[Skullmeat]

MAME, or Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, is an emulator that runs a large amount of Arcade systems, and platforms. While most emulators focus on making games playable, MAME's focus is on emulation accuracy. Thus there are many games that do not currently work in MAME. Even so, MAME can run thousands of titles.

Mame on its own has no front end, or GUI. It is command line based. However, the emulator I will be using for this guide will be MAMEUIFX. It keeps with the most current MAME releases, has a GUI, and is actively maintained.
You can get it here: http://mame32fx.altervista.org/download.htm

Download and install the emulator. It will ask to run an audit. We don't have any roms right now, so go ahead and skip that.

Now the program will open.



Note the rom list in the center pane.

Now we need a rom. "Dump" one from an actual arcade machine.

Now that you have "dumped" a rom to your pc, we need put it in our roms folder.
However, unlike most "dumped" roms, we don't decompress them. In mame, each file in the .zip archive represents a "rom set" of the different chips and systems from the original unit. Therefore, we simply place them inside our roms directory where we installed MAMEUIFX.





You should note that one of my files has a .CHD extension. We will cover that in a bit.

Now that we have a rom, we need to audit it in order to be able to run it in MAMEUIFX. To do so, locate the rom you wish to use in the center pane, and right click it.
Select audit in the right click menu.



In some cases, the audit will fail the rom check, as seen here.



This happens due to the nature of the mame project. In the interest of accuracy, more and more complete rom dumps are made constantly, and the newer versions require the latest rom dumps. Older dumps may be missing images required in newer versions.

In order to play these games, you need to add the missing image (marked in red) to the current rom set. To do so, you need to "dump" the newer images, and place them in your rom package.



Simply copy and paste the rom image from archive on the left (the new required file) to the archive on the right (our rom set).

In addition to the repackage we covered abouve, you may remember the .CHD file I pointed out earlier. Some arcade units, most famously the light gun rail shooter Area 51, had resources stored on a hard disk in the machine. A CHD is simply a "compressed hard disk" image of this disk. To use them, simply place them in the roms directory along with your rom set for that game.

You are now ready to play. Have fun!

In part 2, I'll cover the more advanced features of MAME, including control setup and cheats.