MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: MAME stands for...

> Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator
>
> I've been away from the scene for a few years.
>
> The operative word being ARCADE.
>
> Why the heck are Tiger games, and computers in the official build now?
>
> Not angry, just interested in what the discussion was, and why they were ultimately
> included?
>
> Thanks everyone

MAME stands for MAME, there is no acronym. The term "Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator" hasn't been used officially for several years (although the old logo showing the text is still inexplicably on the Wikipedia page).

Computers and home systems are in the official build because MESS was merged into MAME - MESS was already based on MAME to start with, the difference being that MESS was forgotten most of the time so some of the emulation code remained outdated while being constantly improved on the MAME side. Now it's just playing catch-up to bring the emulation code out of 2003, and with that comes the hundreds of obscure games, computers, clones and bootlegs when the emulation starts working properly, just like MAME did in the early days, dumping and emulating several hundred obscure games, clones, conversions and bootlegs. The only reason the handhelds weren't in MAME/MESS earlier is that no-one in the scene had decapped the chips until recently (something which is/was extremely expensive) and there was no other way of dumping the custom/obscure ROMs hidden inside a blob of epoxy.