Nicola Salmoria (MC6489@mclink.it) and Mirko Buffoni for being the coordinators of the MAME project.
Andrew McCarty (andros@andros.seanet.com), Carlo Noben, Shane Speck, Raul Silva (raul@silva.com) for the MacMAME icons. Raul also did the "About" box rendering.
Nathan Strum for his MacMAME Info page - http://www.calarts.edu/~nstrum/macmame/
"Steve" at Apple for the fast blitting code in earlier versions.
John Stiles and Richard Bannister for constant programming tips, code donation, & general help and support.
Michael R. Simmons (macguitar@aol.com), beta-tester extraordinaire for finding the bugs.
Y. Nemoto, author of MacMoon for providing competition and general encouragement.
Evan Olcott (eolcott@triplo.com) for the original, non-Appearance front-end code.
Miklos Fazekas for helping bring Voodoo support to OpenGL on the Mac (http://www.mesa3d.org/mac)
And to all the Dave's… ;-)
David Caldwell (david@indigita.com) for doing MacMultiPac, MAME's predecessor and the Jr. Pac-Man driver
David Lawrence for his InputSprocket code.
Dave Marli, for his arcade emulator high score page and a ton of other stuff.
David Wareing for the PPC Control Strip hiding code. This code is public domain.
Dave Warker, for finding some bugs in the Mac code that caused crashes under MacOS 8.
Dave Weston (dweston@globaldialog.com) for MAMEbase and his merging instructions.
The official MAME home page is now located at:
http://www.mame.net
Thanks go out to everyone for their fine work! The MacMAME homepage can be found at:
http://www.macmame.org
There is a German version of MacMAME. It can be found at
http://www.h-o-c.com
There is a Swedish version of MacMAME. It can be found at
http://www.emulation.net on the MacMAME page.
Registering?
This program costs nothing and I expect nothing for it. If you'd like to contribute something, here's a list of things you can do:
* Donate $10 (or more!) to your favorite charity. If you do not have one, I do – please contact me for more information.
* send me a postcard
* write a MAME module for your favorite arcade game
If you'd like to send me a postcard, my address is:
Brad Oliver
9605 S 48th St. #1092
Phoenix AZ 85044
By doing one of these three things, I will add you to an e-mail list so that you will be notified the moment the program is updated. If you'd like to send John or Aaron something, please contact them first via e-mail. I love postcards, but more than anything I'd like you to donate something to charity. I cannot stress enough how good it will make you feel to give a little.
What is MacMAME?
In a nutshell, MAME attempts to emulate as closely as possible the original hardware of the early eighties arcade games. As we discover how a game works, support for it is added to the emulator. This is happening at a rapid pace, so be sure to check back often for the latest release of MAME.
To run the games, you need the ROM images, in a package that MacMAME understands. MacMAME looks for ROM files in a folder called "Roms" that resides in the same directory as the application. It currently supports 3 different styles of ROMs - .zip files (common on PC sites), folders with small ROM dumps in them, and the "Super ROM" file which encapsulates the folder ROMs into one file. A program called MAME Converter can be found on the MacMAME homepage (http://www.macmame.org). You can use it to make MacMAME ROM image files from those on the net. Note that you do not need MAME Converter - in fact, I recommend you stick with .zip files as they are easier to use and smaller too.
For a complete list of acknowledgements, please check the file 'readme.txt' that is in the Documentation folder -- it contains the instructions, thank-you's and info for the current MAME release.
The source code is freely distributed so if you see any bugs or areas of improvement in these modules, please let us know!
If you are interested in programming emulations, you must check out the emulation programming repository at: http://www.dct.com/~mhalse/EmuProgramming
How do I play MacMAME?
You can find the complete documentation on how to use it at this URL:
http://www.macmame.org/help.html
Here's a quick breakdown of the keys:
3 - insert a Quarter
1 & 2 - 1 and 2 player start
ESC - Pause
F2 - place the machine in "service" mode if it has one
F3 - reset the emulated machine
F4 - show the charsets. Use the arrows to navigate through the various combinations, ESC to return to the game
F7 - If cheats are allowed, this key toggles them on and off
F8 - cycle through frameskip options
F9 - toggle run-time profiling
F10 - toggle speed throttling (you normally want to leave this on)
F11 - toggle the frames-per-second display on and off
F12 - save a screenshot
TAB - access MAME's configuration menu, where you can adjust the keys and dipswitches
Command-` - toggles the on-screen display. You can adjust video and volume sliders here.
The keys may be configured for each game. Press TAB to get to the configuration menu to change the key settings and also view the key settings for each game. Most games use the arrows to move and control to fire.
For best video results, set your screen to it's highest possible resolution. On my Mac, that is 1280x1024. Pick the 3x3 interlaced video mode and the games will really look authentic. Vector games look particularly gorgeous at this high resolution.
The interlaced video option only affects 2x2 window sizes that fit entirely onto the screen or when you've hidden the desktop. For best results, use a resolution of 800x600 or higher with the 2x2 option. MacMAME will always force the display to 1x1 if it won't fit on a 640x480 screen, regardless of what you pick. You may switch it back to 2x2 once you've started the game if you really want, but lines will be missing off the bottom of the screen.
The 'Sound Samples' folder contains subfolders with samples from games. These are distributed in separate archives, available from my MacMAME page. The proper folder names for the sound samples (for those games that support it) are listed in the file 'gamelist.txt' next to each supported game.
Support Files
You can use all sorts of optional support files to make your MacMAME experience more pleasant.
Q: When I start a game, it says that the file "xxx" could not be opened! What's wrong?
A: MacMAME is looking for a specific ROM file for that game but it did not find it. Look around on the net for arcade game ROM archives and you're sure to find the proper files. Some games are harder to find than others though.
Q: I downloaded ROMs for "xxx" but it doesn't show up in the list. What's wrong?
A: Check the file "readme.txt" to see if that game is actually supported. MacMAME won't work with every arcade game - it needs to be written to specifically support games.
It's also conceivable you've downloaded a set which is named improperly. To verify the proper name of the ROM set, go to the "Misc" tab in the front-end and save a list of all supported games. It will create a text file with the 8-character .zip file name alongside the game's full name. The only way MacMAME knows which sets are which are by these 8-character names so they must match what MacMAME is looking for.
Q: MacMAME says game "xxx" is not supported, but it used to work! What happened?
A: MacMAME needs to know the driver name for each game. It looks for this information either in the ROM file made by MAME Converter or it uses the folder name of the ROM set in the ROMs folder. Most likely, the ROM driver name was changed for the current release so the old name is no longer recognized. The solution is to rename the folder of ROMs and create a new ROM file with MAME Converter - you can find a listing of the driver names in the file "readme.txt" in the Documentation folder.
Q: How do I get the sound samples to work?
A: Download the sound samples from the internet and place the .zip file in the Sound Samples folder. This new zip file must match the "driver" name for the game you are playing or MacMAME won't be able to find them. The "driver" names are listed in the file "mamelist.txt" in the Documentation folder.
Q: I've downloaded the sound samples, renamed the file properly, but still no sound! What is wrong?
A: MacMAME doesn't support sound samples for every game - check "gamelist.txt" to see which games use sound samples and which don't.
Q: Where can I talk about MAME on the internet?
A: Nathan Strum runs a page dedicated solely to MacMAME at:
If Usenet news is your thing, try comp.emulators.misc or alt.emulators.classic-arcade. Additionally, there's a nice, web-based message board dedicated to MAME (all versions) at http://www.macmame.org/wwwboard/mame/
Q: What happened to support for non-PowerMacs?
A: It was dropped because it was getting harder to maintain the code to handle it. Now that it's gone, several PowerPC-specific speedups have been implemented to take full advantage of the chip's speed.
Wanted:
• If you have technical details of how an arcade machine works that you'd like to see, feel free to write a driver for it! We'd be more than happy to include it in the next MAME distribution.
• There are a few ROM sets for which ROM dumps are bad. These are marked in the ROM audits. If you have the ability to dump good ROMs for these sets, it would be very much appreciated.
