Happy 25th Birthday Mame!

[mrv2k]

I've been following and supporting Mame since '99. So many emulators have come and gone in 25 years but Mame has endured.

Happy Birthday!

https://twitter.com/mamedev_org/stat...99597443833869

[Fiery Phoenix]

I second this.

Mind was blown when I found out I could actually play THE original arcade versions of games I drooled over in various magazine pics and didn't have to endure the lame conversions to home computers (I'm looking at you Paperboy)

[dreadnought]

They really are the titans of preservation. And yes, my mind was - and still is - blown every time I fire it up. Would've never thought it possible to be able to put entire arcade history on a thumbnail sized card one day, and play it on a whim, even though we spun all kinds of wild scenarios as broke kids ("If I won a miilion dollars I'd buy this arcade and put it all in my basement...", etc).

Special shout out to Calamity and his GroovyMAME fork, which is making it accessible for us CRT fanatics...

[gimbal]

My mind is blown in a different way; that the code base of such a monolithic piece of software is successfully maintained. There is serious skill involved there.

[Viceroy]

My God where has time gone!

[Superman]

Wow how time flies. I remember downloading it for the first time in 1998 and being blown away by the fact I could play Chase HQ on my PC!

Back then it was just the one guy involved Nicola Salmoria but it quickly became a massive project with many different people working on different drivers.

Good times

[Marce]

Mame was there since 1997 but nothing worked fine in those early releases
it started to work fine around 1998, but I really tried 1 year later

I remember around 1999 playing the game Ghost'n goblins in a PC which had a celeron 400 mhz, in 1999 there was only a Mame DOS version and no windows version existed ,or if existed was so slow and buggy to be playlable
I do not remember very well

Ghost'n goblins and some others games ran perfect at full speed, I was really impressed in the time that I was running real arcade games at home
but the game Rastan Saga I remember was slow and unplayable, seems the celeron was slow for such game and some others

Then around 2001 I sold such computer and I build a new PC with a cheap PCHIPS M810LMR motherboard and and a athlon 1ghz
then all mame games which I had ran at full speed excepting cruis'n usa , cruis'n world, killer instinct and some other ones

such games were not playlable until back to intel in 2007 building a PC with a core 2 duo E6600

[HEXWALKER]

Happy birthday Mame! I'm always glad it was there for me when I wanted to play the arcade version of 1943: The Battle of Midway!!!!

[fxgogo]

Wow, I feel old now. I do remember playing games on Mame when it first came out. I actually remember downloading roms 1993ish to play things like Asteroids and the like, it is was separate programs for each rom I think.

Looking to the future of Mame, I wonder where it will be in 25 years?

[Orcish75]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

Special shout out to Calamity and his GroovyMAME fork, which is making it accessible for us CRT fanatics...

Couldn't agree more! It's as close to the real thing that you can get. Bought a couple of cabinets a few years ago, one for horizontal games and the other for vertical games. Using two Core 2 Duo 3GHz PCs with 15KHz modded Radeon HD5450 cards. Also put a 4 channel car amp in each cabinet, two channels driving mids/tweeters and the other two channels, bridged, driving a 10" sub. Complete overkill, but it really does sound good!


https://www.avforums.co.za/index.php/topic,76786.0.html

[Anubis]

I still remember my disbelief that you can play actual arcade game on computers of the time.... only more surprise was finding out that you can play Amiga game and have workbench on a PC.

Just as gimbal has said - it is incredible that they are able to maintain project this big, especially since merge of mame and mess.

[jotd]

It's so big that MAME is used at my company to monitor compilation time on our machines

(note that Nicola Salmoria is a former amiga owner too. He wrote a cool hex editor I used for a while)

[coldacid]

jotd: As a benchmark for compilers / build machines, or was there some arcade game built around software compilation that you're emulating?

[van_dammesque]

MAME, playing kung fu master on a friend's 500 Mhz PC, is why I switched from a towered A1200 040 to a 1.4 Ghz PC back in 2001.

[jotd]

Originally Posted by coldacid

jotd: As a benchmark for compilers / build machines, or was there some arcade game built around software compilation that you're emulating?

just a benchmark. Most people didn't even know what MAME was. I don't know who got the idea to use that at the office.

[gimbal]

Perhaps MAME was that sweet spot in the world of "big open source projects". Big enough to be a serious benchmark, but not so big as Linux that it takes forever for a build to finish

[redblade]

Yep one of my first downloads alongside WinUAE in 2002 when we upgraded from a 486Dx2-66 to a Pentium-1.5ghz with 512MB RAM and WinXP.

I know Mame32 used to use the 68000 core from WinUAE at one stage, don't know if they still do.

I haven't touched it recently because I've read it's bloat as it emulates every type of machine and all I want to play are Retro games up to 94, or any Rasta/bitplane game and not star wars.

Although I wouldn't mind playing the Star wars game from 97, that looks pretty epic, the star wars game on the 32X is very nice

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by redblade

I haven't touched it recently because I've read it's bloat as it emulates every type of machine and all I want to play are Retro games up to 94, or any Rasta/bitplane game and not star wars.

Yeah, they are catching a lot of flak since the MAME / MESS merger, which I think is rather unfair since I'm pretty sure they had some valid reasons for doing that. But, while I was initially put off too, it's easy to filter out all the unwanted stuff using .ini files and then it's just good ol' arcade MAME.



I also doubt the "bloat" itself is really affecting anybody since most people have machines which can handle the big .exe. And you can always roll back on the weaker ones.

[jotd]

MAME uses Musashi code to emulate 68k family.

Latest versions are bloat all right. Android devices used a 0.34 fork from around 2000 to be able to run properly... most iconic games (mame4all). I believe Raspberry Pi builds are made from that fork.