MAME your PC now! (MAME)

Name: pbyron

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Product:	MAME
Date:	13.04.01 (532 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Plays all the classic arcade games of yesteryear

Disadvantages: legality is questionable

MAME is the Ultimate games emulator for the PC and other platforms. It allows you to play all the old arcade machines that you can fondly remember playing at those salty seaside resorts and many many more, using ROMS which contain all the game information from the arcade boards so that the games are more or less identical to their arcade counterparts.

The great thing about MAME is that it's updated all the time and many programmers are writing bootleg versions to support more games and options, which eventually find their way on to the official version.

I first came across MAME about 6 years ago, when it was only supported in DOS and had about 400 odd games to play, ranging from the great Donkey Kong and Space Invaders to such classics as Tetris. Nowadays, it supports many more games, thousands in fact, plus alternative versions and US/Japanese games. You can still play all the 70's and 80's classics but there have been some stunning additions like X-Men and The Simpsons and it just continues to grow at an extraordinary rate as the programmers find more and more ways of emulating new games.

The other great thing about the emulator is that besides the multi-platform ability, it can be played on older spec PCs. This means that if you still have that old 486 or early pentium, you can play all the older games with no noticable slow-down, but as the spec of your PC goes up, you have a wider choice of fabulous games to try out.

MAME really is a great piece of software and it's free to download and use. Downloading arcade machine roms that you don't own is dubious on the legal front, but the choice is there and there are many sites offering the whole mame arcade collection (which would take months to download on a standard 56l internet connection!) Try it out and visit your past today!

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