Mr. Do!'s Arcade

Home of MAME Artwork and other Emulation Goodies

HOW TO COMPILE MAME

MAME for Dummies

Why would you want to compile MAME yourself? There is always a recent version available at the home page, right? Well, there are a couple reasons why:

  1. Immediate updates. MAME is under continuous development. If you want to test the latest and greatest source changes before the next full release, you need to pull the latest source and compile the program.
  2. You will have a local copy of the source. Even if you do not know how to program, the source is interesting to browse through. It may even give you an idea just how much time is actually spent on this wonderful project. Plus, the devs have included notes throughout the source that are not anywhere else.

You do not have to be a programmer to compile MAME. If your only goal is to be able to compile a new version, there is an excellent step-by-step tutorial on the MAMEDev site:

https://www.mamedev.org/tools/