word says with this program you can play several arcade games.

ROM images are the central piece of every arcade emulation project. Those files are still the intellectual property (that's the small line of print with a © or a ® in it) of someone else, probably some megacorp with lots of money to waste on attorneys and law suits.

You will find no ROM files on this site. But if you know how to use ftpsearch and AltaVista, you'll surely have no problems to find 'em. And if you own an original board you can always use some eprom reader to get the images.

MAME is compiled using DJGPP 2.01, a freeware C++ compiler for M$-DOS. Once you have the compiler working, you'll need the Allegro library, which also has an alternative link, and also the SEAL library from Egerter Software to get the sound to work.

Assembly knowledge of the original arcade processor is a good starting point. Lately Marat Fayzullin updated his Z80 and 6502 engines, and also wrote an 'emulator writing HOWTO' which is an interesting read for everyone wanting to write emulators. Be sure to check out his dedicated page here.

No matter how many time I say this: there are so many good search engine, around, and following the links in this page will surely have flied you to the right location. Lazy people can't find it, so take it from here.

PC: http://lim.dsi.unimi.it/curr/mix/mame/index.htm
MAC: http://www.primenet.com/~bradman/mame/
UNIX: http://www.dit.upm.es/~jantonio/mame/
AMIGA: http://www.students.uiuc.edu/~bw-evans/amiga.html