I. Purpose

MAME’s main purpose is to be a reference 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, one 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 software and systems. 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 software are included in the MAME executable.

II. Cost

MAME is made available at no cost. Its source code is freely available. The project as whole is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later (GPL-2.0+), but most of code, including core functionality, is also available under the terms of the more permissive 3-clause BSD license (BSD-3-clause).

III. Software Image Files

ROM, CD, hard disk and other media images are all copyrighted material. They may not be lawfully distributed without the explicit permission of the copyright holder(s). They are not “abandonware”, nor has copyright expired on any of the software supported by MAME.

MAME is not intended to be used as a tool for mass copyright infringement. Therefore, it is strongly against the authors’ wishes to sell, advertise, or link to resources that provide illegal copies of ROM, CD, hard disk or other media images.

IV. Derivative Works

Because 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 derived.

V. Official Contact Information

For questions regarding the MAME license, trademark, or other usage, see https://www.mamedev.org/legal.html

Epilepsy Warning

A very small percentage of individuals may experience epileptic seizures when exposed to certain light patterns or flashing lights. Exposure to certain patterns or backgrounds on a television screen or computer monitor, or while playing video games may induce an epileptic seizure in these individuals.

Certain conditions may induce previously undetected epileptic symptoms even in persons who have no history of prior seizures or epilepsy. These conditions can include emulation accuracy or inaccuracy, computer performance at the time of running MAME, video card drivers, your monitor, and a lot of other factors. If you, or anyone in your family, has an epileptic condition, consult your physician prior to using MAME.

If you experience any of the following while using MAME, IMMEDIATELY discontinue use and consult your physician before resuming use of MAME.

An Introduction to MAME

MAME, formerly an acronym which stood for Multi Arcade Machine Emulator, documents and reproduces through emulation the inner components of arcade machines, computers, consoles, chess computers, calculators, and many other types of electronic amusement machines. As a nice side-effect, MAME allows to use on a modern PC those programs and games which were originally developed for the emulated machines.

At one point there were actually two separate projects, MAME and MESS. MAME covered arcade video games, while MESS covered home and business systems. They are now merged into the one MAME.

MAME is written in C++ and can currently emulate over 32,000 individual systems from the last five decades.

Purpose of MAME

The primary purpose of MAME is to preserve decades of arcade, computer, and console history. As technology continues to rush forward, MAME prevents these important “vintage” systems from being lost and forgotten.

Systems Emulated by MAME

The Arcade Database contains a complete list of the systems currently emulated. As you will notice, being supported does not always mean that the status of the emulation is perfect. You may want

Alternatively, you can simply see the status by yourself, launching the system emulation and taking a look at the red or yellow warning screen which appears before the emulation starts, if any. Notice that if you have information which can help to improve the emulation of a supported system, or if you can directly contribute fixes and/or addition to the current source, you can do any of the following:

Supported OS

The current source code can be directly compiled under all the main operating systems: Microsoft Windows (both with DirectX/BGFX native support or with SDL support), Linux, FreeBSD, and macOS.

System Requirements

MAME is written in C++, and has been ported to numerous platforms. Over time, as computer hardware has evolved, the MAME code has evolved as well to take advantage of the greater processing power and hardware capabilities offered.

The official MAME binaries are compiled and designed to run on a standard Windows-based system. The minimum requirements are:

Of course, the minimum requirements are just that: minimal. You may not get optimal performance from such a system, but MAME should run. Modern versions of MAME require more power than older versions, so if you have a less-capable PC, you may find that using an older version of MAME may get you better performance, at the cost of greatly lowered accuracy and fewer supported systems.

MAME will take advantage of 3D hardware for compositing artwork and scaling displayed software to full screen. To make use of this, you should have at least a semi-modern computer with semi-modern 3D hardware made within the last five to ten years.

HLSL or GLSL special effects such as CRT simulation will put a very heavy load on your video card, especially at higher resolutions. You will need a fairly powerful modern video card, and the load on your video card goes up exponentially as your resolution increases. If HLSL or GLSL are too intensive, try reducing your output resolution.

Keep in mind that even on the fastest computers available, MAME is still incapable of playing some systems at full speed. The goal of the project isn’t to make all system run speedy on your system; the goal is to document the hardware and reproduce the behavior of the hardware as faithfully as possible.

BIOS Dumps and Software

Most of the systems emulated by MAME requires a dump of the internal chips of the original system. These can be obtained by extracting the data from an original unit, or finding them (at your own risk) on various place on the Internet. Being copyrighted material, MAME does not come with any of these.

Also, you may want to find some software to be run on the emulated machine where it does not have internal software (e.g. some computers will need a disk to boot to an operating system).

Again, Google and other search engines are your best friends. MAME does not provide any software in the MAME package to be run on the emulated machines because it is very often (almost always, in the case of console software) protected by copyright.

The MAME team has been permitted to redistribute some old software, which can be found in the ROMS section of the MAME site.

Installing MAME

Microsoft Windows

You simply have to download the latest binary archive available from http://www.mamedev.org and to extract its content to a folder. You will end up with many files (below you will find explanations about some of these), and in particular mame.exe. This is a command line program. The installation procedure ends here. Easy, isn’t it?

Other Operating Systems

In this case, you can either look for pre-compiled (SDL)MAME binaries (e.g. in the repositories of your favorite Linux distro) which should simply extract all the needed files in a folder you choose, or compile the source code by yourself. In the latter case, see our section on compiling MAME.

Compiling MAME

All Platforms

Putting all of these together, we get a couple of examples:

Rebuilding MAME on a dual-core (e.g. i3 or laptop i5) machine:

make -j3

Rebuilding MAME for just the Pac-Man and Galaxian families of systems, with tools, on a quad-core (e.g. i5 or i7) machine:

make SUBTARGET=pacem SOURCES=src/mame/pacman,src/mame/galaxian TOOLS=1 REGENIE=1 -j5

Rebuilding MAME for just the Apple II systems, compiling up to six sources in parallel:

make SUBTARGET=appulator SOURCES=apple/apple2.cpp,apple/apple2e.cpp,apple/apple2gs.cpp REGENIE=1 -j6

Microsoft Windows

MAME for Windows is built using the MSYS2 environment. You will need Windows 7 or later and a reasonably up-to-date MSYS2 installation. We strongly recommend building MAME on a 64-bit system. Instructions may need to be adjusted for 32-bit systems. Building for 64-bit ARM (AArch64) requires a 64-bit ARM system running Windows 11 or later.

Using a standard MSYS2 installation

You may also build MAME using a standard MSYS2 installation and adding the tools needed for building MAME. These instructions assume you have some familiarity with MSYS2 and the pacman package manager.

The additional packages you’ll need depend on the CPU architecture you’re building for.

64-bit x86-64

32-bit x86

64-bit ARM (AArch64)

For example you could use these commands to ensure you have the packages you need to compile MAME, omitting the ones for configurations you don’t plan to build for or combining multiple pacman commands to install more packages at once:

pacman -Syu
pacman -S curl git make
pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc mingw-w64-x86_64-python
pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-llvm mingw-w64-x86_64-libc++ mingw-w64-x86_64-lld
pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-SDL2 mingw-w64-x86_64-SDL2_ttf
pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-qt5
pacman -S mingw-w64-i686-gcc mingw-w64-i686-python
pacman -S mingw-w64-i686-llvm mingw-w64-i686-libc++ mingw-w64-i686-lld
pacman -S mingw-w64-i686-SDL2 mingw-w64-i686-SDL2_ttf
pacman -S mingw-w64-i686-qt5
pacman -S mingw-w64-clang-aarch64-clang mingw-w64-clang-aarch64-python mingw-w64-clang-aarch64-gcc-compat
pacman -S mingw-w64-clang-aarch64-lld mingw-w64-clang-aarch64-llvm mingw-w64-clang-aarch64-libc++
pacman -S mingw-w64-clang-aarch64-SDL2 mingw-w64-clang-aarch64-SDL2_ttf
pacman -S mingw-w64-clang-aarch64-qt5

You could use these commands to install the current version of the mame-essentials package and add the MAME package repository to your pacman configuration:

curl -O "https://repo.mamedev.org/x86_64/mame-essentials-1.0.6-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz"
pacman -U mame-essentials-1.0.6-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz
echo -e '\n[mame]\nInclude = /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist.mame\nSigLevel = Never' >> /etc/pacman.conf

Building with Microsoft Visual Studio

Some notes about the MSYS2 environment

MSYS2 uses the pacman tool from Arch Linux for package management. There is a page on the Arch Linux wiki with helpful information on using the pacman package management tool.

The MSYS2 environment includes two kinds of tools: MSYS2 tools designed to work in a UNIX-like environment on top of Windows, and MinGW tools designed to work in a more Windows-like environment. The MSYS2 tools are installed in /usr/bin while the MinGW tools are installed in /ming64/bin, /mingw32/bin and/or /clangarm64/bin (relative to the MSYS2 installation directory). MSYS2 tools work best in an MSYS2 terminal, while MinGW tools work best in a Microsoft command prompt.

The most obvious symptom of this is that arrow keys don’t work in interactive programs if you run them in the wrong kind of terminal. If you run MinGW gdb or python from an MSYS2 terminal window, command history won’t work and it may not be possible to interrupt an attached program with gdb. Similarly it may be very difficult to edit using MSYS2 vim in a Microsoft command prompt window.

MAME is built using the MinGW compilers, so the MinGW directories are included earlier in the PATH environment variable for the build environments. If you want to use an interactive MSYS2 program from an MSYS2 shell, you may need to type the absolute path to avoid using the MinGW equivalent instead.

MSYS2 gdb may have issues debugging MinGW programs like MAME. You may get better results by installing the MinGW version of gdb and running it from a Microsoft command prompt window to debug MAME.

GNU make supports both POSIX-style shells (e.g. bash) and the Microsoft cmd.exe shell. One issue to be aware of when using the cmd.exe shell is that the copy command doesn’t provide a useful exit status, so file copy tasks can fail silently. This may cause your build to appear to succeed while producing incorrect results.

It is not possible to cross-compile a 32-bit version of MAME using 64-bit MinGW tools on Windows, the 32-bit MinGW tools must be used. This causes issues due to the size of MAME. It’s impossible to make a 32-bit build with full local variable symbols. GCC may run out of memory, and certain source files may exceed the limit of 32,768 sections imposed by the PE/COFF object file format.

A complete build of MAME including line number symbols exceeds the size limit imposed by the PE file format and cannot be run. Workarounds include including only a subset of the systems supported by MAME or extracting symbols to a separate file and stripping excess symbols from the MAME executable.

Fedora Linux

You’ll need a few prerequisites from your Linux distribution. Make sure you get SDL 2 version 2.0.14 or later as earlier versions lack required functionality:

sudo dnf install gcc gcc-c++ SDL2-devel SDL2_ttf-devel libXi-devel libXinerama-devel qt5-qtbase-devel qt5-qttools expat-devel fontconfig-devel alsa-lib-devel pulseaudio-libs-devel

If you want to use the more efficient LLVM tools for archiving static libraries and linking, you’ll need to install the corresponding packages:

sudo dnf install lld llvm

Compilation is exactly as described above in All Platforms.

To build the HTML user/developer documentation, you’ll need Sphinx, as well as the theme and the SVG converter:

sudo dnf install python3-sphinx python3-sphinx_rtd_theme python3-sphinxcontrib-rsvgconverter

The HTML documentation can be built with this command:

make -C docs SPHINXBUILD=sphinx-build-3 html

Debian and Ubuntu (including Raspberry Pi and ODROID devices)

You’ll need a few prerequisites from your Linux distribution. Make sure you get SDL 2 version 2.0.14 or later as earlier versions lack required functionality:

sudo apt-get install git build-essential python3 libsdl2-dev libsdl2-ttf-dev libfontconfig-dev libpulse-dev qtbase5-dev qtbase5-dev-tools qtchooser qt5-qmake

Compilation is exactly as described above in All Platforms. Note the Ubuntu Linux modifies GCC to enable the GNU C Library “fortify source” feature by default, which may cause issues compiling MAME (see Known Issues).

Arch Linux

You’ll need a few prerequisites from your distro:

sudo pacman -S base-devel git sdl2_ttf python libxinerama libpulse alsa-lib qt5-base

Compilation is exactly as described above in All Platforms.

Apple macOS

You’ll need a few prerequisites to get started. Make sure you’re on macOS 11.0 Big Sur or later. You will need SDL 2 version 2.0.14 or later. You’ll also need to install Python 3 – it’s currently included with the Xcode command line tools, but you can also install a stand-alone version or get it via the Homebrew package manager.

Next you’ll need to get SDL 2 installed.

If you don’t already have it, get Python 3 set up:

Finally to begin compiling, use Terminal to navigate to where you have the MAME source tree (cd command) and follow the normal compilation instructions from above in All Platforms.

Emscripten Javascript and HTML

First, download and install Emscripten 3.1.35 or later by following the instructions at the official site.

Once Emscripten has been installed, it should be possible to compile MAME out-of-the-box using Emscripten’s emmake tool. Because a full MAME compile is too large to load into a web browser at once, you will want to use the SOURCES parameter to compile only a subset of the project, e.g. (in the MAME directory):

emmake make SUBTARGET=pacmantest SOURCES=src/mame/pacman/pacman.cpp

The SOURCES parameter should have the path to at least one driver .cpp file. The make process will attempt to locate and include all dependencies necessary to produce a complete build including the specified driver(s). However, sometimes it is necessary to manually specify additional files (using commas) if this process misses something. e.g.

emmake make SUBTARGET=apple2e SOURCES=src/mame/apple/apple2e.cpp,src/devices/machine/applefdc.cpp

The value of the SUBTARGET parameter serves only to differentiate multiple builds and need not be set to any specific value.

Emscripten supports compiling to WebAssembly with a JavaScript loader instead of all-JavaScript, and in later versions this is actually the default. To force WebAssembly on or off, add WEBASSEMBLY=1 or WEBASSEMBLY=0 to the make command line, respectively.

Other make parameters can also be used, e.g. -j for multithreaded compilation as described earlier.

When the compilation reaches the emcc phase, you may see a number of "unresolved symbol" warnings. At the moment, this is expected for OpenGL-related functions such as glPointSize. Any others may indicate that an additional dependency file needs to be specified in the SOURCES list. Unfortunately this process is not automated and you will need to search the source tree to locate the files supplying the missing symbols. You may also be able to get away with ignoring the warnings if the code path referencing them is not used at run-time.

If all goes well, a .js file will be output to the current directory. This file cannot be run by itself, but requires an HTML loader to provide it with a canvas to draw to and to pass in command-line parameters. The Emularity project provides such a loader.

There are example .html files in that repository which can be edited to point to your newly compiled MAME .js file and pass in whatever parameters you desire. You will then need to place all of the following on a web server:

You need to use a web server instead of opening the local files directly due to security restrictions in modern web browsers.

If the result fails to run, you can open the Web Console in your browser to see any error output which may have been produced (e.g. missing or incorrect ROM files). A “ReferenceError: foo is not defined” error most likely indicates that a needed source file was omitted from the SOURCES list.

Compiling the Documentation

Compiling the documentation will require you to install several packages depending on your operating system.

Compiling the Documentation on Microsoft Windows

On Windows, you’ll need a couple of packages from the MSYS2 environment. You can install these packages with

pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-librsvg mingw-w64-x86_64-python-sphinx mingw-w64-x86_64-python-sphinxcontrib-svg2pdfconverter

If you intend to make a PDF via LaTeX, you’ll need to install a LaTeX distribution such as TeX Live:

pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-texlive-fonts-recommended mingw-w64-x86_64-texlive-latex-extra

Compiling the Documentation on Debian and Ubuntu

On Debian/Ubuntu flavors of Linux, you’ll need python3-sphinx/python-sphinx and the python3-pip/python-pip packages:

sudo apt-get install python3-sphinx python3-pip
pip3 install sphinxcontrib-svg2pdfconverter

On Debian, you’ll need to install the librsvg2-bin package:

sudo apt-get install librsvg2-bin

If you intend to make a PDF via LaTeX, you’ll need to install a LaTeX distribution such as TeX Live:

sudo apt-get install librsvg2-bin latexmk texlive texlive-science texlive-formats-extra

From this point you can do make html or make latexpdf from the docs folder to generate the output of your choice. Typing make by itself will tell you all available formats. The output will be in the docs/build folder in a subfolder based on the type chosen (e.g. make html will create docs/build/html with the output.)

Useful Options

This section summarises some of the more useful options recognised by the main makefile. You use these options by appending them to the make command, setting them as environment variables, or adding them to your prefix makefile. Note that in order to apply many of these settings when rebuilding, you need to set REGENIE=1 the first time you build after changing the option(s). Also note that GENie does not automatically rebuild affected files when you change an option that affects compiler settings.

Overall build options

Tool locations

Including subsets of supported systems

Optional features

Compilation options

Library/framework locations

Known Issues

Issues with specific compiler versions

GNU C Library fortify source feature

The GNU C Library has options to perform additional compile- and run-time checks on string operations, enabled by defining the _FORTIFY_SOURCE preprocessor macro. This is intended to improve security at the cost of a small amount of overhead. MAME is not secure software, and we do not support building with _FORTIFY_SOURCE defined.

Some Linux distributions (including Gentoo and Ubuntu) have patched GCC to define _FORTIFY_SOURCE to 1 as a built-in macro. This is problematic for more projects than just MAME, as it makes it hard to disable the additional checks (e.g. if you don’t want the performance impact of the run-time checks), and it also makes it hard to define _FORTIFY_SOURCE to 2 if you want to enable stricter checks. You should really take it up with the distribution maintainers, and make it clear you don’t want non-standard GCC behaviour. It would be better if these distributions defined this macro by default in their packaging environments if they think it’s important, rather than trying to force it on everything compiled on their distributions. (This is what Red Hat does: the _FORTIFY_SOURCE macro is set in the RPM build environment, and not by distributing a modified version of GCC.)

If you get compilation errors in bits/string_fortified.h you should first ensure that the _FORTIY_SOURCE macro is defined via the environment (e.g. a CFLAGS or CXXFLAGS environment variable). You can check to see whether the _FORTIFY_SOURCE macro is a built-in macro with your version of GCC with a command like this:

gcc -dM -E - < /dev/null | grep _FORTIFY_SOURCE

If _FORTIFY_SOURCE is defined to a non-zero value by default, you can work around it by adding -U_FORTIFY_SOURCE to the compiler flags (e.g. by using the ARCHOPTS setting, or setting the CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS environment variables.

Issues affecting Microsoft Visual Studio

Microsoft introduced a new version of XAudio2 with Windows 8 that’s incompatible with the version included with DirectX for prior Windows versions at the API level. Newer versions of the Microsoft Windows SDK include headers and libraries for the new version of XAudio2. By default, the target Windows version is set to Windows Vista (6.0) when compiling MAME, which prevents the use of this version of the XAudio2 headers and libraries. To build MAME with XAudio2 support using the Microsoft Windows SDK, you must do one of the following:

The MSVC compiler produces spurious warnings about potentially uninitialised local variables. You currently need to add NOWERROR=1 to the options passed to make when generating the Visual Studio project files. This stops warnings from being treated as errors. (MSVC seems to lack options to control which specific warnings are treated as errors, which other compilers support.)

Unusual Build Configurations

Linking using the LLVM linker

The LLVM linker is generally faster than the GNU linker that GCC uses by default. This is more pronounced on systems with a high overhead for file system operations (e.g. Microsoft Windows, or when compiling on a disk mounted over a network). To use the LLVM linker with GCC, ensure the LLVM linker is installed and add -fuse-ld=lld to the linker options (e.g. in the LDFLAGS environment variable or in the ARCHOPTS setting).

Cross-compiling MAME

MAME’s build system has basic support for cross-compilation. Set CROSS_BUILD=1 to enable separate host and target compilers, set OVERRIDE_CC and OVERRIDE_CXX to the target C/C++ compiler commands, and if necessary set CC and CXX to the host C/C++ compiler commands. If the target OS is different to the host OS, set it with TARGETOS. For example it may be possible to build a MinGW32 x64 build on a Linux host using a command like this:

make TARGETOS=windows PTR64=1 OVERRIDE_CC=x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc OVERRIDE_CXX=x86_64-w64-mingw32-g++ OVERRIDE_LD=x86_64-w64-mingw32-ld MINGW64=/usr**

(The additional packages required for producing a standard MinGW32 x64 build on a Fedora Linux host are mingw64-gcc-c++, mingw64-winpthreads-static and their dependencies. Non-standard builds may require additional packages.)

Using libc++ on Linux

MAME may be built using the LLVM project’s “libc++” C++ Standard Library. The prerequisites are a working clang/LLVM installation, and the libc++ development libraries. On Fedora Linux, the necessary packages are libcxx, libcxx-devel, libcxxabi and libcxxabi-devel. Set the C and C++ compiler commands to use clang, and add -stdlib=libc++ to the C++ compiler and linker options. You could use a command like this:

env LDFLAGS=-stdlib=libc++ make OVERRIDE_CC=clang OVERRIDE_CXX=clang++ ARCHOPTS_CXX=-stdlib=libc++ ARCHOPTS_OBJCXX=-stdlib=libc++

The options following the make command may be placed in a prefix makefile if you want to use this configuration regularly, but LDFLAGS needs to be be set in the environment.

Using a GCC/GNU libstdc++ installation in a non-standard location on Linux

GCC may be built and installed to a custom location, typically by supplying the --prefix= option to the configure command. This may be useful if you want to build MAME on a Linux distribution that still uses a version of GNU libstdC++ that predates C++17 support. To use an alternate GCC installation to, build MAME, set the C and C++ compilers to the full paths to the gcc and g++ commands, and add the library path to the run-time search path. If you installed GCC in /opt/local/gcc72, you might use a command like this:

make OVERRIDE_CC=/opt/local/gcc72/bin/gcc OVERRIDE_CXX=/opt/local/gcc72/bin/g++ ARCHOPTS=-Wl,-R,/opt/local/gcc72/lib64

You can add these options to a prefix makefile if you plan to use this configuration regularly.

Configuring MAME

Getting Started: A Quick Preface

Once you have MAME installed, the next step is to configure it. There are several ways to do this, and each will be covered in turn.

If you are on Windows, the MAME executable will be called mame.exe.

If you are on Linux or MacOS, the MAME executable will be called mame.

Initial Setup: Creating mame.ini From Command Line on Windows

First, you will need to cd to the directory where you installed MAME into. If, for instance, you have MAME installed in C:\Users\Public\MAME you will need to type cd C:\Users\Public\MAME into the command prompt.

Then you have MAME create the config file by typing mame -createconfig. MAME will then create the mame.ini file in the MAME installation folder. This file contains the default configuration settings for a new MAME installation.

Initial Setup: Creating mame.ini From Command Line on Linux or MacOS

The steps for Linux and MacOS are similar to those of Windows. If you installed MAME using the package manager that came from a Linux distro, you will type mame -createconfig into your terminal of choice.

If you have compiled from source or downloaded a binary package of MAME, you will cd into the directory you put the MAME files into.

For instance, cd /home/myusername/mame

Then you will type ./mame -createconfig into your terminal of choice.

You can then need to edit the mame.ini file in your favorite text editor, e.g. Notepad on Windows or vi on Linux/MacOS, or you can change settings from inside of MAME.

Initial Setup: Graphical Setup

This is the easiest way to get started. Start MAME by opening the MAME icon in the location where you installed it. This will be mame.exe on Windows, mame on Linux and macOS.

Once MAME has started, you can either use your mouse to click on the Configure Options menu selection at the bottom center of your screen, or you can switch panes to the bottom one (default key is Tab), then press the menu accept button (default key is Return/Enter) to go into the Configuration menu.

Choose Save Configuration to create the mame.ini file with default settings. From here, you can either continue to configure things from the graphical user interface or edit the mame.ini file in your favorite text editor.

Using MAME

If you want to dive right in and skip the command line, there's a nice graphical way to use MAME without the need to download and set up a front end. Simply start MAME with no parameters, by double-clicking the mame.exe file or running it directly from the command line. If you're looking to harness the full power of MAME, keep reading further.

On macOS and *nix-based platforms, please be sure to set your font up to match your locale before starting, otherwise you may not be able to read the text due to missing glyphs.

If you are a new MAME user, you could find this emulator a bit complex at first. Let's take a moment to talk about software lists, as they can simplify matters quite a bit. If the content you are trying to play is a documented entry on one of the MAME software lists, starting the content is as easy as

For instance:

will load the USA version of Metroid for the Nintendo Entertainment System.

Alternatively, you could start MAME with

and choose the software list from the cartridge slot. From there, you could pick any software list-compatible software you have in your roms folders. Please note that many older dumps of cartridges and discs may either be bad or require renaming to match up to the software list in order to work in this way.

If you are loading an arcade board or other non-software list content, things are only a little more complicated:

The basic usage, from command line, is

where

Remember that if you type a <system> name which does not correspond to any emulated system, MAME will suggest some possible choices which are close to what you typed; and if you don't know which <media> switch are available, you can always launch

If you don't know what <options> are available, there are a few things you can do. First of all, you can check the command line options section of this manual. You can also try one of the many Front-ends available for MAME.

Alternatively, you should keep in mind the following command line options, which might be very useful on occasion:

gives a basic summary of command line options for MAME, as explained above.

gives you the (quite long) list of available command line options for MAME. The main options are described, in the Universal Command-line Options section of this manual.

gives you a (quite long) list of available configuration options for MAME. These options can always be modified at command line, or by editing them in mame.ini which is the main configuration file for MAME. You can find a description of some configuration options in the Universal Command-line Options section of the manual (in most cases, each configuration option has a corresponding command line option to configure and modify it).

creates a brand new mame.ini file, with default configuration settings. Notice that mame.ini is basically a plain text file, so you can open it with any text editor (e.g. Notepad, Emacs or TextEdit) and configure every option you need. However, no particular tweaks are needed to start, so you can leave most of the options unaltered.

If you execute mame -createconfig when you already have an existing mame.ini from a previous MAME version, MAME automatically updates the pre-existing mame.ini by copying changed options into it.

Once you are more confident with MAME options, you may want to adjust the configuration of your setup a bit more. In this case, keep in mind the order in which options are read; see Order of Config Loading for details.

MAME’s User Interface

Introduction

MAME provides a simple user interface for selecting the system and software to run and changing settings while running an emulated system. MAME’s user interface is designed to be usable with a keyboard, game controller, or pointing device, but will require a keyboard for initial configuration.

The default settings for the most important controls to know when running an emulated system, and the settings they correspond to in case you want to change them, are as follows:

Navigating menus

By default, MAME menus can be navigated using the keyboard cursor keys. All the UI controls can be changed by going to the General Inputs menu and then selecting User Interface. The default keyboard controls on a US ANSI QWERTY layout keyboard, and the settings they correspond to, are as follows:

Using a game controller

MAME supports navigating menus with a game controller or joystick, but only the most important UI controls have joystick assignments by default:

For gamepad-style controllers, the left analog thumb stick and directional pad usually control UI navigation. Depending on the controller, the right analog thumb stick, triggers and additional buttons may automatically be assigned to UI inputs. Check the User Interface input assignments menu to see how controls are assigned.

If you want to be able to use MAME with a game controller without needing a keyboard, you’ll need to assign joystick buttons (or combinations of buttons) to these controls as well:

If you’re not using an external front-end to launch systems in MAME, you should assign joystick buttons (or combinations of buttons) to these controls to make full use of the system and software selection menus:

Using a mouse or trackball

MAME supports navigating menus using a mouse or trackball that works as a system pointing device:

If you have enough additional mouse buttons, you may want to assign button combinations to the Show/Hide Menu, Pause, UI Back and/or UI Cancel inputs to make it possible to use MAME without a keyboard.

Using a touch screen

MAME has basic support for navigating menus using a touch screen:

Note that for SDL-based MAME, the enable_touch option must be switched on to use touch screen support.

Configuring inputs

MAME needs a flexible input system to support the control schemes of the vast array of systems it emulates. In MAME, inputs that only have two distinct states, on and off or active and inactive, are called digital inputs, and all other inputs are called analog inputs, even if this is not strictly true (for example multi-position switches are called analog inputs in MAME).

To assign MAME’s user interface controls or the default inputs for all systems, select Input Settings from the main menu during emulation and then select Input Assignments (general) from the Input Settings menu, or select General Settings from the system selection menu and then select Input Assignments from the General Settings menu. From there, select a category.

To assign inputs for the currently running system, select Input Settings from the main menu during emulation and then select Input Assignments (this system) from the Input Settings menu. Inputs are grouped by device and sorted by type. You can move between devices with the next group and previous group keys/buttons (opening/closing brackets [ and ] on the keyboard by default).

The input assignment menus show the name of the emulated input or user interface control on the left, and the controls (or combination of controls) assigned to it on the right.

To adjust the sensitivity, auto-centre speed and inversion settings, or to see how emulated analog controls react to your inputs, select Input Settings from the main menu during emulation, and then select Analog Input Adjustments from the Input Settings Menu (this item only appears on the Input Settings menu for systems with analog controls).

Digital input settings

Each emulated digital input has a single assignment setting. For flexibility, MAME can combine controls (keys, buttons and joystick axes) using logical and, not and or operations. This is best illustrated with some examples:

(In technical terms, MAME uses Boolean sum of products logic to combine inputs.)

When a digital input setting is highlighted, the prompt below the menu shows whether selecting it will replace the current assignment or append an or operation to it. Press UI Left/Right before selecting the setting to switch between replacing the assignment or appending an or operation to it. Press UI Clear (Delete or Forward Delete by default) to clear the highlighted setting, or restore the default assignment if it is currently cleared.

When you select a digital input setting, MAME will wait for you to enter an input or a combination of inputs for a logical and operation:

Here’s how to produce some example settings:

Analog input settings

Each emulated analog input has three assignment settings:

The increment and decrement settings are most useful for controlling an emulated analog input using digital controls (for example keyboard keys, joystick buttons, or a directional pad). They are configured in the same way as emulated digital inputs (see above). It’s important that you don’t assign the same control to the axis setting as well as the increment and/or decrement settings for the same emulated input at the same time. For example if you assign Ridge Racer’s Steering Wheel Analog setting to the X axis of the left analog stick on your controller, you should not assign either the Steering Wheel Analog Inc or Steering Wheel Analog Dec setting to the X axis of the same analog stick.

You can assign one or more analog axes to the axis setting for an emulated analog input. When multiple axes are assigned to an axis setting, they will be added together, but absolute position controls will override relative position controls. For example suppose for Arkanoid you assign the Dial Analog axis setting to Mouse X or Joy 1 LSX or Joy 1 RSX on a mouse and Xbox-style controller. You will be able to control the paddle with the mouse or either analog stick, but the mouse will only take effect if both analog sticks are in the neutral position (centred) on the X axis. If either analog stick is not centred on the X axis, the mouse will have no effect, because a mouse is a relative position control while joysticks are absolute position controls.

For absolute position controls like joysticks and pedals, MAME allows you to assign either the full range of an axis or the range on one side of the neutral position (a half axis) to an axis setting. Assigning a half axis is usually used for pedals or other absolute inputs where the neutral position is at one end of the input range. For example suppose for Ridge Racer you assign the Brake Pedal Analog setting to the portion of a vertical joystick axis below the neutral position. If the joystick is at or above the neutral position vertically, the brake pedal will be released; if the joystick is below the neutral position vertically, the brake pedal will be applied proportionally. Half axes are displayed as the name of the axis followed by a plus or minus sign (+ or -). Plus refers to the portion of the axis below or to the right of the neutral position; minus refers to the portion of the axis above or to the left of the neutral position. For pedal or analog trigger controls, the active range is treated as being above the neutral position (the half axis indicated by a minus sign).

When keys or buttons are assigned to an axis setting, they conditionally enable analog controls assigned to the setting. This can be used in conjunction with an absolute position control to create a “sticky” control.

Here are some examples of some possible axis setting assignments, assuming an Xbox-style controller and a mouse are used:

When you select an axis setting, MAME will wait for you to enter an input:

To adjust sensitivity, auto-centring speed and inversion settings for emulated analog inputs, or to see how they respond to controls with your settings, select Input Settings from the main menu during emulation, and then select Analog Input Adjustments from the Input Settings Menu. Settings for emulated analog inputs are grouped by device and sorted by type. You can move between devices with the next group and previous group keys/buttons (opening/closing brackets [ and ] on the keyboard by default). The state of the emulated analog inputs is shown below the menu, and reacts in real time. Press the On Screen Display key or button (the backtick/tilde key by default on a US ANSI QWERTY keyboard) to hide the menu to make it easier to test without changing settings. Press the same key or button to show the menu again.

Each emulated input has four settings on the Analog Controls menu:

Use the UI left/right keys or buttons to adjust the highlighted setting. Selecting a setting or pressing the UI clear key/button (Forward Delete by default) restores its default value.

The units for the increment/decrement speed, auto-centering speed and sensitivity settings are tied to the driver/device implementation. The increment/decrement speed and auto-centering speed settings are also tied to the frame rate of the first emulated screen in the system. The response to controls assigned to the increment/decrement settings will change if the system changes the frame rate of this screen.

The system and software selection menus

If you start MAME without specifying a system on the command line, the system selection menu will be shown (assuming the ui option is set to cabinet). The system selection menu is also shown if you select Select New System from the main menu during emulation. Selecting a system that uses software lists shows the similar software selection menu.

The system and software selection menus have the following parts:

You can type to search the displayed list of systems or software. Systems are searched by full name, manufacturer and full name, and short name. If you are using localised system names, phonetic names will also be searched if present. Software items are searched by description, alternate titles (alt_title info elements in the software lists), and short name. UI Cancel (Escape by default) will clear the search if currently searching.

Navigation controls

In addition to the usual menu navigation controls, the system and software selection menus have additional configurable controls for navigating the multi-pane layout, and providing alternatives to toolbar buttons if you don’t want to use a pointing device. The default additional controls (with a US ANSI QWERTY keyboard), and the settings they correspond to, are:

When focus is on the filter list, you can use the menu navigation controls (up, down, home and end) to highlight a filter, and UI Select (Return/Enter by default) apply it.

When focus is on any area besides the info/image tabs, you can change the image or info source with left/right. When focus is on the info/image tabs, left/right switch between tabs. When focus is on the image/info tabs or source, you can scroll the info using up, down, page up, page down, home and end.

You can move focus to an area by clicking on it with the middle mouse button.

The simple system selection menu

If you start MAME without specifying a system on the command line (or choose Select New System from the main menu during emulation) with the ui option set to simple, the simple system selection menu will be shown. The simple system selection menu shows fifteen randomly selected systems that have ROM sets present in your configured ROM folder(s). You can type to search for a system. Clearing the search causes fifteen systems to be randomly selected again.

The info panel below the menu shows summary information about the highlighted system. The background colour changes depending on the emulation status: green for working, amber for imperfectly emulated features or known issues, or red for more serious issues.

Default Keyboard Controls

Controls Foreword

MAME supports a vast array of different types of machines, with a significantly different array of inputs across them. This means that some keyboard keys, mouse buttons, and joystick buttons will be used for multiple functions. As a result, the control charts below are separated by machine-types to make it easier to find what you’re looking for.

All of the controls below are fully configurable in the user interface. These charts show the default configuration.

Note that the defaults shown here are arranged by US ANSI key positioning. If you are using a different layout, the keys will vary.

MAME User Interface Controls

The controls here cover MAME functions such as MAME’s menus, machine pause, and saving/loading save states.

System and software selection menus

The system and software selection menus use additional controls

Default Arcade Machine Controls

This section covers controls that are applicable to most kinds of arcade machines. Note that not all machines will have all of these controls. All the controls below are fully configurable in the user interface. This list shows the standard keyboard configuration.

Default Arcade Game Controls

This section covers controls for arcade games using common joystick/button control schemes. All the controls below are fully configurable in the user interface. This list shows the standard keyboard configuration.

Player 1 Controls

Player 2 Controls

Player 3 Controls

Player 4 Controls

Default Mahjong and Hanafuda Keys

Most mahjong and hanafuda games use a standard control panel layout. Some keys may not be present, depending on the kind of game. For example games without a bonus game feature may lack the Take Score, Double Up, Big and Small keys, and games without gambling features may also lack the Bet key. Some games may not use all keys that are present. For example many games do not use the Flip Flop and Last Chance keys. [image: Standard mahjong control panel layout] [image]

Due to the large number of keys, MAME only provides default input configuration for a single set of player controls. For multi-player mahjong/hanafuda games, or mahjong/hanafuda games with multiple player positions, manual configuration is required. All the keys below are fully configurable in the user interface. This list shows the standard keyboard configuration.

Default Gambling Keys

All the keys below are fully configurable in the user interface. This list shows the standard keyboard configuration.

Note that many gambling games use buttons for multiple functions. For example a slots game may use the Start button to stop all reels, lacking a dedicated Stop All Reels button, or a poker game may use the hold buttons to control the double-up bonus game, lacking dedicated Take Score, Double Up, High and Low buttons.

Default Blackjack Keys

All the keys below are fully configurable in the user interface. This list shows the standard keyboard configuration.

Default Poker Keys

All the keys below are fully configurable in the user interface. This list shows the standard keyboard configuration.

Default Slots Keys

All the keys below are fully configurable in the user interface. This list shows the standard keyboard configuration.

Default Computer Keys

All the keys below are fully configurable in the user interface. This list shows the standard keyboard configuration.

Note that controls can vary widely by computer type, so not all keys are shown here. See the Input Assignments (this system) section of MAME’s Input Settings menu for details for the machine you are currently using.

Other Machines

All the keys are fully configurable in the user interface.

Note that controls can vary widely by machine type, so default keys are not shown here and defaults will vary considerably based on the manufacturer and style. See the Input Assignments (this system) section of MAME’s Input Settings menu for details for the machine you are currently using.

MAME Menus

Introduction

To show the main menu while running an emulated system in MAME, press the Show/Hide Menu key or button (Tab by default). If the emulated system has keyboard inputs, you may need to press the Toggle UI Controls key or button (Scroll Lock, or Forward Delete on macOS, by default) to enable user interface controls first. You can dismiss a menu by pressing the UI Back key or button (Escape by default). Dismissing a menu will return to its parent menu, or to the running system in the case of the main menu.

You can hide a menu and return to the running system by pressing the Show/Hide Menu key or button. Pressing the Show/Hide Menu key or button again will jump back to the same menu. This is useful when testing changes to settings.

Emulated system inputs are ignored while menus are displayed. You can still pause or resume the running system while most menus are displayed by pressing the Pause key or button (F5 on the keyboard by default).

If you start MAME without specifying a system on the command line, the system selection menu will be shown (assuming the ui option is set to cabinet). The system selection menu is also shown if you select Select New System from the main menu during emulation.

For more information on navigating menus, see the relevant section.

Main menu

The main menu is shown when you press the Show/Hide Menu key or button while running an emulated system or while the system information screen is displayed. It provides access to menus used to change settings, control various features, and show information about the running system and MAME itself.

If you press the Show/Hide Menu key or button to show the main menu while the system information screen is displayed, the emulated system will not start until the main menu is dismissed (either by selecting Start System, pressing the UI Back key or button, or pressing the Show/Hide Menu key or button). This can be useful for mounting media images or changing DIP switches and machine configuration settings before the emulated system starts.

Input Settings menu

The Input Settings provides options for assigning controls to emulated inputs, adjusting analog control settings, controlling toggle inputs, and testing input devices. You can reach the Input Settings menu by selecting Input Settings from the main menu. The items shown on this menu depend on available emulated inputs for the running system. Available emulated inputs may depend on slot options, machine configuration settings and DIP switch settings.

Toggle Inputs menu

The Toggle Inputs menu shows the current state of multi-position or toggle inputs. Common examples include mechanically locking Caps Lock keys on computers, and two-position gear shit levers on driving games. You can reach the Toggle Inputs menu by selecting Toggle Inputs from the Input Settings menu. Note that available emulated inputs may depend on slot options, machine configuration settings and DIP switch settings.

Inputs are grouped by the emulated device they belong to. You can move between devices using the Next Group and Previous Group keys or buttons. Names of inputs are shown on the left, and the current settings are shown on the right.

To change the state of an input, highlight it and use the UI Left and UI Right keys or buttons, or click the arrows beside the current setting.

Keyboard Selection menu

The Keyboard Selection menu lets your switch between emulated and natural keyboard modes, and enable or disable keyboard inputs for individual emulated devices. You can reach the Keyboard Selection menu by selecting Keyboard Selection from the Input Settings menu.

In emulated keyboard mode, keyboard and keypad inputs behave like any other digital inputs, responding to their assigned controls. In natural keyboard mode, MAME attempts to translate typed characters to emulated keystrokes. The initial keyboard mode is set using the natural option.

There are a number of unavoidable limitations in natural keyboard mode:

Each emulated device in the system that has keyboard and/or keypad inputs is listed on the menu, allowing keyboard/keypad inputs to be enabled or disabled for individual devices. By default, keyboard/keypad inputs are enabled for the first device with keyboard inputs (if any), and for all other devices that have keypad inputs but no keyboard inputs. The enabled keyboard/keypad inputs are automatically saved to the configuration file for the system when the emulation session ends.

Input Devices menu

The Input Devices menu lists input devices recognised by MAME and enabled with your current settings. Recognised input devices depend on the keyboardprovider, mouseprovider, lightgunprovider and joystickprovider options. Classes of input devices can be enabled or disabled using the mouse, lightgun and joystick options. You can reach the Input Devices menu by selecting Input Devices from the Input Settings menu or the General Settings menu.

Input devices are grouped by device class (for example keyboards or light guns). You can move between device classes using the Next Group and Previous Group keys or buttons. For each device, the device number (within its class) is shown on the left, and the name is shown on the right.

Select a device to show the supported controls for the device. The name of each control is displayed on the left and its current state is shown on the right. When an analog axis control is highlighted, its state is also shown in graphical form below the menu. Digital control states are either zero (inactive) or one (active). Analog axis input states range from -65,536 to 65,536 with the neutral position at zero. You can also select Copy Device ID to copy the device’s ID to the clipboard. This is useful for setting up stable controller IDs in controller configuration files.

How does MAME look for files?

Introduction

Unlike typical desktop applications where you browse your disk and select a file to open or a location to save to, MAME has settings to tell it where to look for the files it needs. You can change these settings by starting MAME without specifying a system, selecting Configure Options from the system selection menu, and then selecting Configure Directories (remember to select Save Configuration if you want to keep your changes). You can also change settings by editing your mame.ini and ui.ini files directly, or specify settings on the command line. For information on available options for controlling where MAME searches for files, see Core Search Path Options.

Terminology

It’s necessary to understand some MAME-specific terminology used in the explanations here:

Search path options

Most options for specifying locations to search allow multiple directories to be specified, separated by semicolon (;) characters. Environment variables are expanded, using CMD shell syntax on Windows, or Bourne shell syntax on UNIX-like systems.

Relative paths are interpreted relative to the current working directory at the time of use. If you start MAME by double-clicking it in Windows Explorer, the working directory is set to the folder containing the MAME executable. If you start MAME by double-clicking it in the macOS Finder or from most Linux desktop environments, the working directory will be set to your home directory.

Archive files

MAME can load files from PKZIP and 7-Zip archives (these must have .zip and .7z file name extensions, respectively). A number of extensions to the PKZIP format are supported, including Zip64 for large archives, NTFS timestamps, and LZMA compression. Only ASCII or UTF-8 filenames are supported in PKZIP archives (7-Zip archives always use UTF-16 filenames).

MAME does not load files from nested archives. MAME will not load files stored in a PKZIP or 7-Zip archive which is itself contained within a PKZIP or 7-Zip archive. Multi-segment archives and encrypted archives are not supported. The legacy “implode” compression method in PKZIP archives is not supported.

MAME may perform poorly with archives containing large numbers of files. Files compressed using the LZMA compression algorithm are inherently more CPU-intensive to decompress than files compressed using simpler algorithms. MAME does not take the archive layout into consideration when loading files from archives, so using “solid compression” often results in MAME decompressing the same data repeatedly when loading media.

How does MAME search for media?

Use the rompath option sets the folders where searches for ROM dumps, disk images, and other media. By default MAME looks for media in a folder called roms in the working directory. For the purpose of this discussion, floppy disk, cassette, paper tape and other media images that are not stored in CHD format are treated as ROM dumps.

When searching for system, device and software ROM dumps, MAME treats folders and archives inside the folders configured in you rompath setting as equivalent, but remember the limitation that MAME cannot load files from an archive contained within another archive. MAME looks for a folder first, then a PKZIP archive, and finally a 7-Zip archive. When searching for a ROM dump in an archive, MAME first looks for a file with the expected name and CRC. If no matching file is found, MAME looks for a file with the expected CRC ignoring the name. If no matching file is found, MAME finally looks for a file with the expected name, ignoring the CRC.

While MAME can load disk images in CHD format from inside archives, this is not recommended. CHD files contain compressed data stored in a format allowing random access. If a CHD format disk image is stored in a PKZIP or 7-Zip archive, MAME needs to load the entire file into memory in order to use it. For hard disk or LaserDisc images in particular, this will likely use an excessive amount of swap file space, hurting performance and possibly reducing the life expectancy of your disks or SSDs. It’s best to keep CHD format disk images in folders.

System ROMs

For each folder configured in your rompath setting, MAME looks for system ROMs in the following locations:

Using Shiritsu Justice Gakuen as an example, MAME will search for system ROMs as follows:

Device ROMs

For each folder configured in your rompath setting, MAME looks for device ROMs in the following locations:

Using a Unitron 1024 Macintosh clone with a French Macintosh Plus keyboard with integrated numeric keypad attached as an example, MAME will look for the keyboard microcontroller ROM as follows:

Software Item ROMs

For each folder configured in your rompath setting, MAME looks for software item ROMs in the following locations:

If you load the German version of Dune II from the Mega Drive/Genesis cartridge software list in the PAL Mega Drive console, MAME will look for the cartridge ROM as follows:

CHD format disk images

MAME searches for system, device and software item CHD format disk images in almost the same way it searches for ROMs, with just a few differences:

To save space, MAME allows delta CHD files to be used for clone systems, devices with parent ROM devices and clone software items. The delta CHD file must use a CHD format disk image from the parent system, parent ROM device or parent software item as its parent CHD file. The space saved depends on how much content can be reused from the parent CHD file. MAME searches the same locations for parent CHD files that it would search for the disk image itself.

Loose software

Many systems support loading media from a file by supplying the path on the command line for one of the media options. Relative paths are interpreted relative to the current working directory.

You can specify a path to a file inside a PKZIP or 7-Zip archive similarly to specifying a path to a file in a folder (keep in mind that you can have at most a single archive file in a path, as MAME does not support loading files from archives contained within other archives). If you specify a path to a PKZIP or 7-Zip archive, MAME will use the first file found in the archive (this depends on the order that files are stored in the archive – it’s most useful for archives containing a single file).

Start the Nintendo Entertainment System/Famicom system with the file amazon_diet_EN.nes mounted in the cartridge slot:

mame nes -cart amazon_diet_EN.nes

Start the Osborne-1 system with the first file in the archive os1xutls.zip mounted in the first floppy disk drive:

mame osborne1 -flop1 os1xutils.zip

Start the Macintosh Plus system with the file system tools.img in the archive sys603.zip mounted in the first floppy disk drive:

mame macplus -flop1 "sys603.zip/system tools.img"

Diagnosing missing media

When starting a system from MAME’s system selection menu or software selection menu, MAME will list any missing system or device ROM dumps or disk images, as long as at least one ROM dump or disk image for the system is present. For clone systems, at least one ROM dump or disk image unique to the clone must be present for MAME to list missing ROM dumps and disk images.

If all system and device ROM dump and disk images are present and the system is being started with a software item, MAME will check that ROM dumps and disk images for the software item are present. If at least one ROM dump or disk image for the software item is present, MAME will list any missing ROM dumps or disk images.

For example if you try to start the Macintosh Plus system and the keyboard microcontroller ROM dump is missing, MAME displays the following error message:

The name of the missing ROM dump is shown (341-0332-a.bin), as well as the short name of the device it belongs to (mackbd_m0110a). When a missing ROM dump or disk image is not specific to the selected system, the short name of the system or device it belongs to is shown.

If you start a system in MAME from a command prompt, MAME will show where it searched for any ROM dumps or disk images that were not found.

Using the example of a Unitron 1024 Macintosh clone with a French keyboard connected, MAME will show the following error messages if no ROMs are present:

mame utrn1024 -kbd frp
342-0341-a.u6d NOT FOUND (tried in utrn1024 macplus)
342-0342-a.u8d NOT FOUND (tried in utrn1024 macplus)
341-0332-a.bin NOT FOUND (tried in mackbd_m0110a_f mackbd_m0110a utrn1024 macplus)

MAME used the system short name utrn1024 and the parent system short name macplus when searching for system ROMs. When searching for the keyboard microcontroller ROM, MAME used the device short name mackbd_m0110a_f, the parent ROM device short name mackbd_m0110a, the system short name utrn1024, and the parent system short name macplus.

Software parts that use the ROM loader (typically cartridge media) show similar messages when ROM dumps are not found. Using the example of the German version of Dune II on a PAL Mega Drive, MAME will show the following error messages if no ROMs are present:

mame megadriv dune2g
mpr-16838-f.u1 NOT FOUND (tried in megadriv\dune2g megadriv\dune2 dune2g dune2 megadriv genesis)
Fatal error: Required files are missing, the machine cannot be run.

MAME searched for the cartridge ROM using:

Software parts that use the image file loader (including floppy disk and cassette media) only check for media after ROM images are loaded, and missing media files are shown differently. Using the example of Macintosh System 6.0.3, MAME will show these error messages if the software is missing:

mame macplus -flop1 sys603:flop1
:fdc:0:35dd: error opening image file system tools.img: No such file or directory (generic:2) (tried in mac_flop\sys603 sys603 macplus)
Fatal error: Device Apple/Sony 3.5 DD (400/800K GCR) load (-floppydisk1 sys603:flop1) failed: No such file or directory

The error messages show where MAME searched for the image file in the same format. In this case, it used the software list short name mac_flop and the software short name sys603, the software short name sys603 only, and the locations that would be searched for system ROMs.

Front-ends

A number of third party tools for MAME to make system and software selection simpler are available. These tools are called “front-ends”, and there are far too many to list exhaustively here. Some are free, some are commercial – caveat emptor. Some older front-ends predate the merging of MAME and MESS and do not support the additional console, hand-held, and computer functionality inherited from MESS.

This following list is not an endorsement of any of these front-ends by the MAME team. It simply shows a number of commonly used free front-ends to provide a starting point.

The MAME team will not provide support for issues with front-ends. For support, we suggest contacting the front-end author or asking on one of the popular MAME-friendly forums on the Internet.

About ROMs and Sets

Handling and updating of ROMs and Sets used in MAME is probably the biggest area of confusion and frustration that MAME users will run into. This section aims to clear up a lot of the most common questions and cover simple details you'll need to know to use MAME effectively.

Let's start with a simple definition of what a ROM is.

What is a ROM image?

For arcade games, a ROM image or file is a copy of all of the data inside a given chip on the arcade motherboard. For most consoles and handhelds, the individual chips are frequently (but not always) merged into a single file. As arcade machines are much more complicated in their design, you'll typically need the data from a number of different chips on the board. Grouping all of the files from Puckman together will get you a ROM set of Puckman.

An example ROM image would be the file pm1_prg1.6e stored in the Puckman ROM set.

Why ROM and not some other name?

ROM stands for Read-Only Memory. The chips used to store the game data were not rewritable and were permanent (as long as the chip wasn't damaged or aged to death!)

As such, a copy of the data necessary to reconstitute and replace a dead data chip on a board became known as a "ROM image" or ROMs for short.

Parents, Clones, Splitting, and Merging

As the MAME developers received their third or fourth revision of Pac-Man, with bugfixes and other code changes, they quickly discovered that nearly all of the board and chips were identical to the previously dumped version. In order to save space, MAME was adjusted to use a parent/clone set system.

A given set, usually (but not necessarily) the most recent bugfixed World revision of a game, will be designated as the parent. All sets that use mostly the same chips (e.g. Japanese Puckman and USA/World Pac-Man) will be clones that contain only the changed data compared to the parent set.

This typically comes up as an error message to the user when trying to run a Clone set without having the Parent set handy. Using the above example, trying to play the USA version of Pac-Man without having the PUCKMAN.ZIP parent set will result in an error message that there are missing files.

Now we add the final pieces of the puzzle: non-merged, split, and merged sets.

MAME is extremely versatile about where ROM data is located and is quite intelligent about looking for what it needs. This allows us to do some magic with how we store these ROM sets to save further space.

A non-merged set is one that contains absolutely everything necessary for a given game to run in one ZIP file. This is ordinarily very space-inefficient, but is a good way to go if you want to have very few sets and want everything self-contained and easy to work with. We do not recommend this for most users.

A split set is one where the parent set contains all of the normal data it should, and the clone sets contain only what has changed as compared to the parent set. This saves some space, but isn't quite as efficient as

A merged set takes the parent set and one or more clone sets and puts them all inside the parent set's storage. For instance, if we combine the Puckman sets, Midway Pac-Man (USA) sets, and various other related official and bootleg sets all into PUCKMAN.ZIP, the result would be a merged set. A complete merged set with the parent and all clones uses less disk space than a split set.

With those basic principles, there are two other kinds of set that will come up in MAME use from time to time.

First, the BIOS set: Some arcade machines shared a common hardware platform, such as the Neo-Geo arcade hardware. As the main board had data necessary to start up and self-test the hardware before passing it off to the game cartridge, it's not really appropriate to store that data as part of the game ROM sets. Instead, it is stored as a BIOS image for the system itself (e.g. NEOGEO.ZIP for Neo-Geo games)

Secondly, the device set. Frequently the arcade manufacturers would reuse pieces of their designs multiple times in order to save on costs and time. Some of these smaller circuits would reappear in later boards that had minimal common ground with the previous boards that used the circuit, so you couldn't just have them share the circuit/ROM data through a normal parent/clone relationship. Instead, these re-used designs and ROM data are categorized as a Device, with the data stored as a Device set. For instance, Namco used the Namco 51xx custom I/O chip to handle the joystick and DIP switches for Galaga and other games, and as such you'll also need the NAMCO51.ZIP device set as well as any needed for the game.

Troubleshooting your ROM sets and the history of ROMs

A lot of the frustration users feel towards MAME can be directly tied to what may feel like pointless ROM changes that seem to only serve to make life more difficult for end-users. Understanding the source of these changes and why they are necessary will help you to avoid being blindsided by change and to know what you need to do to keep your sets running.

A large chunk of arcade ROMs and sets existed before emulation did. These early sets were created by arcade owners and used to repair broken boards by replacing damaged chips. Unfortunately, these sets eventually proved to be missing critical information. Many of the early dumps missed a new type of chip that contained, for instance, color palette information for the screen. The earliest emulators approximated colors until the authors discovered the existence of these missing chips. This resulted in a need to go back and get the missing data and update the sets to add the new dumps as needed.

It wouldn't be much longer before it would be discovered that many of the existing sets had bad data for one or more chips. These, too, would need to be re-dumped, and many sets would need complete overhauls.

Occasionally games would be discovered to be completely wrongly documented. Some games thought to be legitimate ended up being bootleg copies from pirate manufacturers. Some games thought to be bootlegs ended up being legit. Some games were completely mistaken as to which region the board was actually from (e.g. World as compared to Japan) and this too would require adjustments and renaming.

Even now, occasional miracle finds occur that change our understanding of these games. As accurate documentation is critical to detailing the history of the arcades, MAME will change sets as needed to keep things as accurate as possible within what the team knows at the time of each release.

This results in very spotty compatibility for ROM sets designated for older versions of MAME. Some games may not have changed much within 20-30 revisions of MAME, and others may have drastically changed multiple times.

If you hit problems with a set not working, there are several things to check-- are you trying to run a set meant for an older version of MAME? Do you have any necessary BIOS or Device ROMs? Is this a Clone set that would need to have the Parent as well? MAME will tell you what files are missing as well as where it looked for these files. Use that to determine which set(s) may be missing files.

ROMs and CHDs

ROM chip data tends to be relatively small and are loaded into system memory in their entirety. Some games also used additional storage media such as hard disks, CD-ROMs, DVDs, and LaserDiscs. Those storage media are, for multiple technical reasons, not well-suited to being stored the same way as ROM data and won’t fully fit in memory in some cases.

Thus, a new format was created for these in the CHD file. Compressed Hunks of Data files, or CHD files for short, are designed very specifically around the needs of mass storage media. Some arcade games, consoles, and PCs will require one or more CHD files to run. As CHD files are already compressed, they should not be stored PKZIP or 7-Zip archives as ROM images would be.

To save space when multiple variants of a system or software item are present, MAME supports delta CHD files. A delta CHD file only stores the parts of the data that differ from its parent CHD file. This allows large space savings when different variants share a lot of data. Delta CHD files can only be used for clone systems, devices with a parent ROM device, and clone software items. A delta CHD file must use a (non-delta) CHD file from the parent system, parent ROM device or parent software item as its parent CHD file. The parent CHD file must be present to use a delta CHD file, or MAME will not be able to read the shared data from it.

Common Issues and Questions (FAQ)

Disclaimer: The following information is not legal advice and was not written by a lawyer.

Why does my game show an error screen if I insert coins rapidly?

This is not a bug in MAME. On original arcade hardware, you simply could not insert coins as fast as you can mash the button. The only ways you could feed credits at that kind of pace was if the coin mech hardware was defective or if you were physically trying to cheat the coin mech.

In either case, the game would display an error for the operator to look into the situation to prevent cheating them out of their hard-earned cash. Keep a slow, coin-insert-ish pace and you won’t trigger this.

Why is my non-official MAME package (e.g. EmuCR build) broken? Why is my official update broken?

Many MAME features, such as software lists, HLSL or BGFX shaders, Lua plugins and UI translations, use external files. Updates to these features often require the external files to be updated along with MAME. Unfortunately, builds provided by third parties may only include the main MAME executable, or may include outdated external files. Using an updated MAME executable with outdated external files causes issues with features reliant on the external files. Despite repeated requests that they distribute MAME complete with matching external files, some of these third parties persist in distributing incomplete or broken MAME updates.

As we have no control over how third parties distribute MAME, all we really can do is recommend against obtaining MAME from sites like EmuCR. We cannot provide any support for packages we didn’t build ourselves. You can completely avoid these issues by compiling MAME yourself, or using an official package we provide.

You may also encounter this problem if you do not update the contents of the hlsl, bgfx or plugins folders when updating your MAME installation with a new official build.

Why does MAME support console games and dumb terminals? Wouldn't it be faster if MAME had just the arcade games? Wouldn't it take less RAM? Wouldn't MAME be faster if you just X?

This is a common misconception. The actual size of the MAME file doesn't affect the speed of it; only the parts that are actively being used are in memory at any given time.

In truth, the additional supported devices are a good thing for MAME as they allow us to stress test sections of the various CPU cores and other parts of the emulation that don't normally see heavy utilization. While a computer and an arcade machine may use the exact same CPU, how they use that CPU can differ pretty dramatically.

No part of MAME is a second-class citizen to any other part. Video poker machines are just as important to document and preserve as arcade games.

There's still room for improvements in MAME's speed, but chances are that if you're not already a skilled programmer any ideas you have will have already been covered. Don't let that discourage you-- MAME is open source, and improvements are always welcome.

Why do my Neo Geo ROMs no longer work? How do I get the Humble Bundle Neo Geo sets working?

Recently the Neo Geo BIOS was updated to add a new version of the Universe BIOS. This was done between 0.171 and 0.172, and results in an error trying to load Neo Geo games with an un-updated neogeo.zip set.

This also affects the Humble Bundle set: the games themselves are correct and up to date as of MAME 0.173 (and most likely will remain so) though you'll have to pull the ROM set .ZIP files out of the package somehow yourself. However, the Neo Geo BIOS set (neogeo.zip) included in the Humble Bundle set is incomplete as of the 0.172 release of MAME.

We suggest you contact the provider of your sets (Humble Bundle and DotEmu) and ask them to update their content to the newest revision. If enough people ask nicely, maybe they'll update the package.

How can I use the Sega Genesis & Mega Drive Classics collection from Steam with MAME?

As of the April 2016 update to the program, the ROM images included in the set are now 100% compatible with MAME and other Genesis/Mega Drive emulators. The ROMs are contained in the steamapps\Sega Classics\uncompressed ROMs folder as a series of .68K and .SGD images that can be loaded directly into MAME. PDF manuals for the games can be found in steamapps\Sega Classics\manuals as well.

Why does MAME report "missing files" even if I have the ROMs?

There can be several reasons for this:

How can I be sure I have the right ROMs?

MAME checks to be sure you have the right ROMs before emulation begins. If you see any error messages, your ROMs are not those tested to work properly with MAME. You will need to obtain a correct set of ROMs through legal methods.

If you have several games and you wish to verify that they are compatible with the current version of MAME, you can use the -verifyroms parameter. For example:

mame -verifyroms robby ...checks your ROMs for the game Robby Roto and displays the results on the screen.

mame -verifyroms * >verify.txt ...checks the validity of ALL the ROMs in your ROMS directory, and writes the results to a textfile called verify.txt.

Why is it that some games have the US version as the main set, some have Japanese, and some are the World?

Parent and clone sets are a convenience feature to help keep different versions of the same system or software together. The decision on which set to make the parent will always be somewhat arbitrary, but we do have some guidelines:

It’s not always possible to choose a set that’s preferred according to all criteria.

As an example, the World release of Ghouls’n Ghosts (ghouls) is the parent of the US release (ghoulsu) and the Japanese original Daimakaimura, as it is the most widespread English-language release, and has the story and cutscenes intact.

Another example is Midway Pac-Man (pacman), which is a clone of Namco Puck Man (puckman), because Pac-Man is a licensed version for the US market, while Puck Man was released by Namco themselves.

How do I legally obtain ROMs or disk images to run on MAME?

You have several options:

Beyond these options, you are on your own.

Isn't copying ROMs a legal gray area?

No, it’s not. You are not permitted to make copies of software without the copyright owner’s permission. This is a black and white issue.

Can't game ROMs be considered abandonware?

No. Even the companies that went under had their assets purchased by somebody, and that person is the copyright owner.

I had ROMs that worked with an old version of MAME and now they don't. What happened?

As time passes, MAME is perfecting the emulation of older games, even when the results aren't immediately obvious to the user. Often times the better emulation requires more data from the original game to operate. Sometimes the data was overlooked, sometimes it simply wasn't feasible to get at it (for instance, chip "decapping" is a technique that only became affordable very recently for people not working in high-end laboratories). In other cases it's much simpler: more sets of a game were dumped and it was decided to change which sets were which version.

What about those arcade cabinets on eBay that come with all the ROMs?

If the seller does not have a proper license to include the ROMs with their system, they are not legally permitted to include any ROMs with the system. If they have purchased a license to the ROMs in your name from a distributor or vendor with legitimate licenses, then they may include the ROMs with the cabinet. After signing an agreement, cabinet owners that include legitimate licensed ROMs may be permitted to include a version of MAME that runs those ROMs and nothing more.

What about those guys who burn DVDs of ROMs for the price of the media?

What they are doing is just as unlawful as selling the ROMs outright. As long as somebody holds the copyright, making unauthorised copies is unlawful. If someone went on the internet and started a business of selling cheap copies of U2 albums for the price of media, do you think they would get away with it?

Even worse, a lot of these people like to claim that they are helping the project. In reality, they only create more problems for the MAME team. We are not associated with these people in any way, regardless of how “official” they may attempt to appear. By buying from them, you only help criminals profit from selling software they have no right to sell. Anyone using the MAME name and/or logo to sell such products is also in violation of the MAME trademark.

But isn't there a special DMCA exemption that makes ROM copying legal?

No, you have misread the exemptions. The exemption allows people to reverse-engineer the copy protection or encryption in computer programs that are obsolete. The exemption simply means that figuring out how these obsolete programs worked is not illegal according to the DMCA. It does not have any effect on the legality of making unauthorised copies of computer programs, which is what you are doing if you make copies of ROMs.

But isn't it OK to download and "try" ROMs for 24 hours?

This is an urban legend that was made up by people who made ROMs available for download from their web sites, in order to justify the fact that they were breaking the law. There is no provision like this in any copyright law.

If I buy a cabinet with legitimate ROMs, can I set it up in a public place to make money?

Probably not. ROMs are typically only licensed for personal, non-commercial purposes.

But I've seen Ultracade and Global VR Classics cabinets out in public places? Why can they do it?

Ultracade had two separate products. The Ultracade product is a commercial machine with commercial licenses to the games. These machines were designed to be put on location and make money, like traditional arcade machines. Their other product is the Arcade Legends series. These are home machines with non- commercial licenses for the games, and can only be legally operated in a private environment. Since their buyout by Global VR they only offer the Global VR Classics cabinet, which is equivalent to the earlier Ultracade product.

HELP! I'm getting a black screen or an error message in regards to DirectX on Windows!

You probably have missing or damaged DirectX runtimes. You can download the latest DirectX setup tool from Microsoft at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=35

Additional troubleshooting information can be found on Microsoft's website at https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/179113

I have a controller that doesn't want to work with the standard Microsoft Windows version of MAME, what can I do?

By default, MAME on Microsoft Windows tries to read joystick(s), mouse/mice and keyboard(s) using the RawInput API. This works with most devices, and allows multiple keyboards and mice to be used independently. However, some device drivers are not compatible with RawInput, and it may be necessary to use DirectInput or window events to receive input. This is also the case for most software that simulates mouse or keyboard input, like JoyToKey, VNC or Remote Desktop.

You can try changing the keyboardprovider, mouseprovider, joystickprovider or lightgunprovider setting (depending on which kind of device you’re having issues with) from rawinput to one of the other options such as dinput or win32. See OSD-related Options for details on input provider options

What happened to the MAME support for external OPL2-carrying soundcards?

MAME 0.23 added support for using a sound card’s onboard OPL2 (Yamaha YM3812 chip) instead of emulating the OPL2. This feature was only supported for DOS – it was never supported in official Windows versions of MAME. It dropped entirely as of MAME 0.60, as the OPL2 emulation in MAME had become advanced enough to be a better solution in almost all cases. MAME’s OPL2 emulation is now superior to using a sound card’s YM3812 in all cases, especially as modern sound cards lack a YM3812.

What happened to the MAME support for autofire?

A Lua plugin providing enhanced autofire support was added in MAME 0.210, and the built-in autofire functionality was removed in MAME 0.216. This plugin has more functionality than the built-in autofire feature it replaced; for example, you can configure alternate buttons for different autofire rates.

You can enable and configure the new autofire system with the following steps:

The setting will be automatically saved for future use.

See Autofire Plugin for more information about using the autofire plugin, or Plugins for more information about using plugins with MAME in general.

Does MAME support G-Sync or FreeSync? How do I configure MAME to use them?

MAME supports both G-Sync and FreeSync right out of the box for Windows and Linux, however macOS does not support G-Sync or FreeSync.

The effects of G-Sync and FreeSync will be most noticeable in drivers that run at refresh rates that are very different from normal PC refresh rates. For instance, the first three Mortal Kombat titles run at 54.706841Hz.

Universal Command-line Options

This section contains configuration options that are applicable to all MAME configurations (including both SDL and Windows native).

Commands and Verbs

Commands include mame itself as well as various tools included with the MAME distribution such as romcmp and srcclean.

Verbs are actions to take upon something with the command (e.g. mame -validate pacman has mame as a command and -validate as a verb)

Patterns

Many verbs support the use of patterns, which are either a system or device short name (e.g. a2600, zorba_kbd) or a glob pattern that matches either (e.g. zorba_*).

Depending on the command you're using the pattern with, pattern matching may match systems or systems and devices. It is advised to put quotes around your patterns to avoid having your shell try to expand them against filenames (e.g. mame -validate "pac*").

File Names and Directory Paths

A number of options for specifying directories support multiple paths (for example to search for ROMs in multiple locations). MAME expects multiple paths to be separated with semicolons ( ; ).

MAME expands environment variable expressions in paths. The syntax used depends on your operating system. On Windows, % (percent) syntax is used. For example %APPDATA%\mame\cfg will expand the application data path for the current user's roaming profile. On UNIX-like system (including macOS and Linux), Bourne shell syntax is used, and a leading ~ expands to the current user's home directory. For example, ~/.mame/${HOSTNAME}/cfg expands to a host-specific path inside the .mame directory in the current user's home directory. Note that only simple variable substitutions are supported; more complex expressions supported by Bash, ksh or zsh are not recognized by MAME.

Relative paths are resolved relative to the current working directory. If you start MAME by double-clicking it in Windows Explorer, the working directory is set to the folder containing the MAME executable. If you start MAME by double-clicking it in the macOS Finder, it will open a Terminal window with the working directory is set to your home directory (usually /Users/<username> ) and start MAME.

If you want behaviour similar to what Windows Explorer provides on macOS, create a script file containing these lines in the directory containing the MAME executable (for example you could call it mame-here ):

#!/bin/sh
cd "`dirname "$0"`"
exec ./mame

You should be able to use any text editor. If you have a choice of file format or line ending style, choose UNIX. This assumes you're using a 64-bit release build of MAME, but if you aren't you just need to change mame to the name of your MAME executable (e.g. mamed, mamep, mamedp). Once you've created the file, you need to mark it as executable. You can do this by opening a Terminal window, typing chmod a+x followed by a space, dragging the file you created onto the window (this causes Terminal to insert the full escaped path to the file), and then ensuring the Terminal window is active and hitting Return (or Enter) on your keyboard. You can close the Terminal window after doing this. Now if you double-click the script in the Finder, it will open a Terminal window, set the working directory to the location of the script (i.e. the folder containing MAME), and then start MAME.

Core Verbs

TIP:

-help / -h / -?

mame -help

-validate / -valid [<pattern>]

mame -validate
Driver ace100 (file apple2.cpp): 1 errors, 0 warnings
Errors:
Software List device 'flop525_orig': apple2_flop_orig.xml: Errors parsing software list:
apple2_flop_orig.xml(126.2): Unknown tag: year
apple2_flop_orig.xml(126.8): Unexpected content
apple2_flop_orig.xml(127.2): Unknown tag: publisher
apple2_flop_orig.xml(127.13): Unexpected content
apple2_flop_orig.xml(128.2): Unknown tag: info
apple2_flop_orig.xml(129.2): Unknown tag: sharedfeat
apple2_flop_orig.xml(132.2): Unknown tag: part
apple2_flop_orig.xml(133.3): Tag dataarea found outside of software context
apple2_flop_orig.xml(134.4): Tag rom found outside of part context
apple2_flop_orig.xml(137.3): mismatched tag

Configuration Verbs

-createconfig / -cc

mame -createconfig

-showconfig / -sc

mame -showconfig > mame.ini

-showusage / -su

Frontend Verbs

Note: By default, all the '-list' verbs below write info to the standard output (usually the terminal/command window where you typed the command). If you wish to write the info to a text file instead, add this to the end of your command:

where filename is the name of the file to save the output in (e.g. list.txt ). Note that if this file already exists, it will be completely overwritten.

mame -listcrc puckman > list.txt

-listxml / -lx [<pattern>...]

mame galaxian -listxml
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE mame [
<!ELEMENT mame (machine+)>


        <!ATTLIST mame build CDATA #IMPLIED>


        <!ATTLIST mame debug (yes|no) "no">


        <!ATTLIST mame mameconfig CDATA #REQUIRED>


        <!ELEMENT machine (description, year?, manufacturer?, biosset*, rom*, disk*, device_ref*, sample*, chip*, display*, sound?, input?, dipswitch*, configuration*, port*, adjuster*, driver?, feature*, device*, slot*, softwarelist*, ramoption*)>


                <!ATTLIST machine name CDATA #REQUIRED>


                <!ATTLIST machine sourcefile CDATA #IMPLIED>
...
<mame build="0.216 (mame0216-154-gabddfb0404c-dirty)" debug="no" mameconfig="10">


    <machine name="galaxian" sourcefile="galaxian.cpp">


                <description>Galaxian (Namco set 1)</description>


                <year>1979</year>


                <manufacturer>Namco</manufacturer>


        ...


    <machine name="z80" sourcefile="src/devices/cpu/z80/z80.cpp" isdevice="yes" runnable="no">


                <description>Zilog Z80</description>


    </machine>
</mame>

TIP:

-listfull / -ll [<pattern>...]

mame -listfull galaxian*
Name:             Description:
galaxian          "Galaxian (Namco set 1)"
galaxiana         "Galaxian (Namco set 2)"
galaxianbl        "Galaxian (bootleg, set 2)"
galaxianbl2       "Galaxian (bootleg, set 4)"
galaxiani         "Galaxian (Irem)"
galaxianm         "Galaxian (Midway set 1)"
galaxianmo        "Galaxian (Midway set 2)"
galaxiant         "Galaxian (Taito)"
galaxian_sound    "Galaxian Custom Sound"

-listsource / -ls [<pattern>...]

mame galaga -listsource
galaga           galaga.cpp

-listclones / -lc [<pattern>]

mame pacman -listclones
Name:            Clone of:
pacman           puckman

mame puckman -listclones
Name:            Clone of:
abscam           puckman
bucaner          puckman
crockman         puckman
crockmnf         puckman
...
puckmod          puckman
titanpac         puckman

-listbrothers / -lb [<pattern>]

mame galaxian -listbrothers
Source file:         Name:            Parent:
galaxian.cpp         amidar
galaxian.cpp         amidar1          amidar
galaxian.cpp         amidarb          amidar
...
galaxian.cpp         zigzagb
galaxian.cpp         zigzagb2         zigzagb

-listcrc [<pattern>...]

mame playch10 -listcrc
d52fa07a pch1-c__8t_e-2.8t                      playch10                PlayChoice-10 BIOS
503ee8b1 pck1-c.8t                              playch10                PlayChoice-10 BIOS
123ffa37 pch1-c_8te.8t                          playch10                PlayChoice-10 BIOS
0be8ceb4 pck1-c_fix.8t                          playch10                PlayChoice-10 BIOS
9acffb30 pch1-c__8k.8k                          playch10                PlayChoice-10 BIOS
c1232eee pch1-c__8m_e-1.8m                      playch10                PlayChoice-10 BIOS
30c15e23 pch1-c__8p_e-1.8p                      playch10                PlayChoice-10 BIOS
9acffb30 pch1-c__8k.8k                          playch10                PlayChoice-10 BIOS
c1232eee pch1-c__8m_e-1.8m                      playch10                PlayChoice-10 BIOS
30c15e23 pch1-c__8p_e-1.8p                      playch10                PlayChoice-10 BIOS
9acffb30 pch1-c__8k.8k                          playch10                PlayChoice-10 BIOS
83ebc7a3 pch1-c_8m.8m                           playch10                PlayChoice-10 BIOS
90e1b80c pch1-c_8p-8p                           playch10                PlayChoice-10 BIOS
9acffb30 pch1-c__8k.8k                          playch10                PlayChoice-10 BIOS
c1232eee pch1-c__8m_e-1.8m                      playch10                PlayChoice-10 BIOS
30c15e23 pch1-c__8p_e-1.8p                      playch10                PlayChoice-10 BIOS
e5414ca3 pch1-c-6f.82s129an.6f                  playch10                PlayChoice-10 BIOS
a2625c6e pch1-c-6e.82s129an.6e                  playch10                PlayChoice-10 BIOS
1213ebd4 pch1-c-6d.82s129an.6d                  playch10                PlayChoice-10 BIOS
48de65dc rp2c0x.pal                             playch10                PlayChoice-10 BIOS

-listroms / -lr [<pattern>...]

mame neogeo -listroms
ROMs required for driver "neogeo".
Name                                   Size Checksum
sp-s2.sp1                            131072 CRC(9036d879) SHA1(4f5ed7105b7128794654ce82b51723e16e389543)
sp-s.sp1                             131072 CRC(c7f2fa45) SHA1(09576ff20b4d6b365e78e6a5698ea450262697cd)
sp-45.sp1                            524288 CRC(03cc9f6a) SHA1(cdf1f49e3ff2bac528c21ed28449cf35b7957dc1)
...
sm1.sm1                              131072 CRC(94416d67) SHA1(42f9d7ddd6c0931fd64226a60dc73602b2819dcf)
000-lo.lo                            131072 CRC(5a86cff2) SHA1(5992277debadeb64d1c1c64b0a92d9293eaf7e4a)
sfix.sfix                            131072 CRC(c2ea0cfd) SHA1(fd4a618cdcdbf849374f0a50dd8efe9dbab706c3)

-listsamples [<pattern>]

mame armorap -listsamples
Samples required for driver "armorap".
loexp
jeepfire
hiexp
tankfire
tankeng
beep
chopper

-verifyroms [<pattern>]

mame gradius -verifyroms
romset gradius [nemesis] is good
1 romsets found, 1 were OK.

-verifysamples [<pattern>]

mame armorap -verifysamples
sampleset armorap [armora] is good
1 samplesets found, 1 were OK.

-romident [path/to/romstocheck.zip]

mame unknown.rom -romident
Identifying unknown.rom....
unknown.rom         = 456-a07.17l           gradius    Gradius (Japan, ROM version)

-listdevices / -ld [<pattern>]

mame apple2e -listdevices
Driver apple2e (Apple //e):


   <root>                         Apple //e


     a2bus                        Apple II Bus


     a2common                     Apple II Common Components @ 14.31 MHz


     a2video                      Apple II video @ 14.31 MHz


     aux                          Apple IIe AUX Slot


       ext80                      Apple IIe Extended 80-Column Card


     auxbus                       Apple IIe AUX Bus


     ay3600                       AY-5-3600 Keyboard Encoder


     ...


     speaker                      Filtered 1-bit DAC


     tape                         Cassette

-listslots / -lslot [<pattern>]

mame apple2e -listslots
SYSTEM           SLOT NAME        SLOT OPTIONS     SLOT DEVICE NAME
---------------- ---------------- ---------------- ----------------------------
apple2e          sl1              4play            4play Joystick Card (rev. B)


                                  ...


                                  aevm80           Applied Engineering Viewmaster 80


                                  alfam2           ALF MC1 / Apple Music II


                                  ...


                                  zipdrive         Zip Technologies ZipDrive


                 ...


                 aux              ext80            Apple IIe Extended 80-Column Card


                                  rw3              Applied Engineering RamWorks III


                                  std80            Apple IIe Standard 80-Column Card


                 gameio           compeyes         Digital Vision ComputerEyes


                                  joy              Apple II analog joysticks


                                  paddles          Apple II paddles

-listbios [<pattern>]

mamed -listbios apple2 -sl2 grapplus -sl4 videoterm
BIOS options for system Apple ][ (apple2):


    default          Original Monitor


    autostart        Autostart Monitor


  BIOS options for device Orange Micro Grappler+ Printer Interface (-sl2 grapplus):


      v30              ROM 3.0


      v32              ROM 3.2


  BIOS options for device Videx Videoterm 80 Column Display (-sl4 videoterm):


      v24_60hz         Firmware v2.4 (60 Hz)


      v24_50hz         Firmware v2.4 (50 Hz)

-listmedia / -lm [<pattern>]

mame coco3 -listmedia
SYSTEM           MEDIA NAME       (brief)    IMAGE FILE EXTENSIONS SUPPORTED
---------------- --------------------------- -------------------------------
coco3            cassette         (cass)     .wav  .cas


                 printout         (prin)     .prn


                 cartridge        (cart)     .ccc  .rom


                 floppydisk1      (flop1)    .dmk  .jvc  .dsk  .vdk  .sdf  .os9  .d77  .d88  .1dd  .dfi  .hfe  .imd  .ipf  .mfi  .mfm  .td0  .cqm  .cqi


                 floppydisk2      (flop2)    .dmk  .jvc  .dsk  .vdk  .sdf  .os9  .d77  .d88  .1dd  .dfi  .hfe  .imd  .ipf  .mfi  .mfm  .td0  .cqm  .cqi


                 harddisk1        (hard1)    .vhd


                 harddisk2        (hard2)    .vhd

-listsoftware / -lsoft [<pattern>]

mame coco3 -listsoftware
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE softwarelists [
<!ELEMENT softwarelists (softwarelist*)>


        <!ELEMENT softwarelist (software+)>


                <!ATTLIST softwarelist name CDATA #REQUIRED>


                <!ATTLIST softwarelist description CDATA #IMPLIED>


                <!ELEMENT software (description, year, publisher, info*, sharedfeat*, part*)>


        ...
<softwarelists>


        <softwarelist name="coco_cart" description="Tandy Radio Shack Color Computer cartridges">


                <software name="7cardstd">


                        <description>7 Card Stud</description>


                        <year>1983</year>


                        <publisher>Tandy</publisher>


                        <info name="developer" value="Intelligent Software"/>


                        <info name="serial" value="26-3074"/>


                        <part name="cart" interface="coco_cart">


                                <dataarea name="rom" size="8192">


                                        <rom name="7 card stud (1983) (26-3074) (intelligent software).rom" size="8192" crc="f38d8c97" sha1="5cfcb699ce09840dbb52714c8d91b3d86d3a86c3"/>


                                </dataarea>


                        </part>


                </software>


        ...

-verifysoftware / -vsoft [<pattern>]

mame coco3 -verifysoftware
romset coco_cart:7cardstd is good
coco_cart:amazing: a mazing world of malcom mortar (1987)(26-3160)(zct systems).rom (16384 bytes) - NEEDS REDUMP
romset coco_cart:amazing is best available
coco_cart:amazing1: a mazing world of malcom mortar (1987)(26-3160)(zct systems)[a].rom (16384 bytes) - NEEDS REDUMP
romset coco_cart:amazing1 is best available
romset coco_cart:androne is good
...

-getsoftlist / -glist [<pattern>]

mame -getsoftlist apple2_flop_orig
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE softwarelists [
<!ELEMENT softwarelists (softwarelist*)>


        <!ELEMENT softwarelist (software+)>


                <!ATTLIST softwarelist name CDATA #REQUIRED>


                <!ATTLIST softwarelist description CDATA #IMPLIED>


                <!ELEMENT software (description, year, publisher, info*, sharedfeat*, part*)>


                        <!ATTLIST software name CDATA #REQUIRED>


                        <!ATTLIST software cloneof CDATA #IMPLIED>


                        <!ATTLIST software supported (yes|partial|no) "yes">


                        <!ELEMENT description (#PCDATA)>


                        <!ELEMENT year (#PCDATA)>


                        <!ELEMENT publisher (#PCDATA)>


                        <!ELEMENT info EMPTY>


                                <!ATTLIST info name CDATA #REQUIRED>


                                <!ATTLIST info value CDATA #IMPLIED>


                        <!ELEMENT sharedfeat EMPTY>


                                <!ATTLIST sharedfeat name CDATA #REQUIRED>


                                <!ATTLIST sharedfeat value CDATA #IMPLIED>


            ...

-verifysoftlist / -vlist [softwarelistname]

mame -verifysoftlist apple2_flop_orig
romset apple2_flop_orig:agentusa is good
romset apple2_flop_orig:airheart is good
romset apple2_flop_orig:aplpanic is good
romset apple2_flop_orig:alambush is good
romset apple2_flop_orig:ankh is good
romset apple2_flop_orig:aplcdspd is good
romset apple2_flop_orig:agalxian is good
romset apple2_flop_orig:aquatron is good
romset apple2_flop_orig:archon is good
romset apple2_flop_orig:archon2 is good
romset apple2_flop_orig:ardyardv is good
romset apple2_flop_orig:autobahn is good
...

OSD-related Options

-uimodekey [keystring]

mame ibm5150 -uimodekey DEL

-controller_map / -ctrlmap <filename>

mame -controller_map gamecontrollerdb.txt sf2ce

-[no]background_input

mame -background_input ssf2tb

-uifontprovider <module>

Supported UI font providers per-platform

Supported keyboard input providers per-platform

Supported mouse input providers per-platform

Supported light gun input providers per-platform

Supported joystick input providers per-platform

OSD Command-Line Verbs

-listmidi

mame -listmidi
MIDI input ports:
MIDI output ports:
Microsoft MIDI Mapper (default)
Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth

-listnetwork

mame -listnetwork
No network adapters were found

mame -listnetwork
Available network adapters:


    Local Area Connection

TIP:

OSD Output Options

-output

mame asteroid -output console
led0 = 1
led0 = 0
...
led0 = 1
led0 = 0

Configuration Options

-[no]readconfig / -[no]rc

mame apple2ee -noreadconfig -sl6 diskii -sl7 cffa2 -hard1 TotalReplay.2mg

Core Search Path Options

-homepath <path>

mame -homepath C:\mame\lua

-rompath / -rp <path>

mame -rompath C:\mame\roms;C:\roms\another

-hashpath / -hash_directory / -hash <path>

mame -hashpath C:\mame\hash;C:\roms\softlists

-samplepath / -sp <path>

mame -samplepath C:\mame\samples;C:\roms\samples

-artpath <path>

mame -artpath C:\mame\artwork;C:\emu\shared-artwork

-ctrlrpath <path>

mame -ctrlrpath C:\mame\ctrlr;C:\emu\controllers

-inipath <path>

mame -inipath C:\Users\thisuser\documents\mameini

-fontpath <path>

mame -fontpath C:\mame\;C:\emu\artwork\mamefonts

-cheatpath <path>

mame -cheatpath C:\mame\cheat;C:\emu\cheats

-crosshairpath <path>

mame -crosshairpath C:\mame\crsshair;C:\emu\artwork\crosshairs

-pluginspath <path>

mame -pluginspath C:\mame\plugins;C:\emu\lua

-languagepath <path>

mame -languagepath C:\mame\language;C:\emu\mame-languages

-swpath <path>

mame -swpath C:\mame\software;C:\emu\mydisks

Core Output Directory Options

-cfg_directory <path>

mame -cfg_directory C:\mame\cfg

-nvram_directory <path>

mame -nvram_directory C:\mame\nvram

-input_directory <path>

mame -input_directory C:\mame\inp

-state_directory <path>

mame -state_directory C:\mame\sta

-snapshot_directory <path>

mame -snapshot_directory C:\mame\snap

-diff_directory <path>

mame -diff_directory C:\mame\diff

-comment_directory <path>

mame -comment_directory C:\mame\comments

Core State/Playback Options

-[no]rewind

mame -norewind

-rewind_capacity <value>

mame -rewind_capacity 30

-state <slot>

mame -state 1

-[no]autosave

mame -autosave

-playback / -pb <filename>

mame pacman -playback worldrecord

TIP:

-[no]exit_after_playback

mame pacman -playback worldrecord -exit_after_playback

-record / -rec <filename>

mame pacman -record worldrecord

TIP:

-mngwrite <filename>

mame pacman -mngwrite pacman-video

-aviwrite <filename>

mame pacman -playback worldrecord -exit_after_playback -aviwrite worldrecord

-wavwrite <filename>

mame pacman -wavwrite pacsounds

-snapname <name>

mame robby -snapname foo\%g%i

mame nes -cart robby -snapname %g\%d_cart

mame c64 -flop1 robby -snapname %g\%d_flop1/%i

-snapsize <width>x<height>

mame pacman -snapsize 1920x1080

TIP:

-snapview <viewname>

mame wrecking -snapview cocktail

-[no]snapbilinear

mame pacman -nosnapbilinear

-statename <name>

mame robby -statename foo\%g
All save states will be stored inside sta\foo\robby\

mame nes -cart robby -statename %g/%d_cart
All save states will be stored inside sta\nes\robby\

mame c64 -flop1 robby -statename %g/%d_flop1
All save states will be stored inside sta\c64\robby\

TIP:

-[no]burnin

mame neogeo -burnin

Core Performance Options

-[no]autoframeskip / -[no]afs

mame gradius4 -autoframeskip

-frameskip / -fs <level>

mame gradius4 -frameskip 2

-seconds_to_run / -str <seconds>

mame pacman -seconds_to_run 60

-[no]throttle

mame pacman -nothrottle

-[no]sleep

mame gradius 4 -nosleep

-speed <factor>

mame pacman -speed 1.25

-[no]refreshspeed / -[no]rs

mame pacman -refreshspeed

-numprocessors / -np auto|<value>

mame gradius4 -numprocessors 2

-bench <n>

mame gradius4 -bench 300

-[no]lowlatency

mame bgaregga -lowlatency

Core Rotation Options

-[no]rotate

mame pacman -norotate

-[no]ror

-[no]rol

mame pacman -ror

mame pacman -rol

-[no]autoror

-[no]autorol

mame pacman -autoror

mame pacman -autorol

TIP:

-[no]flipx

-[no]flipy

mame -flipx pacman

mame -flipy suprmrio

Core Video Options

-video <bgfx|gdi|d3d|opengl|soft|accel|none>

mame gradius3 -video bgfx

-numscreens <count>

mame darius -numscreens 3

mame pc_cntra -numscreens 2

-[no]window / -[no]w

mame coco3 -window

-[no]maximize / -[no]max

mame apple2e -window -nomaximize

-[no]keepaspect / -[no]ka

mame sf2ua -nokeepaspect

-[no]waitvsync

mame gradius2 -waitvsync

-[no]syncrefresh

mame mk -syncrefresh

-prescale <amount>

mame pacman -video d3d -prescale 3

-[no]filter / -[no]d3dfilter / -[no]flt

mame pacman -nofilter

-[no]unevenstretch

mame dkong -nounevenstretch

Core Full Screen Options

-[no]switchres

mame kof97 -video d3d -switchres -resolution 1280x1024

Core Per-Window Options

-screen <display>

-screen0 <display>

-screen1 <display>

-screen2 <display>

-screen3 <display>

mame pc_cntra -numscreens 2 -screen0 \\.\DISPLAY1 -screen1 \\.\DISPLAY2

mame darius -numscreens 3 -screen0 \\.\DISPLAY1 -screen1 \\.\DISPLAY3 -screen2 \\.\DISPLAY2

TIP:

TIP:

-aspect <width:height> / -screen_aspect <num:den>

-aspect0 <width:height>

-aspect1 <width:height>

-aspect2 <width:height>

-aspect3 <width:height>

mame contra -aspect 16:9

mame pc_cntra -numscreens 2 -aspect0 16:9 -aspect1 5:4

-resolution <widthxheight[@refresh]> / -r <widthxheight[@refresh]>

-resolution0 <widthxheight[@refresh]> / -r0 <widthxheight[@refresh]>

-resolution1 <widthxheight[@refresh]> / -r1 <widthxheight[@refresh]>

-resolution2 <widthxheight[@refresh]> / -r2 <widthxheight[@refresh]>

-resolution3 <widthxheight[@refresh]> / -r3 <widthxheight[@refresh]>

mame pc_cntra -numscreens 2 -resolution0 1920x1080 -resolution1 1280x1024

-view <viewname>

-view0 <viewname>

-view1 <viewname>

-view2 <viewname>

-view3 <viewname>

mame contra -view native

Core Artwork Options

-[no]artwork_crop / -[no]artcrop

mame pacman -artwork_crop

TIP:

-fallback_artwork

mame coco -fallback_artwork suprmrio

TIP:

-override_artwork

mame galaga -override_artwork puckman

Core Screen Options

-brightness <value>

mame pacman -brightness 0.5

-contrast <value>

mame pacman -contrast 0.5

-gamma <value>

mame pacman -gamma 0.8

-pause_brightness <value>

mame pacman -pause_brightness 0.33

-effect <filename>

mame pacman -effect scanlines

Core Vector Options

-beam_width_min <width>

mame asteroid -beam_width_min 0.1

-beam_width_max <width>

mame asteroid -beam_width_max 2

-beam_intensity_weight <weight>

mame asteroid -beam_intensity_weight 0.5

-beam_dot_size <scale>

mame asteroid -beam_dot_size 2

-flicker <value>

mame asteroid -flicker 0.15

Core Video OpenGL Feature Options

These options are for compatibility in -video opengl. If you report rendering artifacts you may be asked to try messing with them by the developers, but normally they should be left at their defaults which results in the best possible video performance.

TIP:

-[no]gl_forcepow2texture

-[no]gl_notexturerect

-[no]gl_vbo

-[no]gl_pbo

Core Video OpenGL GLSL Options

-[no]gl_glsl

mame galaxian -gl_glsl

-gl_glsl_filter

mame galaxian -gl_glsl -gl_glsl_filter 0

-glsl_shader_mame0

-glsl_shader_mame1

...

-glsl_shader_mame9

mame suprmrio -gl_glsl -glsl_shader_mame0 NTSC/NTSC_chain -glsl_shader_mame1 CRT-geom/CRT-geom

-glsl_shader_screen0

-glsl_shader_screen1

...

-glsl_shader_screen9

mame suprmrio -gl_glsl -glsl_shader_screen0 gaussx -glsl_shader_screen1 gaussy -glsl_shader_screen2 CRT-geom-halation

Core Sound Options

-samplerate <value> / -sr <value>

mame galaga -samplerate 44100

-[no]samples

mame qbert -nosamples

-[no]compressor

mame popeye -nocompressor

-volume / -vol <value>

mame pacman -volume -30

-sound <dsound | coreaudio | sdl | xaudio2 | portaudio | none>

mame pacman -sound portaudio

Supported sound subsystems per-platform

Core Input Options

-[no]coin_lockout / -[no]coinlock

mame suprmrio -coin_lockout

-ctrlr <controller>

mame dkong -ctrlr xarcade

-[no]mouse

mame centiped -mouse

-[no]joystick / -[no]joy

mame mappy -joystick

-[no]lightgun / -[no]gun