MAME Celebrates Its 20th Anniversary (mame.net)

After years of work, a fan has finally completed a MAME version of Atari's unreleased game Primal Rage II this week, one more example of the emulator preserving digital history. Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo quotes MAME.net: Way back in 1997, Nicola Salmoria merged a few stand-alone arcade machine emulators into the first Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. Could he have possibly imagined the significance of what he'd built? Over the past two decades, MAME has brought together over a thousand contributors to build a system that emulates more machines than any other program.

But MAME is more than that: MAME represents the idea that our digital heritage is important and should be preserved for future generations. MAME strives to accurately represent original systems, allowing unmodified software to run as intended. Today, MAME documents over thirty thousand systems, and usably emulates over ten thousand. MAME meets the definitions of Open Source and Free Software, and works with Windows, macOS, Linux and BSD running on any CPU from x86-64 to ARM to IBM zSeries.
A 20th-anniversary blog post thanked MAME's 1,600 contributors -- more than triple the number after its 10th anniversary -- and also thanks MAME's uncredited contributors. "if you've filed a bug report, distributed binaries, run a community site, or just put in a good word for MAME, we appreciate it." I've seen MAME resurrect everything from a rare East German arcade game to a Sonic the Hedgehog popcorn machine. Anybody else have a favorite MAME experience to share?

Comments

how many of today's games will be preserved?

[Anonymous Coward]

our digital heritage is important and should be preserved for future generations.

With the rise in online DRM and games where much of the logic runs on a remote server and that code is never made available, it seems like there's a risk of a "digital dark age".

Of course people can attempt to re-implement the remote parts, or break the DRM, but sometimes that's easier said than done. There are popular games where no crack appears for years, and not for lack of trying. At the very least, it's going to be a much harder job in the future than preserving classic arcade games is today.

One positive point is that games available on DRM-free services like GOG will be easily preservable. Which is a good reason to buy your games through GOG, so that business model succeeds in the market place and there is commercial pressure to use that instead of intrusive DRM.

More that just arcade machines.

[Anonymous Coward]

MAME now emulates more than just arcade machines. Years back, a separate branch of MAME was used to emulate home computers and console systems form teh Atrai 2600 to the Commodore Amiga. This was called MESS (Multi Emulator Super System). In May of 2015, MESS was merged with MAME. Now MAME not only emulates arcades systems, but a plethora of home computers and console systems.

Re:Working roms...

[bmo]

Dave's Classics on the Wayback Machine.

You're welcome.

--
BMO

Re:Upgrade your archaic naming system

[Waffle Iron]

Since it's such an arduous process to track down a physical example of a classic arcade game, purchase it, get it delivered, then rip its ROM to obtain a legal image, it shouldn't be too hard to remember the 8.3 filename you give it.

Re:That has to be a record, too

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Did you really think they would be past v1.0 and still get kernel panics? ;)

No, advances in AI technology integrated in Windows will guarantee future kernel panics. With AI, Windows becomes "aware" of itself, and realizes that it is a Microsoft product.

That thought causes the kernel to panic.