My newb question of the day

[Genome]

okay i read the readme (more or less) and i still cant figure out just what the hell Mame is. i know it emulates arcade machines but the games im hearing that are playable on it seem to be from multiple systems and genres. is it like on big umbrella emulator or something?

[alcoatjez]

okay i read the readme (more or less) and i still cant figure out just what the hell Mame is. i know it emulates arcade machines but the games im hearing that are playable on it seem to be from multiple systems and genres. is it like on big umbrella emulator or something?

Yep, something like that. Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. It emulates many systems and thousands of games. The goal of MAME is to document and preserve each and every arcade game and hardware by emulating it.

[Robert]

Listen to alcoatjez, he's very knowledgeable about many things - as i've seen on another forum. One other thing about MAME is many people are under the mistaken belief that it was made so they could play free games - they are wrong. It's only there to stop the old games disappearing forever, by replacing the old broken-down hardware with a software equivalent.

[Genome]

cool. so i can remember several arcade machines i used to play. could it play a lineup like galaga,sonic the hedgehog, and mk4. also what are the file types? (ex. .nes or .n64)

[montpics]

Mostly bin or rom files. But some of the games contained different file format.

[alcoatjez]

Thank you, robert

cool. so i can remember several arcade machines i used to play. could it play a lineup like galaga,sonic the hedgehog, and mk4.

Yes, yes (partially), and no (MK4 is on a type of hardware that is very hard to emulate)

also what are the file types? (ex. .nes or .n64)

As montpics said, the file formats are various. Most of the time the roms are named like they exist on the arcade board itself. Like a56.u51 for example. This is easier for programmers I guess to see what kind of roms they are.

[Robert]

As with anything, there's no "standard" to rom naming. The easiest is the roms with a sticker on top with its name, such as "epr38124". In the example above, it may have a56 written on it, and be component number u51. And some boards have a grid system, letters across the top, and numbers down the side. The rom at location d12 might be unmarked, so that's the name it gets in mame.