Home

How to MAME™ and MESS up for fun!

I remember playing Dig Dug, Karate, Pac Man, and all those other fun games that took so much of my allowance every week. Every now and then, everyone has fond memories of playing their favorite classic arcade games and I was no exception.

Around 2003, my friend introduced me to MAME™ and I was ecstatic about the program. I played some of those older games and loved how the games were exact in appearance and playable. I went home and downloaded the MacMame program for the Macintosh system and played for hours.

So what is MAME™?

MAME™ stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator and was created by Nicola Salmoria. The program is available for PC, Mac, and UNIX based systems and is free to use, provided you follow the rules of using MAME™.

• No new games more recent than 3 years old, or still on sale by the company that produced the game.
• You cannot provide a list of games that can be generated to identify any games that a MAME™ user can use to seek out illegal sources of ROM, Images, or CDs to acquire illegal games.
• You cannot remove the startup screen of MAME™ that contains information on why some non-working games do not work.

There are a lot of games out there that can be played thanks to MAME™, but you should realize that they are probably illegal. MAME™ was created to preserve older games that might no longer be able to be played when the hardware running the game no longer works.

You can check out MAME™, download the program and learn a lot more about this wonderful project at: http://mamedev.org.

MESS stands for Multiple Emulator Super System and is an offshoot project of MAME™ that deals with computer and console based systems. Emulate games consoles like the Nintendo 64 or Sony Playstation. The MESS program will also emulate older computer systems such as the Apple II, Commodore, etc…

The policy for MESS is pretty much the same as MAME™. You can check out MESS, download the program, and learn more about the emulator at http://www.mess.org.

MAME is a registered trademark of Nicola Salmoria.