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Welcome to The Official Site of the MAME Development Team

What is MAME?

MAME is a multi-purpose emulation framework.

MAME’s purpose is to preserve decades of software history. As electronic technology continues to rush forward, MAME prevents this important "vintage" software from being lost and forgotten. This is achieved by documenting the hardware and how it functions. The source code to MAME serves as this documentation. The fact that the software is usable serves primarily to validate the accuracy of the documentation (how else can you prove that you have recreated the hardware faithfully?). Over time, MAME (originally stood for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) absorbed the sister-project MESS (Multi Emulator Super System), so MAME now documents a wide variety of (mostly vintage) computers, video game consoles and calculators, in addition to the arcade video games that were its initial focus.

License

The MAME project as a whole is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, 2 (GPL-2.0), since it contains code made available under multiple GPL-compatible licenses. A great majority of files (over 90% including core files) are under the BSD-3-Clause License and we would encourage new contributors to distribute files under this license.

Please note that MAME is a registered trademark of Gregory Ember, and permission is required to use the "MAME" name, logo or wordmark.

MAME 0.278

30 Jun 2025

After two long months, MAME 0.278 is finally ready. Of course, the big news is that the new sound system has arrived! The benefits it brings include:

  • Native WASAPI support on Windows and PipeWire support on Linux.
  • Support for sound input for emulated systems that have microphones or other audio capture hardware.
  • Support for multi-channel input and output.
  • Built-in effects, including a parametric equaliser and dynamic range compressor.
  • Better quality sample rate conversion and mixing, and lower latency.

As this is the first release of a major new component, it’s going to be rough around the edges in some ways. But we’re already thinking about some of the ways we can improve it further over the coming months.

We’ve been busy with the sound system, but we haven’t stopped working on emulation. There are some nice fixes for graphical issues in 3D systems, including Sega Model 2 and Taito Type Zero. But it doesn’t stop with 3D – the 2D classics are still getting love. Quite a few Konami games are looking nicer, including often-overlooked cocktail mode support, and all the missing graphics in the iconic IGS mahjong game Long Hu Bang are finally fixed.

There’s a long list of newly supported systems this month. We’ve got Exidy and Taito arcade games from the 1970s, LCD games from behind the Iron Curtain, and a whole pile of recently dumped TV games. On top of that, numerous additional versions of Gaelco arcade games have surfaced from the archives. In between, you’ll find rare Capcom arcade releases, music workstations and sequencers, game watches, casino games, and more. If you do play casino games, please be aware that some of the default input assignments for gambling games have changed in this release.

There’s lots of fun to be had with the computer emulation updates in this release. The Victor 9000 has had its floppy support overhauled and SASI hard disk support added. There’s been a bit of a flurry of updates for the Sanyo PHC-25. The POKEY’s serial communication support used by the Atari 8-bit computers has finally been implemented properly.

If you want to read about all the adventures in MAME development in these past two months, check out the whatsnew.txt file. As always, the source code and 64-bit Windows binary packages are available from the download page.

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Next MAME release delayed while we finish new features

15 May 2025

Hi everyone! As you may be aware, MAME 0.278 will include the fabled new sound stream system. This includes sound input support, better quality resampling and mixing, support for multi-channel output, and more! To ensure we can deliver something we’re proud of, we’re won’t have a May release. This will give us a bit more time to finish things off and make sure it’s stable. If you want to try it out in the mean time, you can always compile the source code yourself or get a build from GitHub Actions. Otherwise, hang tight for the release in June!

MAME 0.277

30 Apr 2025

Have you been wondering what MAME 0.277 will bring? Well, now you can find out! First of all, we’ve added support for compiling on 64-bit ARM-based systems running Windows 11 using the MSYS2 CLANGARM64 environment. Updates to included third-party libraries should resolve some issues people were having with new compilers and development environments.

In improvements that you can see, Konami GX blending effects are now looking much nicer, Sega Model 2 3D geometry is behaving better, and some remaining issues with Philips CD-i graphics decoding have been fixed. You may be able to hear improved sound emulation in some Famicom, WonderSwan, and Game Boy games, too. If that’s too subtle, you should be able to hear the difference in the DMX and LinnDrum percussion synthesisers.

There’s a big update for the Apple II and Macintosh floppy disk software lists this month. A lot of Macintosh NuBus cards have been overhauled as well, so let us know if we’ve inadvertently broken your virtual Macintosh setup. There are plenty of other software list additions, including a batch of tapes for Sinclair computers.

That’s all we’re going to cover here, but much more has happened this month in MAME development. You can read all about it in the whatsnew.txt file, and source code and 64-bit Windows binary packages are available from the download page.

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MAME 0.276

31 Mar 2025

MAME 0.276 has arrived just in time for the end of March, and it’s full of emulation goodness! Remember that 64-bit ARMv8 recompiler we added a few months ago? Well now it’s even faster! This release fixes graphical issues in Konami GX arcade games and Philips CD-i software. We’ve added several IGS gambling games, as well as Chinese versions of some Dynax mahjong games. The LinnDrum percussion synthesiser is now working with interactive controls and sound output. And speaking of sound, audio emulation issues in several arcade games have been fixed.

PC-88VA emulation is progressing, with fixes for multiple graphics modes. A few more peripherals for the TI-99 computer family are now supported. There have been a few CPU/DSP fixes that should improve Sega 3D arcade game emulation. Psion hand-helds now correctly detect more memory configurations and give better-looking video output. We’ve also fixed some issues with CHD creation, floppy disk image handling, and XML system information output. Windows users now get an option to have debugger windows appear in the taskbar and window switcher.

As always, you can marvel at all the exciting development this month when you read the whatsnew.txt file. The source code and 64-bit Windows binary packages can be found on the download page.

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MAME 0.275

26 Feb 2025

MAME 0.275 is out now! It’s been a short month, but there’s still been plenty of interesting development. This release adds support for several arcade games on PlayStation-based hardware, a few PowerBook Duo sub-notebook computers, some hand-held LCD games, and a couple of Casio music keyboards.

Support for the Zorro II bus used in the Amiga 2000 has been improved, including DMA support and a few more emulated cards. Some graphical glitches in Konami arcade games have been fixed. The Oberheim DMX drum machine is now fully emulated. We’ve even optimised the recompilers a little more this month.

You can read about all the work that’s gone into this release in the whatsnew.txt file, or get source code and 64-bit Windows binary packages from the download page.

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MAME 0.274

31 Jan 2025

Today’s the day you get to experience MAME 0.274 for the first time! As previously mentioned, our Windows binary releases now require a CPU with x86-64-v2 functionality. The most anticipated feature completed this month is almost certainly the 64-bit ARMv8 recompiler back-end. It’s been tested on macOS, conventional Linux and Android, and provides some very welcome performance improvements when emulating systems with RISC CPUs, including MIPS III, PowerPC and SuperH. In addition to the new back-end, we’ve fixed some bugs in the existing back-ends and made some performance improvements for x86-64. Keep in mind that the actual performance benefits you experience will vary substantially depending on your CPU and the emulated system and software.

While that was happening, emulation work continued to progress. This release adds support for numerous digital pets, a couple more Tronica LCD games, and several synthesisers. Several CD-i graphics formats have been fixed, and speaking of Philips, video emulation for their Minitel 2 terminal has been improved as well. Our NEC µPD17771C emulation has been completely overhauled, which is particularly noticeable in Star Speeder on the Epoch Super Cassette Vision.

Lots has been going on in computer emulation this month. We’ve taken a few steps along the road to emulating the first-generation Power Macintosh systems; the Heath/Zenith computers now have hard-sectored floppy formats and working joystick support; the JUKU E5104 now has mouse support; the Silicon Graphics Professional IRIS 4D workstations are now considered working. There’s also been some work on Amiga graphics emulation, although some of the improvements missed this release.

As always, you can read about all of the month’s development work in the whatsnew.txt file. If you’re excited and want to try it out, head right over to the download page where you can find the source code and 64-bit Windows binary packages. See you all again next month for another thrilling MAME release!

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CPU requirements for Windows binary MAME releases

17 Jan 2025

If you’ve been following along, you’ll no doubt realise that MAME development is off to a flying start in 2025. Perhaps the most exciting feature coming in the next release is a native recompiler for 64-bit ARMv8 systems. This includes Apple Silicon, recent Raspberry Pi models, and the most popular Android devices.

After several years, we’ve decided it’s time to start taking advantage of features of newer (or at least slightly less outdated) CPUs. Starting with MAME 0.274, official Windows binary releases will require so-called x86-64-v2 features. These features have been available in all popular x86-64 CPUs for close to a decade. They were introduced in the following CPU families:

  • Intel “Nehalem” (2008), or “Silvermont” (2013) for low-power CPUs
  • AMD “Bulldozer” (2011), or “Jaguar” (2013) for low-power CPUs
  • VIA “Nano C” and “Eden C” (both 2015)

If you still want to run up-to-date versions of MAME on older systems running Windows, you’ll need to compile it from the source code.