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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.

• Official MAME Development Team Site (includes binary downloads, wiki, forums, and more)
• MAME Testers (official bug tracker for MAME)

• MAME Forums on bannister.org
• r/MAME on Reddit
• MAMEWorld Forums

If you're on a UNIX-like system (including Linux and macOS), it could be as easy as typing

make

for a full build,

make SUBTARGET=tiny

for a build including a small subset of supported systems.

See theCompiling MAME page on our documentation site for more information, including prerequisites for macOS and popular Linux distributions.

For recent versions of macOS you need to installXcode including command-line tools andSDL 2.0.

For Windows users, we provide a ready-madebuild environment based on MinGW-w64.

Visual Studio builds are also possible, but you still needbuild environment based on MinGW-w64.In order to generate solution and project files just run:

make vs2022

or use this command to build it directly using msbuild

make vs2022 MSBUILD=1

MAME source code should be viewed and edited with your editor set to use four spaces per tab. Tabs are used for initial indentation of lines, with one tab used per indentation level. Spaces are used for other alignment within a line.

Some parts of the code followAllman style; some parts of the code followK&R style -- mostly depending on who wrote the original version.Above all else, be consistent with what you modify, and keep whitespace changes to a minimum when modifying existing source. For new code, the majority tends to prefer Allman style, so if you don't care much, use that.

All contributors need to either add a standard header for license info (on new files) or inform us of their wishes regarding which of the following licenses they would like their code to be made available under: theBSD-3-Clause license, theLGPL-2.1, or theGPL-2.0.

See more specificC++ Coding Guidelines on our documentation web site.

The MAME project as a whole is made available under the terms of theGNU General Public License, version 2or later (GPL-2.0+), since it contains code made available under multipleGPL-compatible licenses. A great majority of the source files (over 90%including core files) are made available under the terms of the3-clause BSD License, and wewould encourage new contributors to make their contributions available under theterms of this license.

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

Copyright (c) 1997-2025  MAMEdev and contributorsThis program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify itunder the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2, as provided indocs/legal/GPL-2.0.This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUTANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY orFITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License formore details.

Please seeCOPYING for more details.