mame roms

Mame

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MAME is an emulator application designed to recreate the hardware of arcade game systems in software, with the intent of preserving gaming history and preventing vintage games from being lost or forgotten. The name is an acronym for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator.

The first public MAME release (0.1) was on February 5, 1997, by Nicola Salmoria. As of version 0.111 (actually the 155th proper release), released December 10, 2006, MAME now supports 3400 unique games and 6344 actual ROM image sets and is growing all the time. However, not all of the games in MAME are playable; 740 ROM sets are marked as not working in the current version, and 28 are not actual games but BIOS ROM sets.

Emulation philosophy

The stated aim of the project is to document hardware, and so MAME takes a somewhat purist view of emulation, prohibiting programming hacks that might make a game run improperly or run faster at the expense of emulation accuracy (see UltraHLE, a project aimed to run games at a playable speed). In MAME every emulated component is replicated down to the smallest level of individual registers and instructions. Consequently, MAME emulation is very accurate (in many cases pixel- and sample-accurate), but system requirements can be high. Since MAME runs mostly older games, a large majority of the games run well on a 2 GHz PC. More modern arcade machines are based on fast pipelined RISC processors, math DSPs, and other devices which are difficult to emulate efficiently. These systems may not run quickly even on the most modern systems available.

The MAME team has not diverged from this purist philosophy to take advantage of 3D hardware available on PCs today. It is a common but incorrect assumption that performance problems are due to some games' use of 3D graphics. However, even with graphics disabled, games using RISC processors and other modern hardware are not emulated any faster. Thus taking advantage of 3D hardware would not speed these games up significantly. In addition, using 3D hardware would make it difficult to guarantee identical output between different brands of cards, or even revisions of drivers on the same card, which goes against the MAME philosophy. Consistency of output across platforms is very important to the MAME team.

Legal status of MAME

Owning and distributing MAME itself is legal in the US, as it is merely an emulator. Some companies (notably Sony) have attempted in court to prevent emulators from being sold, but they have been ultimately unsuccessful.[1] As yet, no legal action has been brought against the MAME team.

The situation regarding ROM images of games is less clear-cut. Most if not all arcade games are still covered by copyright.

Some copyright holders have been indecisive regarding making licensed MAME ROMs available to the public. For example, in 2003 Atari made MAME-compatible ROMs for 27 of its arcade games available through the internet site Star ROMs. However, a status check in March 2006 revealed a reversal of that decision, and the ROMs are no longer being sold there.

Other copyright holders have released games which are no longer commercially viable free of charge to the public. Games including Gridlee and Robby Roto have been released by their copyright holders under non-commercial licenses. These games may be downloaded legally from the official MAME web site.

However, the majority of games emulated in MAME at this time are copyrighted but no longer commercially available in any form. The legality of distributing or downloading such games depends greatly upon the laws in each country. Many national copyright laws include language which limits offenses to those which cause material harm to copyright holders. An argument could be made that where a game is no longer being manufactured or sold, this could not be the case.

A peculiar legal situation exists with regard to games which are covered by copyright but where there no longer exists a copyright holder. Such games are termed orphan works. They are covered by copyright but, since they have no legal owner, do not make money for anybody. Copyright reformers such as Lawrence Lessig believe that such works no longer have a reason to be copyrighted and should be in the public domain. On January 31, 2006, the United States Copyright Office released the results of its study of this issue

Some well known Mame emulators today are:

MAME - v0.81b
MAME32 - v81b

Top Roms

Pac-Man Atari (1982)
Dig Dug Atari (1983)
Jungle Hunt Atari (1983)
RealSports Baseball Atari (1983)
Pitfall II Activision (1984)
Zaxxon Sega (1984)
Ballblazer Atari/Lucasfilm Games (1986)

How to Play

Please check our Getting started page for more information.

External links

Official MAME website