Talk:MAME

Spring cleaning, April 2011
I did a major overhaul on the entire article. ROM set naming is an implementation detail; likewise for the release types. They are far from relevant in the grand scale of things. The purpose of this article isn't to explain how to use MAME, but to describe what it's about. I trimmed down these sections and wrote a lot of new text describing MAME to the uninitiated. I also reduced the sections about cabinets and frontends to two paragraphs in the overview. The section about reception was removed. For movies and video games reception is relevant, but in the case of software like MAME it's better served by describing the impact MAME has had on the world at large (which I attempt to do in the history section). Dngnta (talk) 19:14, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

CHD acronym definition
It's nice that this article provides a definition for CHD... but do we have the correct definition? A Google search tells me that "compressed hard disk" or "compressed hard drive" might be a more accurate acronym definition than "compressed hunks of data." 71.219.170.65 (talk) 01:22, 5 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Added a reference. It's spelled out in the MAME source code. Dngnta (talk) 21:21, 5 June 2011 (UTC)

KEEP
Can somebody tell me what KEEP has to do with MAME other than them both being emulators (or at least, an emulator is part of the KEEP project)? The KEEP emulator is written in Java AFAIK. --Vyadh (talk) 11:25, 15 November 2011 (UTC)

Developers removing support for certain games
I think it should be included that the developers often remove support for certain arcade boadrs or titles at the request of companies like the recent event with Cave and their SH-3 based board being removed and the builds of MAME removed containing emulation support for it. Usx9 (talk) 15:47, 5 January 2012 (UTC)
 * You're welcome to. --Golbez (talk) 15:57, 5 January 2012 (UTC)
 * I just did, but the content was removed due to insufficient sources. I can't add sources since the website is blocked from use in my work place. There is a post on MAME World Forums explaining this when a user asked about MAME versions being deleted. --Usx9 (talk) 09:56, 23 January 2012 (UTC)

BSD Derived License
The license for MAME doesn't appear to be connected in any way to the BSD license. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.161.255.106 (talk) 22:03, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

3D Hardware Support
http://mamedev.org/devwiki/index.php/FAQ:About says about 3D Hardware Support: "As of MAME 0.106 and later, MAME will take advantage of 3D hardware for compositing artwork and scaling the games to full screen. To make use of this, you should have a modern Direct3D 8-capable video card with at least 16MB of video RAM."

I am not sure if the Wikipedia Text in this part is entirely correct; it might be referring to something slightly different than the MAME FAQ though... I was just scanning the whole thing quickly. Peter --62.167.89.193 (talk) 14:22, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

Cleanup and compliance
MAME deserves a better article than this. I can see a few problems here:


 * The article relies almost entirely on primary sources.
 * Notability is never truly established. Given MAME's history and significance, we should be able to do this rather easily.  Regardless, it's still an issue and needs to be addressed.
 * Reliable sources should be added to the unsourced sections. As far as I can tell from a quick overview, there really isn't much original research.  We don't need a source for the statement that "games come in ROM format", but assertions that MAME pioneered the emulation of certain architectures probably does need a source.
 * Some of the technical details are needlessly detailed. I know that some editors love to drown their articles in this kind of complexity, but it's not necessary to list that MAME can emulate ICs, microcontrollers, data buses, and memory regions.  The average reader just isn't going to care about this kind of minutiae.  The changeover from C to C++ seems relevant, but it's still bordering on trivia.

I'm going to tag this article with a few templates and see if I can find some reliable sources. If I get distracted, it might take a while. NinjaRobotPirate (talk) 15:58, 3 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Well, that was quick! I went through and fixed most of the surface problems.  I added citations to several reliable source.  With citations from the New York Times, IGN (4X), PC World, and Joystiq, I think we've conclusively established notability and solved the problem of not having enough sources.  I'm still a little worried that the article relies so heavily on primary sources, but I've removed template:Primary sources.  If other editors feel it necessary, they should re-add that template.  I streamlined some of the excess detail, but there's still more that can be removed.  However, I'm tired of editing this article, and I think it looks much more presentable now.  Oh, and I standardized all the references and dates.  I also fixed a few of the references that were missing data (accessdate and author, mostly).  It wasn't very fun.  Leave comments on my talk page if you think the article needs further emergency work (or you hate my edits), but I think I'm done with it for now. NinjaRobotPirate (talk) 21:16, 3 July 2013 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified 2 external links on MAME. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20110420212857/http://mamedev.org/updates.html to http://mamedev.org/updates.html
 * Added tag to http://www2.sega.com/support/manuals/taitolegends_pc_manual.pdf
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20130704071827/http://mamedev.org/source/src/lib/util/chd.h.html to http://mamedev.org/source/src/lib/util/chd.h.html

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Not just for games
The MAME at386 machine emulates a IBM PC/AT 386 clone so it is not limited to running games. There are probably other MAME machines that can be used as general-purpose emulators of vintage hardware. It is theoretically possible to run MAME on MAME. I'm not sure yet how to address MAME being a general-purpose computer emulator capable of running operating systems, etc. in the article. Any suggestions? Jamplevia (talk) 20:42, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

“Former” acronym?

 * MAME (formerly an acronym of Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) is a free and open-source emulator...

"Formerly"? Was there some controversy that required them to stop making that association? – AndyFielding (talk) 03:48, 5 March 2023 (UTC)


 * Okay, I now see this on MAME's site:
 * 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.
 * So I guess they just consider it a name now, as the acronym is no longer accurate. – AndyFielding (talk) 09:17, 7 March 2023 (UTC)