Arcade Emulator

MAME v0.180

This is one of those projects with a crazy version number. 0.180 doesn't mean it's nearly a fifth of the way to a major release. That would make a mockery of its 20 years of development (MAME celebrates its birthday on February 5, 2017). Instead, it's a hard-fought testament to the many, many releases over those years, each adding too many platforms, too many games, and too many features to list. MAME has grown from an emulator for playing basic arcade games from the early age of computing, to a system capable of playing more than 10,000 different games. Since 2015, it has also included the computer and console emulators from MESS, and 2016 brought a much more functional internal UI for selecting games. But it's the last couple of releases that have got us excited, as these are the first to incorporate native OpenGL shaders for Linux.

The Windows version of MAME has always benefited from graphical effects coded to work with Microsoft's DirectX, and although OpenGL shaders have been created by users for Linux, they were never part of the main project. They instead required you to build them manually and add them to configuration files. The recent release of MAME has finally rolled these into the main project, and while you can't yet save every parameter, you can access dozens of effects for changing how MAME looks from the new UI. These effects include perspective distortion to change the angle of the screen or the curve of the CRT. You can add noise bars, distortion, and scanlines, change the beam scatter algorithm for the CRT and the convergence of red, green, and blue pixels, as well as play around with the color, gamma, and contrast. With a bit of practice, you can recreate the characteristics of almost any ancient and heavy screen, and MAME even includes presets. These can be pasted into a game's specific configuration file so you can have one set of shaders for Space Invaders, for example, and another for Rastan Sega.

A little like archive.org, this is a project about documenting the history of computing and gaming. Of course, there will always be those of us who run a MAME-based arcade machine, playing games we couldn't afford to push coins into as children, but that's really a side show from the incredible breadth of MAME.

Project Website

http://www.mame.net/

Party like it's 1984 with the latest OpenGL shaders built right into MAME.