M.A.M.E. - Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator An article by Keeks Remember all those wasted hours (and money) spent down in the local arcade trying to beat the high scores, hammer your friends on the beat 'em ups or be the first to conquer the new game? Well now you can relive all the thrills again (without all that pestering of your parents for extra pocket money because you squandered all your 10p in the machines) with MAME. MAME started off as a collection of separate emulations done by Nicola Salmoria for various CPUs used in arcade machines. Later using a driver oriented architecture, it grew up until the actual version that counts support for more than 700 games. Originally, Nicola developed single emulators for individual games, such as Lady Bug, Mr. Do!, Pengo, and a multiple game emulator of the various early Pac Man games. Nicola decided to combine the emulators into a multiple game emulator format, which is now known world wide as MAME. Today, there are well over 100 people contributing to the MAME project. MAME is available for a wide variety of operating systems. These are version for Windows 32bit, Macintosh, Unix, Amiga, and Acorn/RISC. While its primary developing environment is MS-DOS, updates for the various other versions soon follow. I haven't seen any of the other versions or have any information on them but I will be investigating these soon. The version I'm reviewing is Mame32, the windows version. This requires the following system requirements: * Windows 95, Windows 98 or Windows NT 4 * DirectX version 3.0 or higher. * Pentium class CPU To get the latest version of MAME32, please check these two sites: Michael Soderstrom's MAME32 page: http://www.classicgaming.com/mame32 Christopher Kirmse's MAME32 page: http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Lair/8706/mame32.html To obtain the official MAME (MS-DOS) release, go to The Official MAME home page at: http://mame.retrogames.com Installing Mame32 is a simple matter of downloading the zip file from one of the above sites, creating a suitable directory (eg c:\mame32) and extract all the files from the archive to it. The next thing is to download some games to play. These are found in the form of roms. The roms consist of several files but because MAME can read zip files you can leave them in their archived format. There are several sites that have roms ready to download. Here are two sites that I have found to be quite good: http://www.guruchoc.speedhost.com and http://www.romlist.com Due to the quasi legal state of some of these roms these sites might have different URLs by the time you read this. If you can't find them and this goes for findings Mame itself, you can try these two sites for links to them. http://www.retrogames.com and http://www.davesclassics.com These are probably the best sites around for anything involving emulators and are updated daily. They also have the latest updates and Dave's Classics is probably the best emulator site around. It covers everything to do with emulators. There are also other emulators here so check them out. Once you have downloaded your favourite games, just place them in the roms directory. There is no need to unzip them as Mame can run them from the zip files, making it easier for you to manage files and also cuts down on the amount of space taken up by the roms, as some are quite big, even when compressed. Load Mame32 and you will be presented with a very well laid out window with the list of games available in the roms directory displayed on the left of the window. You can also display all the games that can be emulated or just the games you don't have here as well. There is also another screen on the right, and this displays a screenshot of the current game selected. A picture only appears if you capture a screenshot yourself, and there are stored as bitmaps in the BMP directory. From here you can also toggle sound and graphic preferences to suit your own setup. It is all done easily with a few mouse clicks. No need for long complicated command line instructions here. As soon as you have your setup complete (Note: the setup is different for each game and is saved as .cfg files for each game) it is time to begin playing. You can play the games either with a joystick, mouse or keyboard. All controls are fully configurable. The one thing you have to do before playing, like in a real arcade, is to insert your money. This is done by pressing either 3, 4 or 5 and to start the press 1 for a one player game etc. This is a great product and is good fun and an enjoyable break from adventuring. It brings back memories of all the money I spent in the arcades. This is a great package and is excellently put together but is not without its faults. As with all free software, proper documentation is a little thin on the ground, but if you look around there are plenty of helping hands out there in net land. - o -