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Open source power-up on the way for arcade game emulator MAME
Code's already available but this makes it official
MAME – the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator – is going open source.
MAME is beloved of retro-gamers, who delight in its ability to run the ROMs of vintage cabinet and console games on Windows, MacOS and Linux.
A single Tweet last week – see below – set the cat among the pigeons for fanciers of such fare.
MAME is going open source, if you have contributed in past and we still did not contact you please contact us at mamedev@mamedev.org
— mamedev.org (@mamedev_org) May 14, 2015
The move to open source appears to be a formality: the project's source code is already on GitHub. As the Tweet below shows the project seems keen to dot the i's and cross the tees to make it official and legal.
@Daviey we were always source available software, but not open source by definition
— mamedev.org (@mamedev_org) May 14, 2015
Just what licence MAME will use, and when it intends to emerge in its new form, hasn't been revealed. Nor have any plans to make more game ROMs available: at present there's a considerable grey market for ROMs that run on the emulator. The shout-out appears to be an attempt to contact past developers to ensure their contributions can be included in an official code dump. ®