Nicola Salmoria

MAME

emulation software that aims to recreate the hardware of many systems

Released: —
Platforms: Windows
Genres: —
Developers: Nicola Salmoria
Publishers: —

About

MAME (formerly an acronym of Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) is a free and open-source emulator designed to emulate the hardware of arcade games, later expanded to include video game consoles, old computers and other systems in software on modern personal computers and other platforms. Its intention is to preserve gaming history by preventing vintage video games from being lost or forgotten. It does this by emulating the inner workings of the emulated machines; the ability to actually play the video games is considered "a nice side effect". Joystiq has listed MAME as an application that every Windows and Mac gamer should have.

The first public MAME release was by Nicola Salmoria on 5 February 1997. The project currently documents over 32,000 individual systems, with more than 10,000 working titles, including arcade hardware, home computers, and video game consoles, though not all games are playable. MESS, an emulator for many video game consoles and computer systems, based on the MAME core, was integrated into MAME in 2015.

The articlegameplay, story, development, reception

Development

The MAME project was started by Italian programmer Nicola Salmoria. It began as a project called Multi-Pac, intended to preserve video games in the Pac-Man family, but the name was changed as more games were added to its framework. The first MAME version was released in 1996. In April 1997, Salmoria stepped down for his national service commitments, handing stewardship of the project to fellow Italian Mirko Buffoni for half a year.

In May 2003, David Haywood took over as project coordinator; and from April 2005 to April 2011, the project was coordinated by Aaron Giles; then Angelo Salese stepped in as the coordinator; and in 2012, Miodrag Milanovic took over. The project is supported by hundreds of developers around the world and thousands of outside contributors.