Just What Is This M.A.M.E. thing anyway?
Why Would Anyone Want To Do This?
Why A Cocktail Cabinet? Why Not An Upright?
Just What Is This M.A.M.E. thing anyway?
From The Site mame.net
On December 24th, 1996, Nicola Salmoria began working on his single game 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 (23:32 +0100). Using a modular and portable driver oriented architecture with an open source philosophy, it soon grew into immense proportions. The current version supports 3229 ROM sets, 1843 unique games. 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. Nicola Salmoria is still the coordinator of the project.
Why Would Anyone Want To Do This?
For those of us who grew up in the ’70s and ’80s, arcade games were a part of our lives. Standing in front of these games for hours, pumping quarter after quarter into them, hoping to make it to the next level, to beat your friends, or simply to lose yourself.
With the advent of home entertainment video game systems, the video arcades have dwindled dramatically. We who grew up during this period build these machines to capture this moment in our own homes. And we even have the option of using quarters, or not!
Why A Cocktail Cabinet? Why Not An Upright?
There were several reasons behind this. First, some of my fondest memories were going to pizza places with my dad. Usually there would be a cocktail Pac-Man somewhere, and occasionally I would have a quarter to waste.
Another being my wife, who I had to convince to let me have this in her house to begin with. The cocktail would be much easier to cover up, say, with a table cloth. And there are more upright projects than cocktail, I wanted something unusual. This being my first project (but certainly not my last, I’m having too much fun) I wanted the experience one to be remembered.
