MAME originally stood for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator.

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 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.

If you're on a *NIX or OSX system, it could be as easy as typing

make

for a MAME build,

make SUBTARGET=arcade

for an arcade-only build, or

make SUBTARGET=mess

for MESS build.

For Linux users we have provided you with all the prerequisites.

For recent versions of OSX you need to install Xcode including command-line tools and SDL 2.0.

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

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

make vs2015

or use this command to build it directly using msbuild

make vs2015 MSBUILD=1

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

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 follow GNU style; some parts of the code follow K&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 GNU 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: the BSD-3-Clause license, the LGPL-2.1, or the GPL-2.0.

The MAME project as a whole is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later (GPL-2.0+), since it contains code made available under multiple GPL-compatible licenses. A great majority of files (over 90% including core files) are under the BSD-3-Clause License and we would encourage new contributors to distribute files under this license.

Please note that MAME is a registered trademark of Nicola Salmoria, and permission is required to use the "MAME" name, logo, or wordmark.

Copyright (C) 1997-2016  MAMEDev and contributors

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along
with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc.,
51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA.

Please see LICENSE.md for further details.