MAME

MAME (formerly an acronym of Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) is a free and open-source emulator designed to emulate the hardware of arcade games, later expanded to include video game consoles, old computers and other systems in software on modern personal computers and other platforms. Its intention is to preserve gaming history by preventing vintage video games from being lost or forgotten. It does this by emulating the inner workings of the emulated machines; the ability to actually play the video games is considered "a nice side effect". Joystiq has listed MAME as an application that every Windows and Mac gamer should have. The first public MAME release was by Nicola Salmoria on 5 February 1997. The project currently documents over 32,000 individual systems, with more than 10,000 working titles, including arcade hardware, home computers, and video game consoles, though not all games are playable. MESS, an emulator for many video game consoles and computer systems, based on the MAME core, was integrated into MAME in 2015.