is
the brain child of Nicola Salmoria, who
started the project by combining a few of his already outstanding standalone
emulators and making the source code available to the public. Before long,
Nicola had an entire TEAM of programmers submitting drivers, bug patches, sound
samples, and upgrades to the M.A.M.E. engine. In less than a year,
this amazing effort emulates HUNDREDS of different arcade machines, including
clones, bootlegs, and variants!
We're especially fond of M.A.M.E. because it allows us to play our old arcade games as they were meant to be played. You thought those compilation discs by Namco and Williams were special? Wait until you get a load of this! It just makes me wonder how game manufacturers can sleep at night knowing that they're selling their six or seven game package "compilation" for $40 when a far superior mega-game compilation is available on the net for just the price of admission. And it makes ME lose sleep when I try to figure out how this many games plus the software engine that drives them can run in under 600mb of disk space. Looks like those commercial packages aren't using much of that CD, after all!
PLEASE NOTE: This is a good place to get a "taste" of MAME, but the collection of ROMs here is pretty limited. Check elsewhere on the net (see our links section under "emulators") for more of them to add to your collection!