It began as a project called Multi-Pac, intended to preserve games in the Pac-Man family, but the name was changed as more games were added to its framework. The MAME project was started by the Italian programmer Nicola Salmoria. MESS, an emulator for many video game consoles and computer systems, based on the MAME core, was integrated into MAME in 2015. It now supports over 7,000 unique games and 10,000 actual ROM image sets, though not all of the games are playable. The first public MAME release was by Nicola Salmoria on February 5, 1997. Joystiq has listed MAME as an application that every Windows and Mac gamer should have. It does this by emulating the inner workings of the emulated arcade machines the ability to actually play the games is considered 'a nice side effect'. Its intention is to preserve gaming history by preventing vintage games from being lost or forgotten. MAME (originally an acronym of Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) is a free and open-source emulator designed to recreate the hardware of arcade game systems in software on modern personal computers and other platforms.

GPL-2.0-or-later, with some sub-parts BSD-3-Clause

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