What is MAME?

new school, depending on how you look at it. Yeah. Um, those of us who grew up in the nineteen eighties, you remember the arcade games that used to be so popular. Now they're still there, but nobody goes, well, there are very few arcades left. The ones that I go to or I've been to, I've mostly had racing games or Dance Dance Revolution, Yeah, Dance Dance Revolution, racing games, and

gun games. And then there's that cow, right, yeah, the cow. Yeah. Anyway, Um, so we were talking about the kinds of games that we like to play, and you know, a lot of us have a soft spot in our hearts for those old arcades style games like the pac Man's and the Donkey Kong's and Elevator Action. Yeah, that was my favorite game make fun of Elevator Action. I'm not making fun of Elevator Action. I'm just not an Elevator Action devotee. Well, no one can be perfect. But the thing is, you can't,

you know, play those games. It's really easy. You can't just go down to your seven eleven or you know, Circle K or whatever you happen to have handy and dumb, you know, to seventy five and in the machine and play all night like or and and you know, there there are a few places where you can maybe go to say an auction, and there are places that will auction off old arcade games. Have actually have a friend

who used to go to these all the time. There was one that would come to Atlanta two or three times a year and they would set up all the games and you could go and you could play them for a little while and if if you liked one, you could bid on it and if you won, you took it home that night. He had two or three different cabinets in the basement of his house. Yeah. Yeah,

there are antique game stores too. You look around and and try to find him, you know, make your basement like in uh, silver spoons and a couple of day games, tinball machines, um, pachinko, you know that kind of stuff. I'm gonna have that Leam song stuck in my head all day now I have one anyway. Um. The thing is a lot of those, uh, a lot of those games. You know, if you don't have the wherewithal to purchase

one yourself, you're kind of out of luck. Um. And a lot of those manufacturers are, you know, in dire straits, have been bought out by other people, have discontinued their operating existence. Speak. Yeah, they've been absorbed into other companies to the point where there's no real no, there's there's nothing left of the original entity. I mean, hey, you could even take Atari, which was you know, ubiquitous in the nineteen eighties arcade um, and you know they've died

and been resurrected. They're completely different company. Yeah and actually yeah, and and also we should point out that a lot of these arcade games, the game itself was hardwired into the hardware the of the gaming system. So it seems it seems kind of weird now when you think about popping a DVD in your computer to play a game, you know, well, you could play thousands of games on

your computer. Well not so with these things. They were wired to play one game in one game only, right, So that concerned a group of people who really wanted to find a way to um preserve these games, these games that otherwise, if the hardware fails, the games die, we lose them forever. And uh, that's kind of where name kind of came out of, which stands for multiple

arcade machine emulator. That's true. Now name is for educational and preservation purposes, all right, this this the purpose of this is not to give people an opportunity to play

the games they loved. It's to create a system that will play these these games, uh, in order to preserve them, so that say, sometime in the future, uh, somewhat, the the rightful owner of this game could come back and say, you know, we want to build another machine that's just like the one we built twenty years ago, but we don't have any of the existing hardware anymore. Um, we don't know how to build it the way it was built originally. We would have to reinvent it if we

were to build it again. Well, Maine kind of preserves these things, and it's almost like a museum in a way. Uh, it's meant to to keep things so that we we don't lose them. That's it. And as the creators themselves say that, you know, just being able to play the games again, that's a nice side effect. It's purely you know, coincident. Don't exactly play these games. And in the software itself, which is open source and free, there is no game code.

So if you download MAM for your computer, you have downloaded MAME for your computer, and you can get a copy for PC, Mac and lenox. I believe. But you know, you may be going, Okay, I don't get what all the fuss is about. Why were you talking about these old games? Well, Maine doesn't have any in there. What's up with that? Right? Okay, so there are no games that come with Maine is just an emulator, which means

it emulates the the abilities of various arcade machines. Now that's where the multiple comes from as well, the multiple arcade machine emulator. Not all arcade machines worked exactly the same way. In fact, they were all very quirky and all. You know, if games from one manufacturer may work in

a completely different way than from another manufacturer. Sometimes games from the same manufacturer worked in very odd ways, so you had to have an emulator that could emulate all of these different machine means in order for you to to run this these programs. So if it doesn't come with any of these games, where do you get the games? The games themselves are on ROM images and read only memory, right exactly. ROM stands for read only memory. And why

is it read only? Well, it's because these are games. They're not designed to change. Uh, it wasn't. This wasn't something that that the game designers wanted people to to go in and tweak settings on. This is really meant to just be a game, that's it. There's no need for it to be random access. There's no read only memories.

All you needed and they weren't gonna put anything else in there, right, especially if you had, say, Centipede, which used a trackball and a shoot button fire button, and you wanted to throw something else in there, like Defender, which had a joystick and lots of fire buttons and thrust in hyperspace and all other stuff, and you couldn't. You couldn't do that. You'd have to read wire the

whole darn thing, exactly. So these ROMs. Now, these were usually hardwired into the the hardware of the arcade machine. Usually it's on a chip, although it could also be on a disk or tape. Um those were used in some games, but not many. A laser disc in one case or two cases. Really yep, and you're referring to a dragon's layer in Space Ace with Don Bluth animation. You're dead on there. But let it's it's that's exactly correct. So you have these files that are on these other systems.

Now what what mame? What the main folks in the ROM folks have done. They've managed to pull that information off and make an image of it. Um, it's an image, is It's essentially it's a copy, is really what it comes down to. And uh, some places host these copies. Uh, not as a museum necessarily, but as a way from able to get hold of them. And if you have the MAME emulator, uh, and it supports that particular game. If you have the ROM and the emulator together, you

can play the old classic arcade game on your computer. Right, And if you actually own the chip rams, then you're doing it legally exactly if you Yeah, if you don't have the guts of the machine. Right, so if you do not legitimately own a copy of that machine already,

you are essentially stealing. And um, you might say, well, these machines are very old, surely they're not bound by copyright law, and you would be wrong because none of these have dropped out of copyright, right, they're not abandoned ware. These are all viable. So in theory, if you go and steal a copy of an Atari game, then then you could get you could theoretically be prosecuted for it. Now, are they actually gonna track you down? I don't know. Well, it's not. It's not the r I A A or

the m P A A. They're not. They haven't been as strict, but that especially the publishers who are who have completely gone out of business, they really haven't gone after people for trying to do that. And some of the game creators have even gone ahead and released their copyright hold and allowed people to go ahead and take copies of their games. No, granted, the titles of these games aren't necessarily like you know, show stoppers, like I

don't know, I've never played Circus. Oh well you know, but still you can get those copies legitimately because there's there's no longer a hold and they're part of the public domain. In fact, Name hosts them on its site, right, but not the thousands and thousands of other arcade games that might be found elsewhere, right those Name does not host. Uh.

It does not endorse the downloading of ROMs. That's not the purpose of the emulator, as they've said over and over, And people who do go and download these ROMs may find out that not all of them work the way they had hoped they would. Part of that is that the emulator is constantly evolving. So if if you read that the emulator supports a game, that doesn't necessarily mean it's gonna play exactly the way it played in the arcade on your machine. It means that the emulator successfully

copies what the machine does. But maybe note at the same speed, some of these games can come across as very slow, and it might be a little different experience playing a game that was supposed to have been played with a joystick when you don't have a joystick. Yeah, if you were just using the keyboard, for example, that might slow things down. Depending on the settings you have on your emulator. Some of the emulators look because name

is really a back end function. It's a command line function, which means it's you know, you have to type in commands to get to run programs. But people have created front end versions that have a user interface, make it like a graphic user interface, to make it easier to to navigate the main system and to play ROMs on it. Um.

But all of that takes up processing power. So by the time your game is actually running, a lot of your computers processing powers already dedicated to just running the emulator, and the game itself may suffer as a consequence. I I played a uh a RAM, an emulator version of I want to say it was Ghouls and Ghosts. Do

you know that game very well? A little bitty guy in armor running around firing at monsters and anyway, I tried playing it on a friends machine, uh a friend friends machine, not my machine, and uh it was really slow, like it just it was. It was practically unplayable. Other games ran all right, but that one in particular, not so much. So. Just because you can get hold of the emulator and the RAMS doesn't necessarily mean that you're gonna get the same experience you would at an arcade

now that's true. Um. Even uh, there have been some people who have gone so far as to assemble their own arcade cabinet with a custom built screen essentially a TV and a PC that they use only for that. And it's um, you can actually buy these machines and you know, they've got the full arcade layout with all the different fire buttons and joysticks and track balls and things that you can use. And some people, uh, you know, have their own multi arcade machine emulator using name or

other software to to power it. Um, and you can theoretically set all this stuff up. Of course, you know, if the authorities found in your house, they might be upset. Right. Yeah, I do know someone who actually has one of these where it was his his wish to set up an arcade machine that had all these rooms in it and then you could just select whichever game you wanted from a little simple user interface, try and hide the fact

that it's a computer at all. You know, the the interface made it look like it was just an arcade selection thing and you could, you know, scroll down the different titles, pick the one you wanted, it would start playing, and uh, and he had pretty much weeded out any of the games that would not run smoothly through the emulator. So uh but yeah, he set it up that way, and he had an old arcade cabinet that he bought it one of these auctions and uh yeah, I mean

you can. I can go over to his place and and play some MS pac Man as I am want to do. Don't laugh. I love Miss pac Man. No, no, no, no, not at all. Um, she's saucy. You know. One of the things that's interesting too is um and this really goes back to what the main inventors intended. UM. If you try out different realms, you can find out you could try games different persons of the same game that were originally intended for different markets, and they're slightly different

from one another. It's and it's you know, you look at it from a uh the standpoint of an archive and you go, okay, well, that's really cool that this You know that you get a chance to see what people in the other part of the world. Uh, you know, we're playing at the same time it was it was playing in the United States. Yeah. Yeah, you can get a feel for the cultural differences. Like if you play the same version, same game, but different versions different regional

versions of the game. Um, you can definitely see some interesting differences, and uh um they're even there. And of course there are there's a whole host of games that were only available in other countries and that you may never have had a chance to see unless you had actually, you know, traveled around the world in the eighties. Lots and lots of Japanese games for example, that um, otherwise you would you would never necessarily encounter because they were

never imported into the United States. And uh and main supports more than three thousand nine unique games. That's a that's a pretty impressive list. And that was back that was when they last updated, which was sometime in two thousand eight, so it maybe even more now. That's that's true, um, and I should point out to that it's not just

games from the eighties. There are other you know, more modern games nives and uh double zeros, except you know, I imagine some of those really rely on their sophisticated hardware and things that you know, those giant floora games with the surfboards and the not the cow not the cow. Okay, so what Plett's referring to is a a cow arcade game that I encountered once upon a time. It was a milking game and the control was a set of utters that would light up and you had to pull

the lit utter. It was like a Rhythm slash Simon game. I just had to explain it because I don't want to have to answer those emails. Well, you know what, I think that's fascinating though. It's just that's one of the cool things about the arcade game that you don't get from playing a game on your PC is uh, stuff like that that has the specialized hardware and you get to to do this have this completely different experience and you would you know, just you know, the wee

is fun, but it's it's not the same. Yeah, there's also something about having the cabinet, um, you know, because you could there's no reason why you have to build a cat I mean, there's there's no requirement. You could just have a television on a stand and you could have regular joysticks or whatever hooked up to it and you could play it that way. Um. But the reason for the cabinet is really to recreate that sort of

arcade experience from the eighties. And so we're really talking a lot about people who are pretty much our age who remember that, you know, as a kid going to the arcade and uh and standing in line so that you could have your turn at Street Fighter too and take on the reigning champ or whatever it was that was your favorite. No, actually, I go back before Street

Fighter two. So so I'm thinking more along the lines of I can't wait for that guy to stop playing Galagha because I really want to play um or Donkey Kong Jr. There was another good Food Fight classic anyway, enough memory Lane, so to speak. Um. So yeah, that's uh, that's pretty much it for Maine. But there are other emulators out there. It's not just main is not the only player in town, and there are a lot of

them for various machines, that's true, you know. Actually, speaking of the Wei um, you have the ability to uh buy, we wear and and let you play games from the Nintendo Entertainment System, Super Nintendo, even the Sega Genesis UM and a lot of the games that got poored it over, the classic Arcade games are available on that and uh what at the Xbox Xbox three sixty the arcade version,

you know, and got some of those classics. Yeah, yeah, these these machines have emulators built into them that allow you to play these games, and uh and and legally. Yeah, there are other illegal ones as well. Um, I can say that I have seen a Dreamcast emulator for the Nintendo and the Supernintendo. Uh, i've i've I can tell you that maybe half the games on each disc work properly, but not Super punch Out, which was the only one

I really wanted, I mean, my friend really wanted. Yeah. Um, but yeah, yeah, so there are emulators that people make, you know, the hackers make essentially for various consoles that allow you to play the games from other consoles. Uh. Manufacturers don't like that, you know, for the simple reason that they would much prefer you go out and buy any other console. Yeah. Yeah, but in in cases where the console is already dead and you want to be able to play those old games, yeah, they can make

it a little extra money by making that available. Yeah, making it like if they if they follow if they followed Nintendo's lead, then they can totally make money off of that. Now, granted they're they're all these rights issues for all those old games. No, Nintendo, it's a little easier, But for other game companies that refer the reliant very heavily. On third party games, it gets a lot more complicated. But yeah, if you can make that available legally, people

will go out and they'll buy them. Um. Otherwise, people kind of it's it's wrong to feel like you have this sort of justified um sense of ownership over these games because you don't. You really, you don't have any ownership of these games. There's no reason why you should be able to get hold of them. Just because you can say like, well they're not available any other anywhere else.

That's not justification for going out and stealing them. Uh. I know a lot of people kind of ignore that because they're like, well, I really want to play this game and there's no other way for me to do it, And the companies had a business, why do they care? They probably still do care, yes, but the writer of that game probably cares. I mean some of the writers they don't. They they just want their game to be played. But those are the ones who released the ROMs for

public consumption. And in that case that's fine. But otherwise it's you know, better to stay on the sunnyside of the street. I guess, well, that's a good discussion there. Um. You know what that brings us to listener mail? Disconnect with um. Good luck. So today's listener mail comes from Brendan Davey from Washington. I don't know how to say the name of your town, Brendan, so I'm not even gonna bother alright, alright, And he says, I'm looking into

buying a computer. I would like to know whether the Windows operating system is better than the mac OS? Can you compare these? Also? I heard that some max can use both operating systems? Is this true? Thanks? So we're gonna have a macp C throwdown, all right, Mr Mac convinced me that Mac OS is better than Windows. Um. One of the advantages of having the Macintosh operating system UM is that it is more resistant to viruses. This

is true, or at least fewer viruses exist for it. Yeah, And that's that's part of the problem with being less uh popular, if you will, is that a lot of the crackers U take shots at the big guys and uh leave the little guys alone. So the Lenox and mac crowd just don't see the viruses and trojans and all the other malware out there in the same volume that Windows people do and mac os also poor. It's a lot of really really useful software. UM. So if you do a lot of media editing, for example, the

Max software is great stuff. I mean there's tons and tons of stuff out there for video editing, audio editing. Max are great for that. Um. In fact, I prefer using Max two PCs whenever I'm doing any kind of media editing. It can even be adapted. Since it runs on the BSD, which is a form of Unix UM, it can actually be adapted to run other Unix based applications.

It's a little tricky, it involves some emulation, UM, but but it can be used to run Linux and other Unix based applications UM when you need to do that, which gives you a broader base of of applications to draw from. Because one of the big complaints, like, for example, my father has Mac versus PC. He says, well, you know, the Mac just doesn't have the same level of software, right. Well, that's the thing is that Windows does support a huge

library of software. I'm the lions share really, So if you're like a gamer, Windows is the way to go because that's where most of your games are going to come from. Now, there's some great games in the MAX. So Mac lovers don't write to me and say that I'm a Mac hater. I'm not. I own a Mac. Um. But it's just it depends on what you want to use it for. So if you're a big gamer, I would say say you want Windows. But you did ask that you had heard that some MAX can use both

operating systems. That's true, That's absolutely true. Um. If your Mac has an Intel based processor, and that's essentially anything released in the last couple of years or so that two and a half years, UM, then you should be able to run Windows and even Linux or other forms of Unix on there that will run on an Intel processor. Yeah, you can get a program called boot camp that allows you to have both Windows and the Mac operating system

running on your machine. You choose when you boot up your machine which one you want to run, and then you just go from there. So let's say you've got a Windows program you want to run, Well, then you can boot into Windows and run it, and then you can quit booted back up into Mac if you want to. Actually speaking of emulation and of doing that, UM, there are there are at least three options that I know of that will allow you to run Windows or Linux on your desktop at the same time as you were

running your Mac os. Holy free holies. There's parallels Desktop vm Ware's Fusion. And there's an even a free open source version or application called UM virtual Box from Sun and it will allow you to run the other OS in a Mac window. So you can be if you say, I'm done with my project in Mac, I want to play this game that's only on Windows. You can boot up virtual Box UM and you know, launch Windows and start playing that game. Now you have to partition your

hard drive. Boot Camp is an Apple native application that will that actually comes with the OS UM, but that requires you to reboot your computer into Windows. You have to own a copy of Windows obviously. Yeah, that's the thing. Yeah, I mean, you know, Linux is one thing, it's free. But um, you know, if you want a copy of Windows legally, but you need to buy you know, a boot disc and do that and partition your hard drive

with bootcamp. Yeah, so so it is possible. Um And uh so if you if you just cannot decide on between one or the other, then you could get a new Mac and and do that. Just keep in mind that this does mean you have to partition your hard drive, so you're not gonna have the same amount of hard drive space per operating system. Um. And uh you know otherwise, UM,

you know, pick whatever suits your needs the most. If you're gonna do a lot of media editing, I suggest the mac Os if you're gonna play a lot of games Windows. Really, if if you're just going to be surfing the web, check an email, writing something up in the word processor, building websites, you don't really have to have. It really doesn't matter which one you either one because right, yeah,

they're they're both good operating systems. It ends up being more a matter of personal preference at this point, especially since they've been growing together in the past ten fifteen years. If you look at Windows seven and you look at mac Os ten, they're very similar. Yeah, they really are. Well. We hope that answers your question, Brittan, And if any of you have questions, suggestions, comments, corrections, you can write into us at tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com.

And we have blogs up and live now, so if you want to read blogs from the tech stuff crew or from Stuff you Should Know, or the History group, the auto group. We've got we've got blogs on all of these topics, and you can find those at blogs dot how stuff works dot com. And we'll talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how Stuff Works dot Com brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you