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)

• r/MAME on Reddit
• MAMEdev Forum
• MAMEdev Discussions on GitHub

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 the Compiling 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 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 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 follow Allman 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 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: the BSD-3-Clause license, the LGPL-2.1, or the GPL-2.0.

See more specific C++ Coding Guidelines on our documentation web site.

The MAME project as a whole is made available 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 the source files (over 90% including core files) are made available under the terms of the 3-clause BSD License, and we would encourage new contributors to make their contributions available under the terms of this license.

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

Copyright (c) 1997-2026  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 version 2, as provided in
docs/legal/GPL-2.0.

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.

Please see COPYING for more details.