

The first MAME version was released in 1996.

It began as a project called Multi-Pac, intended to preserve games in the Pac-Man family, but the name was changed as more games were added to its framework. The MAME project was started by Italian programmer Nicola Salmoria. The NTVDM from Microsoft is only supported for the 32-bit versions of Windows. With OTVDM (WineVDM) a version of MAME is available to emulate 16-Bit DOS and Windows applications on 圆4 and AArch64 versions of Windows.

MESS, an emulator for many video game consoles and computer systems, based on the MAME core, was integrated into MAME in 2015. It now supports over 7,000 unique games and 10,000 actual ROM image sets, though not all of the games are playable. 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)
