What’s new in MAME 0.210:
- This month, we’ve got lots of fixes for issues with supported systems, as well as some interesting additions. Newly added hand-held and tabletop games include Tronica’s Shuttle Voyage and Space Rescue, Mattel’s Computer Chess, and Parker Brothers’ Talking Baseball and Talking Football. On the arcade side, we’ve added high-level emulation of Gradius on Bubble System hardware and a prototype of the Neo Geo game Viewpoint. For this release, Jack Li has contributed an auto-fire plugin, providing additional functionality over the built-in auto-fire feature.
- A number of systems have had been promoted to working, or had critical issues fixed, including the Heathkit H8, Lola 8A, COSMAC Microkit, the Soviet PC clone EC-1840, Zorba, and COMX 35. MMU issues affecting Apollo and Mac operating systems have been addressed. Other notable improvements include star field emulation in Tutankham, further progress on SGI emulation, Sega Saturn video improvements, write support for the CoCo OS-9 disk image format, and preliminary emulation for MP3 audio on Konami System 573 games.
- There are lots of software list additions this month. Possibly most notable is the first dump of a Hanimex Pencil II cartridge, thanks to the silicium.org team. Another batch of cleanly cracked and original Apple II software has been added, along with more ZX Spectrum +3 software, and a number of Colour Genie cassette titles.
MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) is a freely distributed and non-profit project that provides users with a sophisticated arcade machine emulator software designed for the GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows operating systems.
Supports a plethora of old-school games
The project’s main goal is to preserve ancient games from disappearing forever just because the hardware that were designed to run on is no longer manufactured. In no way this application should be used for pirating games and other copyright infringement purposes.
It has been designed from the ground up to support a wide range of ROMs, as well as CD or hard disk images with some of the most popular games of all times, especially classic arcade games from the late ’70s era.
Key features include support for both vector and raster displays, a wide range of sound chips and processors, a flexible timer system, and dynamic recompilation. It is targeted at 32-bit and 64-bit instruction set architectures.
Availability and installation
The application has been written entirely in the C++ programming language and it is distributed as a source archive. To compile and install the program in your Linux-based operating system, download and extract the archive on your home folder.
Then, simply navigate to the extracted folder via a terminal emulator and type the “make” command. Once the compilation process has been completed, you can use the program as-is from that folder or install it system wide using the “make install” command as root (system administrator).
Bottom line
In conclusion, Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME) is a decent arcade game system emulator software that supports a multitude of games and hardware platforms.
