MAME is an emulator designed to recreate electronic equipment of arcade machines in the form of software in order to preserve the history of games and prevent the disappearance of old games. The name of the program is an acronym for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator - an emulator of many arcade machines.
| MAME | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Type of | Emulator |
| Developer | Nicola Salmoria and the MAME Team |
| Written on | C |
| operating system | Cross-platform |
| Latest version | |
| License | MAME license |
| Website | mamedev.org |
The first public release of MAME (version 0.1), authored by Nicola Salmoria , took place on February 5, 1997 . The emulator supports 4266 unique games and 8286 rum sets (each game can have one or more clones). But not all games supported by MAME are actually playable: currently 1188 game images do not work, and another 45 are BIOS images. Currently, the project leader is Aaron Giles .
MAME has been ported to many different platforms. The now not updated version for UNIX-like systems is called XMAME , the version for Mac OS X is called MacMAME , based on the SDL library - SDLMAME .
Content
- 1 How MAME Works
- 2 Emulator Philosophy
- 3 Classification of MAME releases
- 4 notes
- 5 See also
How MAME works
The architecture of the MAME code includes several components - separate software emulators of different types of processors , sound generation chips , video controllers , and other standard elements. To emulate each game or a unified arcade system (such as Neo-Geo ), separate “drivers” are written that use the emulation code of standard components and add code that emulates other devices and connects the components.
The composition of the emulator does not include images of ROMs containing code and game data.
Emulator Philosophy
The main goal of the emulator is to document the hardware of arcade machines, save their data for history [2] , therefore it is forbidden to make changes to the code and hacks that can make games work incorrectly or faster, at the cost of accuracy of emulation. In MAME, each emulated component is emulated at the program level prior to each register and instruction. Therefore, emulation in MAME is very accurate (in many cases up to every pixel), but system requirements can be quite high. MAME emulates mainly old machines, games run at an acceptable speed on a computer with a 1 GHz processor. Modern arcade machines are quite complex, based on fast RISC processors, mathematical DSP , and other elements that are complex enough for accurate emulation, and therefore these systems may not work fast enough even on the most modern computers.
MAME Classification
There are several types of versions of MAME that are designed for different user audiences.
- The major releases of MAME occur once a month and are given a version number, for example, 0.99. The UNIX release numbering system is used, which differs from the usual one, that is, the version after 0.99 has the number 0.100. This release is intended for the unpretentious user, and on the MAME website two versions are laid out - for Windows and for DOS.
- Small, interim releases occur between major ones. Issues differ by the number “u” after the version number of the previous release, for example, 0.99u3 means that this is the third version for developers after the main version 0.99. Usually there are five such versions between the main ones.
Notes
- ↑ Release 0.214 - 2019.
- ↑ About MAME ™
See also
- MESS is an emulator of arcade consoles and computer systems based on the MAME kernel