README

MAME

 What is MAME?

MAME is a multi-purpose emulation framework.

MAME's purpose is to preserve decades of software history. As electronic technology continues to rush forward, MAME prevents this important "vintage" software from being lost and forgotten. This is achieved by documenting the hardware and how it functions. The source code to MAME serves as this documentation. The fact that the software is usable serves primarily to validate the accuracy of the documentation (how else can you prove that you have recreated the hardware faithfully?). Over time, MAME (originally stood for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) absorbed the sister-project MESS (Multi Emulator Super System), so MAME now documents a wide variety of (mostly vintage) computers, video game consoles and calculators, in addition to the arcade video games that were its initial focus.

 Where can I find out more?

 Official MAME Development Team Site (includes binary downloads, wiki, forums, and more)
 MAME Testers (official bug tracker for MAME)

 Community

 r/MAME on Reddit
 MAMEdev Forum
 MAMEdev Discussions on GitHub

 Development

!Alt

 CI status and code scanning

![CI (Linux)/badge.svg)](https://github.com/mamedev/mame/actions/workflows/ci-linux.yml) ![CI (Windows/badge.svg)](https://github.com/mamedev/mame/actions/workflows/ci-windows.yml) ![CI (macOS)/badge.svg)](https://github.com/mamedev/mame/actions/workflows/ci-macos.yml)    

 How to compile?

If you're on a UNIX-like system (including Linux and macOS), it could be as easy as typing


make


for a full build,


make SUBTARGET=tiny


for a build including a small subset of supported systems.

See the Compiling MAME page on our documentation site for more information, including prerequisites for macOS and popular Linux distributions.

For recent versions of macOS you need to install Xcode including command-line tools and SDL 2.0.

For Windows users, we provide a ready-made build environment based on MinGW-w64.

Visual Studio builds are also possible, but you still need build environment based on MinGW-w64.
In order to generate solution and project files just run:


make vs2022

or use this command to build it directly using msbuild


make vs2022 MSBUILD=1


 Coding standard

MAME source code should be viewed and edited with your editor set to use four spaces per tab. Tabs are used for initial indentation of lines, with one tab used per indentation level. Spaces are used for other alignment within a line.

Some parts of the code follow Allman style; some parts of the code follow K&R style -- mostly depending on who wrote the original version. Above all else, be consistent with what you modify, and keep whitespace changes to a minimum when modifying existing source. For new code, the majority tends to prefer Allman style, so if you don't care much, use that.

All contributors need to either add a standard header for license info (on new files) or inform us of their wishes regarding which of the following licenses they w