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For those people that have lived outside of the Solar System for the past decade, MAME is all about playing old arcade games on modern consumer equipment; equipment such as PCs, Macs or even XBOXs.
MAME been developed from its early days back in 1997, and those eight years of heritage clearly show in the complexity and completeness of this miracle in software engineering. As a games programmer myself, I fully understand the difficulties and challenges that those on the MAME team have faced - and I totally salute their achievement knowing full-well the monumental effort that has gone into its production.
MAME currently supports over 3,000 unique games, and well over 5,000 variations upon those. Curiously enough, MAME hasn't even reached version 1.0 yet, although that milestone is probably going to be met within the year. It has been the collaborative effort of many programmers around the world and no one individual is responsible for its creation, although Nicola Salmoria surely deserves the credit for making it all happen when he begun the project on his own all those years ago.
The collaborative nature of its development is further testament to the immense achievement that these people have risen to - developing such complex and little-understood code is difficult enough at the best of times, let alone when you're trying to do that in concert with many other programmers.
The nature of the code too is extremely difficult; often emulating hardware that is poorly documented, or fails to obide by the documentation, if any existed in the first place. Imagine if you will, that you were asked to draw a schematic of a flux-capacitor, yet you were given no idea of what one looks like before you did so. That's what these guys sometimes have to face, perfectly emulating a piece of hardware by mere deduction rather than instruction. These people surely have infinite patience, and infinite respect in my book.
I have done some of the hardest jobs in my role as a games programmer, some really difficult stuff, yet I still bow my head to the good folks known as MAME developers for they surely know the meaning of "difficult code".
But now to the games; where to start though. Practically every game up to the turn of 1990 is emulated, and surely 95%+ of those during the 1990s too is there for the taking. Games post-2000 are a little more thin on the ground, but there's still a very good number of those around if that's what you're after. These later games though, are often very slow even on the latest hardware - but that is of little surprise. Often, with the more recent games, MAME is having to emulate hardware that is not much older than the hardware on which it is running, and that can never be a good thing. For those ignorant people that whimper and whine that their emulated Ridge Racer is running too slowly on their 3.5GHz machine - please just shut the f*ck up, you are immensely lucky that it is running at all.
For me, MAME is all about preserving history - the history of the Arcade. Many of these old machines are now lost forever as some of the electronics on which they were built was very flaky - try getting hold of an original Defender board in good working order and you'll see what I mean. For many of us, these games are our memories, the good times that we had, the elation at the progression and those hard-fought hi-scores. MAME is here for us, to preserve our memories and to allow us to relive those golden days. So to those who want to play Ridge Racer with a silky frame-rate, I say buy yourself a PlayStation - MAME isn't for you.
Now to where can you get hold of some of this magic. Just head on over to www.mameworld.net and don't be afraid to do a little research - setting up a good installation of MAME is not simple, but all you need to do is read and you will get there. Oh yeah - did I say it was free? It's free.
For the more adventurous - what could be more cool than playing all of those arcade games in an original arcade cabinet? Sounds like a dream beyond that which you dare to think of? Well believe brother, believe and it will come to you. This is something that I've built for myself and it's living and breathing within my own home. Check out just how you can do it [here].
[Posted 06/12/2005] |
