MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) was designed to allow you to enjoy old arcade games on your current machine. Also available as front ends: MAMEUI, IV/Play and Emu Loader.

When you use MAME in conjunction with images of the original arcade game's ROM and disk data, it attempts to reproduce that game as closely as possible on modern computers. It currently emulates several thousand classic arcade games from the late 1970s to today. With it, you can enjoy playing your favorite childhood games just like you were in a classic arcade. The main purpose here is to preserve decades of software history. As electronic technology speeds ahead, MAME prevents this vintage software from being lost or forgotten by documenting the hardware and how it functions and then the source code serves as this documentation.

Contrary to popular belief, MAME is primarily usable to validate the accuracy of the documentation. To expand, MAME and its sister-project MESS (Multi Emulator Super System) merged, allowing MAME to document many other computers, video game consoles, and even calculators on top of the arcade video games that were its initial focus.