I have recently DL’d M.A.M.E., the emulator for all the great video arcade games many of us spent our childhoods or teen years playing.
The only problem is, there seems to be NO INFORMATION anywhere explaning how the heck to get the damned thing working, or how to use it when you GET it working. The DL included a bunch of notepad documents with what is essentially un-useable nonsense within them, and every online search I’ve done to try and find decent information on how to use it.
Does anyone out there HAVE MAME? Can anyone give me any straight forward information on how to use it, or direct me to a user friendly site to guide me through it?
I would really appreciate it. Thanks all, and have a sparkling day.
MAME by itself does nothing, it’s software that allows your computer to emulate arcade game hardware, but you need separate ROM images of the individual games to get MAME to actually do anything for you. Unfortunately, possession of those ROM images violates copyright laws and is illegal, with a few exceptions you can download here. To get it working, it’s probably easiest to use the Windows version of MAME; simply put the ROM image in the Roms folder, start up MAME, then start your game from the MAME menu.
I can’t tell you where to find any other ROMs, and this thread will likely be closed soon because of the copyright issues involved here.
the legality isn’t that cut & dry. These are mostly games that are unavailable anywhere else. The companies aren’t selling them, so they can’t pretend to be losing money on it, and generally allow the roms and emulators to exist peacefully. (also called abandonware)
I’ve heard the best place to get roms www.mame.dk, which is probably where you end up by following cabbage’s link.
www.mame.dk no longer carries the ROMs because of copyright violations.
I can certainly see your point about the lack of availability of the original games, hell, lord knows I’ve downloaded more than my share of the old games. However, the game manufacturers are enforcing the old copyrights, as evidenced by the fact that www.mame.dk no longer carries them, and the accompanying note on their homepage.
The link I gave above is to an official MAME site, I believe, and only contains three specific games that have been released to the public domain.
Oh, getting ROMS won’t be a problem. I already have access to them. I actually have a “Mario” rom in the ROMS folder, but I have no idea how to run MAME. There are no particular icons that I can click to run it, and would then allow me to pick a rom from the rom folder.
I also have “NESTICLE” for Nintendo games, and I am able to work that one just fine, and it plays the roms perfectly. The two look similar, but Nesticle works, and MAME (which is the one I really want to use) doesn’t.
So I’m at a loss. )-: Any further advice or commentary?
