THE BEST MULTI-MODEL ARCE SIMULATOR EVER, CELEBRATED ITS 25TH BIRTHDAY ON FEB. 6, WAS OFFICIALLY TWEETED TO CELEBRATE IT AND REVIEW THE HISTORY OF THE FOUNDERS AND THE INITIAL VERSION.
MAME is an acronym for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, meaning multi-machine arcade simulator, developed by Italian Nikola Salmoria. The goal is to emulate as many arcade games as faithfully and accurately as possible, to preserve the history of the game, and to prevent the loss and forgetting of ancient games.
MAME originated from a project called Multi-Pac, originally written in C to keep the Pac-Man series of games released in December 1996. As more games joined, their names were changed to their current names.
MAME v0.1 was released on February 5, 1997, only supports 5 arcade games such as "Pac-Man", and mainly supports the DOS platform, and only began to fully transition to the Windows platform in 2010. The latest version 0.24 has supported more than 1,000 kinds of substrates of various types, more than 10,000 games, supported operating systems also cover macOS and Linux, supported CPUs in addition to x86-64, and ARM.
Initially, MAME only simulated arcade games, and later with the advent of the MESS (Multiple Emulator Super System) sister project, MAME began to cast its sights on other game platforms, and in 2015, MESS was merged into MAME, although the name has not changed, but the simulatable platform is no longer limited to arcade.
MaME has always been updated and maintained by the open source community, with hundreds of software engineers around the world involved in addition to the official development team. When Salmorya graduated from university in 2002, he also wrote a thesis on the subject of MAME. He gradually withdrew from software development and left the MAME development team in 2009.
Over the years, development engineers have overcome numerous difficulties, including reverse engineering of various old arcade CPUs (such as the Motorola M6809) and sound chips (such as Yamaha FM), and cracking of encrypted arcade substrates (such as SNK Neo Geo, Capcom CPS2 and CPS3).
With the popularity and circle of MAME, enthusiasts began to use MAME to relive old games, and even some hardware manufacturers equipped MAME with a front-end user interface and loaded it into the arcade frame to create a modern arcade. MAME has also been recognized by the original arcade manufacturers, such as Japan's Taito , which commissioned MAME to port its classic games to other platforms.
For 25 years, MAME has maintained a frequency of about monthly updates, which is rare in the history of the simulator, all thanks to its huge community of interests, people from all over the world are making their own contributions to MAME, including excavating ancient games, submitting patches and bug reports, developing the front end, packaging and distribution, introducing the simulator software to others, and so on.
It is precisely because of these people that MAME continues to this day and develops and grows, thank you to many ordinary people who use love to generate electricity and contribute to the community, and also wish MAME a happy 25th birthday.