BASICS

THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW

There's a wonderful MAME FAQ maintained on the Offical MAME Site which I won't try to duplicate here, but I will touch on some of the basic items you need to understand in order to be able to play your favorite arcade games with MAME.

Check the Links section of this document to find the official MAME FAQ.

MAME IS AN EMULATOR

You've no doubt seen products like Microsoft's "Return of Arcade" which allow you to play classic arcade games on your PC. That software is a simulator, not an emulator. An arcade simulator is a program written to perform like the original arcade game. Ever notice Microsoft's Pac-Man says, "Press F1 to Start?" Pac-Man never said that at the arcade! And that's not the only difference. As good as they may be written, simulators never seem to capture the true feel of a game.

An emulator fools your computer into thinking that it's the actual hardware on which the classic arcade machines ran. Different games used different hardware, and MAME emulates many of them. Essentially, when you run Pac-Man on MAME, for all Pac-Man knows he's sitting in an arcade cabinet next to pinball machines. It's the real game.

THE ROM'S THE THING

An emulator without a ROM is like a computer without software.

In those classic arcade games, in the cabinet behind the quarter slots which stole my weekly allowance, were computer motherboards much like in your computer. But instead of having a hard drive or CD-ROM as a storage medium, the game program was burned into computer chips mounted directly on that motherboard. The info on these chips could not be altered, only read. Thus they were called Read-Only Memory chips; or, ROMs.

So what's being done in an emulator is a grand illusion for the sake of the ROMs. MAME fools the ROMs into thinking that your PC is actually the motherboard in which they once lived: your monitor is the screen in the arcade cabinet, and your sound card is really the sound chips that the ROMs used to create those wonderful bleeps & bloops.

Without ROMs, you have nothing.

WHAT'S A FRONT-END AND DO I NEED IT?

For years the way I recommended running MAME was to use the DOS version with the Windows front-end, Arcade@Home by Tim Eckel. A front-end gives the DOS binary a nice Windows graphical interface from which you can maintain, setup and play your games.

However, over the past few months I've changed my mind. My current choice and recommendation is to use MAME32, which is simply a Windows version of MAME with a graphical interface built right in. If you do any research, you'll read that MAME32 is a bit less efficient than the DOS version, but I've decided it's best for my needs for several reasons:

When MAME32 gets updated, the GUI is updated at the same time. This eliminates the need to both search out, download & install two different pieces of software when an new version of MAME comes along.

MAME32 is quicker & easier to install than the DOS MAME & and a front-end, and it takes up less hard drive space.

The minor performance hit was a real consideration back when the "basic" PC configuration included a CPU around 160-233MHz, but in the rapidly evolving world of faster & faster CPUs, even the most CPU-intensive games run at a smooth 60 frames per second under MAME32. Once your processor breaks about the 400Mhz barrier, there's really no discernable difference between a game running under DOS MAME or MAME32.

It's easier! When I first started assembling this CD, I was trying to write a detailed installation procedure to allow you to install MAME, but play the ROMs right off of the CD. To make that happen with the DOS MAME was so complex and involved I just knew it would never be as easy as I'd hoped. But with MAME32, there's an option right from the main toolbar to force MAME to look in any directories you choose to find its ROMs.

With the advent of the latest incarnation of Windows, Windows 2000, DOS is effectively being phased out. Anything that is DOS-dependant will be rendered inoperative when running newer operating systems.
Of course, you don't have to use MAME32 on your computer, but I'm not providing it here because it would take up precious space that is better spent on more ROMs. If you think you'd rather use the DOS MAME, you can find it and the excellent front-end Arcade@Home, from the sites listed on the Links page of this document.

WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT NEO-GEO

Ah, Neo-Geo.

Neo-Geo was a fascinating hybrid piece of hardware. The same hardware was used in arcade games and home console systems, and the same software could run on both systems. Released around 1991, the hardware was a giant leap ahead of the first arcade games with the ability to handle much more complex graphics & sound than game players were accustomed to.

This was great for Neo-Geo, but its inclusion in MAME has often been questioned. Is Neo-Geo a classic arcade platform? More importantly, are Neo-Geo games really classic arcade games? That's an issue that you'll have to decide for yourself. The vast majority of Neo-Geo games (about 90% by my estimation) are mediocre fighting games. The standard kick-jump-punch until your enemy is out of energy, and the winner is the best two out of three. Now I enjoy a good fighting game, in fact the full Street Fighter series is included on this MAME CD, but due to space restrictions not all of them could be included on this CD.

None of the Neo-Geo ROMsets are smaller than 3 megabytes, and some are as large as 39MB! Not only would that fill up a CD very quickly, but you'd have nothing more than a few dozen more look-alike fighting games. It's for these reasons that not all of the Neo-Geo ROMs are on this CD. I have included several notable ones which still retain that creativity and originality that is the trademark of classic video games.

If you're interested in the Neo-Geo games, and don't mind a 20MB+ download, hop on the internet, go to a webcrawling search engine (like webcrawler or hotbot) and look for "neogeo roms." After a few deadends, you should find plenty of them available.

WHAT'S A CLONE, AND WHY ARE THEY HERE?

In the days that arcade games were big money, popular games were imitated a great deal. The number of Pac-Man-like games is astounding -- once Pac-Man got popular, dot-eating maze games popped up everywhere.

But not everyone wanted to take the time to imitate Pac-Man, especially when it was so much easier to just clone him. To clone a game, unscrupulous game companies would take a full set of ROMs for a game, and slightly reprogram just one or two of the ROM chips to alter the game and make it their own. The result was pretty much the same game as the original, but with slight differences.

"That's great," you're thinking, "but why do I need six different versions of Galaga if they're all just clones of the same game? And why are you wasting so much space with the duplication?"

Good questions, and of course, I have good answers.

First of all, unlike biological clones, video game clones aren't exact duplicates of the original. What you get with clones are slight variations on a theme. Some Donkey Kong clones reordered the sequence of levels, and changed sound effects. One Galaga clone had a sloppy bug that, if exploited, would make the aliens stop shooting at you. Some Pac-Man clones modified the maze and changed the ghosts' names. The list goes on and on, but the main point is that having all the clones enriches the enjoyment of the original, or at least most people think so.

Secondly, why waste the space? Wonderfully, there's no wasted space at all. The authors of MAME came up with an ingenious method of combining ROMsets of cloned games so that only those modified ROMs had to be included. ROM chips that were unchanged in the clone, are not duplicated in the merged archive. That means that only the information that is unique to the clone is taking up extra space. Now that's efficiency!

WHAT'S UP WITH BROKEN GAMES?

You'll notice in browsing the hundreds and hundreds of games that some of them report small flaws in the emulation like incorrect color schemes or no sound support. Some of them are listed as "broken" and won't even start up.

This is mostly because MAME is an ongoing project which is being worked on by a team of programmers around the world. It's rare for two programmers to be able to sit down in the same room together and hammer out problems. So when a guy in one corner of the world can get a game to work just a little bit, or even get the chips to acknowledge that they are activated, he'll include that part of his work in MAME so that all of the other programmers around the world can look at what he's started and build on it. If there weren't broken games, MAME would grow very, very slowly indeed -- or not at all. Broken games are a necessary evil that you'll just have to live with. But don't think of them as games you can't play; think of them as a preview of what's to come in future versions!

I've removed some of the ROMsets that MAME reports as broken to maximize space on this disc, but some are still included. But remember; although a game is broken in this MAME release, the next one might have the same game working perfectly, and you'll be all set with the ROM to play it!