The first public MAME release was by Nicola Salmoria on 5 February 1997.
Joystiq has listed MAME as an application that every Windows and Mac gamer should have. It does this by emulating the inner workings of the emulated arcade machines the ability to actually play the games is considered 'a nice side effect'. Its intention is to preserve gaming history by preventing vintage games from being lost or forgotten. MAME (formerly an acronym of Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) is a free and open-source emulator designed to recreate the hardware of arcade game systems in software on modern personal computers and other platforms. Original MAME license (for versions prior to 0.172) GPL-2.0-or-later, with some sub-parts BSD-3-Clause.(for versions since 0.172)
