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On December
24th, 1996, Nicola Salmoria began working on his single
hardware emulators (for example Multi-Pac), which he merged into
one program during January 1997. He named the accomplishment by
the name of Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, or MAME for short
(pronounced as the word 'maim' in English, other languages may
differ).
The first official release was MAME 0.1, which was
released on the evening of February 5th, 1997. Using a modular
and portable driver oriented architecture with an open source
philosophy, it soon grew into immense proportions. The current
version recognizes over six thousand ROM sets. Because MAME
releases happen whenever they are ready, at one point the wait
between new versions was almost 4 months. To help the agony of
the users, a public beta system was used, with a beta release
happening every 2-3 weeks on an average. However, now the beta
designation has been removed in favor of a good old 0.xx version
number. Also a work-in-progress -page exists, if you really want
to know the latest information.
Even though MAME allows people to enjoy the long-lost
arcade games and even some newer ones, the main purpose of the
project is to document the hardware (and software) of the arcade
games. There are already many dead arcade boards, whose function
has been brought to life in MAME. Being able to play the games
is just a nice side-effect. The huge success of MAME would not
be possible without the talent of the programmers who joined to
form the MAME team. At the moment, there are about 100 people on
the team, but there is a large number of contributors outside
the team too. Aaron Giles is the current coordinator of the
project.
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