Changes
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
MAME
,no edit summary
|website = [http://mamedev.org/ MAMEDev.org]
|source = [https://github.com/mamedev/mame GitHub]}}
'''MAME''' ('''<u>M</u>ultiple <u>A</u>rcade <u>M</u>achine <u>E</u>mulator''') is a cross multi-platform [[Multi-System Emulators|multi-system emulator]]. The philosophy behind the project is to recreate the workings of machines through emulation, and thus the ability to actually play the games is "a nice side effect". MAME is incredibly large, [[MAME compatibility list|supporting thousands of machines and ROM sets]], though what is supported is not what's playable; your mileage may vary. In the event you don't like MAME's own interface, there are many alternative front-ends available.
Much like the name says, MAME was supposed to be for arcade machines like Pac-Man back when it was released in 1997. A similar project called [[MESS]] was made to do essentially the same thing for home consoles and other esoteric devices that never got emulated, but it has since been merged into MAME by the end of May 2015 in version 0.162, and now it supports ''a whole lot more'' than arcade machines.
MAME either has lots of standardization on how to organize the ROM dumps, or it has very little, and sometimes the given information can be vague and confusing. A single game may need lots of files for the dump to even register, and separate folders for the BIOS files of consoles. For machines that use stuff like hard drives and optical disks to store its data, MAME has a special format called Compressed Hunks of Data (CHD) which uses a number of compression methods to reduce the size of a raw image file.
It is highly recommended to use a ROM management tool such as RomCenter or clrmameproClrMamePro. Without all the required files and file versions, the game simply will not work.
==How To==
==List of Arcade systems emulated==
* [http://unmamed.mameworld.info/ List of arcade games that DON'T work] Last updated February 2014. Don't expect the most recent games (like [[Sega NAOMI and variants|Sega Naomi ]] ones) to run at full speed, MAME is very resource intensive.
* [http://nonmame.retrogames.com/ NonMAME] ([http://web.archive.org/web/20150306213522/http://consume.retrogames.com/ 2015 Mirror]) This is a list of arcade systems that currently are not emulated by MAME or are emulated better by other emulators.
