Games - MAME

	Games - MAME

MAME is a computer software program for personal computers. The purpose of MAME is to faithfully and precisely emulate as many arcade games as possible, 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.

MAME has been ported to many different platforms. The X11 port for Unix-like systems is named XMAME. The Mac OS X port is named MacMAME.

According to the official MAME web site, the first public MAME release (0.1) was on February 5, 1997, by Nicola Salmoria. As of version 0.104 (actually the 148th proper release), released February 5, 2006, MAME now supports 3270 unique games and 6024 actual ROM sets (each game may just have the original or have one or more clones as well - see below) and is growing all the time. However, not all of the games in MAME are playable; 679 ROM sets are marked as not working in the current version.

How MAME works

MAME contains several components: a CPU emulator which duplicates the behavior of the CPUs of many original arcade machines; an input emulator which maps arcade buttons, joysticks, and other controls to PC keyboards, joysticks and other devices; and an emulator for the arcade game display and sound equipment. The only thing missing from MAME is the ROM image, which is the program from the original arcade game which made the game run. When MAME is run, it is running the original game from several years ago - just on different hardware.

Emulation philosophy

The stated aim of the project is to document hardware, and so MAME takes a somewhat purist view of emulation, prohibiting cheap hacks that might make a game run properly 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 "midpoint" 2 GHz PC. More modern arcade machines are based around 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; some working games have been estimated to require a 10 GHz processor to run at full speed.

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 - the Macintosh and Unix/Linux ports are just as important as Windows.

Currently, MAME suffers from speed inconsistencies due to varying PC configurations (certain games run too quickly, requiring fine-tuning to their operational speed). Although basic speed-throttling controls exist, a more sophisticated system of speed adjustment needs to be implemented before emulation can be considered time-accurate for all processor configurations. Since this is an ever-evolving project, it is fair to expect this fundamental issue to be addressed in the future.

MAME Releases

There are several types of MAME release depending on how frequently users wish to update and the level of code maturity each user feels comfortable running:

The major releases of MAME occur approximately once a month. These releases are given a version number, e.g. 0.99. The Unix numbering scheme is used, i.e. the version after 0.99 is 0.100, which seems counter-intuitive to some. These major releases are the most mature and least frequent ones so are aimed at the average computer user who wants to try MAME. An executable version for Windows & DOS is released from the MAME Home Page.

Smaller, incremental releases are released between major releases. These releases are denoted by a "u" number after the version number of the previous major release, e.g. 0.99u1 is the first development release after major version 0.99. There are usually about 5 new "u" releases in between major releases. These minor releases are not intended for average MAME users. Instead, they are aimed at people who take a close interest in MAME development and have access to compiler tools. As such, these minor releases are not made officially available as executables. They are available only as diffs against the MAME source code.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for MAME ]

Games - MAME

How MAME works

Emulation philosophy

MAME Releases

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