About MAMEMAME originally stood for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator.
MAME's purpose is to preserve decades of software history. As electronic technology continues to rush forward, MAME prevents this important "vintage" software from being lost and forgotten. This is achieved by documenting the hardware and how it functions. The source code to MAME serves as this documentation. The fact that the software is usable serves primarily to validate the accuracy of the documentation (how else can you prove that you have recreated the hardware faithfully?). Over time, MAME 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.
PurposeMAME main purpose is to be a refefence to the inner workings of the emulated machines. This is done both for educational purposes and for preservation purposes, in order to prevent historical software from disappearing forever once the hardware it runs on stops working. Of course, in order to preserve the software and demonstrate that the emulated behavior matches the original, you must also be able to actually use the software. This is considered a nice side effect, and is not MAME's primary focus.
It is not our intention to infringe on any copyrights or patents on the original games. All of MAME's source code is either our own or freely available. To operate, the emulator requires images of the original ROMs, CDs, hard disks or other media from the machines, which must be provided by the user. No portions of the original game code are included in the executable.
CostMAME is free. Its source code is free. The project as whole is under distributed under the GNU General Public License, version 2 (GPL-2.0), but most of code (including core functionality) is available under the BSD-3-clause license.
Derivative WorksBecause the name MAME is trademarked, you must abide by the rules set out for trademark usage if you wish to use "MAME" as part of the name your derivative work. In general, this means you must request permission, which requires that you follow the guidelines above.
The version number of any derivative work should reflect the version number of the MAME release from which it was was derived.
Official Contact InformationFor questions regarding the MAME license, trademark, or other usage, go to
http://mamedev.org/.