M.A.M.E. stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. It was created in 1997 by some bloke from Italy. Like it says on the tin, this is a piece of software that allows you to play arcade games on your PC. Unlike some other older games you see that are available for the PC that are re-written to work on this modern platform, MAME use's a different approach. It's only function is not emulate the software of the old games, but instead to emulate the hardware on which the software runs on. This then allows the original software from the original PCB to be downloaded and run with the help of MAME. MAME can be run on a wide verity of computers. Everything from UNIX, DOS, Windows, Mac’s and CE devises, just to mention a few.

It is truly Amazing!

To date, over 4000 games can be run with the help of MAME, and new versions of MAME are released quite often that increases the number of games that can be played.

The games themselves (know as ROMs), used to be available all over the web, but now most of the web-sites have been shutdown because the user breaks copy-write laws if they use a ROM image without actually owning the PCB.

You can download the latest version of MAME from:-
http://www.mame.net/download

All information on MAME can be found at :
http://www.mameworld.com