MAME (Multiple
Arcade Machine Emulator)
The version supplied on this disc is a Windows command line version of
MAME 0.63. You should read the documentation that accompanies the software
(in the folder \software\mame\)
The history of MAME
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 supports 3690 ROM sets, 2109 unique games.
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.
Warning!
MAME is an emulator. It reproduces, more or less faithfully, the behavior
of various arcade machines. But hardware is useless without software,
so images (files) of the ROMs which run on that hardware are required.
Such ROMs, like all commercial software, are copyrighted. Therefore, it
is illegal to possess a ROM image file if you do not own the original
ROM. Needless to say, ROMs are not distributed together with MAME. Distribution
of MAME with ROM images is a violation of copyright law and a violation
of the MAME license, and it should be promptly reported to the authors
so that appropriate legal action can be taken.
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