Insert coin to continue (MAME)

Name: The Duke

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Product:	MAME
Date:	10/02/01 (597 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: all your fave arcade games

Disadvantages: ROM use legal?

MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) is a project that has been running since 1997. Basically, it emulates practically all the arcade machines you can remember from when you were a kid. If you’re old like me, and spent any time at all in the arcades, this will suit you down to the ground! In fact, the only game it doesn’t seem to emulate from that era (i.e. early/mid 1980’s) is Dragons’ Lair; any other arcade machine you can think of is probably catered for!

Depending on what platform you want to run it on (there are DOS, Windows, Amiga, Mac and Linux ports to the best of my knowledge) you can download it from a number of sources (www.classicgaming.com for the Windows version, and www.mame.net for the DOS version) and it’s currently standing at version 0.36 for both DOS and Windows versions. If you like you can run the 0.37 BETA, but they don’t recommend it.

For the purposes of this opinion, I shall be referring to the 0.36 Windows version. It’s a 2.7Mb download, which isn’t bad given how powerful the program is, and the ROM files come zipped and range from 30k to 1Mb plus (the older games like Asteroids, Pac Man etc. are the smallest, but the more recent games are bigger), but these are available from separate web sites which can be found by searching in a web search engine.

**Note** There is a legal position with the ROMS where you need to own originals in order to be able to use the zipped ones with MAME legally. This means if you own something like the Namco arcade collection for the Playstation, then legally you can use the zipped ROMS with MAME, although it’s a bit of a grey area.

When I first saw how small the ROMs were I was very surprised, in the later versions, you don’t need to unzip the ROMS to use them, you just drop them into the ROM folder, and run MAME. With earlier versions however, you had to unzip them, but even then they were ridiculously small.
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So, after a painless installation (simply a matter of unzipping the file to your required directory), and making sure the ROMS are in the correct place, it’s just a matter of starting up MAME, and selecting a game from the list of ROMs (filters are available to make filing your ROMs easier) then settle back, “insert coins” via a few key presses, then be amazed at the accuracy of your favourite arcade games appearing on your very own home computer.

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