Every once in a while, we get a question about those old games that were once the bleeding edge of entertainment in arcades and bars. Invariably from someone who played them and misses them—not from the current generation of cell-phone gaming addicts. But even if you’re the latter, you might want to see how your parents amused themselves in the days when Pong, Asteroids, and Galaxian were the height of gaming technology. You can easily do so right on your PC. Adventurous programmers have long sharpened their skills by writing emulators for a vast array of computers, game machines, and gaming consoles. For the last decade or so, however, the big project has been MAME.

Note: While this article touts MAME's arcade and console emulation, it’s also intended to emulate just about anything that’s ever computed: various computers, calculators, and even chess machines. [Have a tech question? Send your query to.] Put the blame on MAME For emulating arcade games, there’s nothing remotely as competent as MAME, or the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator.

Mac MAME Emulator is an emulator for running Arcade coin-up games on your Macintosh. It is a port of a PC / DOS version of the MAME emulator developed by a non-profit organization that strives to preserve the history of video games by running them on modern machines via emulators.

Team viewer for mac add local computer. The program supports literally thousands of arcade and gaming console titles by emulating their hardware and loading their ROMs (Read-Only Memory). These are now actually files that contain dumps of the code or data in the chip/chips from the original console or cartridge. Yes, software once came hard-coded in chips and in the form of a cartridge.

Can you imagine that happening in this day and age of release-it-before-it’s-ready, user-tested software? Believe it or not, a bug in your code used to be a mark of shame. Atari The arcade version of Atari’s Centipede playing inside MAME on a PC.

MAME is available from the 's website. At the time of this writing, the latest version was beta 0.184, but don’t let the not-finished status throw you off—this is a project that’s likely to be in beta forever. Emulating everything that’s ever existed in the gaming world, from Pong, to the Atari 2600, to the Amiga and beyond, is a daunting task. MAME has its own rather primitive GUI that appears if you run it on its own, but there are more pleasant-looking and easier-to-use front-ends.

I opt for QMC2 because it’s cross-platform (like MAME: Windows, OS X, Linux), updated regularly (the MAME catalog and ROMs change frequently), and easy on the eye. Initially, you must point the QMC2 to the MAME directory and its subdirectories, but that’s a relatively simple task. IDG The more business-like QMC2 front-end for the MAME arcade emulator. The QMC2 arcade interface is shown at the top of the article. Probably the trickiest part of the whole deal is finding the games. MAME doesn’t provide them because they don’t have legal access to most of them, and the developers are more concerned with providing the means. But if you search the Web, you’ll find sites dedicated to providing MAME ROM files, as well as ROM files for other emulators.