The xmame Gaming Emulator

Creators of gaming emulators set out to take games that were designed for home gaming consoles or arcades and have those games run on a computer. As a result, games that were created for gaming machines that are now outdated or broken can be resurrected on your home computer.

A compilation of gaming emulators has been put together into one project called Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME). Nicola Salmoria started the MAME project in January 1997. There are now more than 100 contributors. An X Window System version of MAME called xmame runs in Red Hat Linux. There are also several other versions that run in different video modes, allowing the use of 3Dfx, SVGALIB, and other video technologies.

No games are delivered with the xmame package. Games that can be used with the xmame package are listed in a file that comes with xmame. That file lists more than 600 games that are supported by xmame. (Up to 2000 games have been listed as compatible with MAME on other computing platforms — in particular, old Windows 3.1/95 platforms.)

You can download the xmame package from any Red Hat FTP site. If you prefer to install from source code, you can download the most recent version from the X-MAME home page at http://x.mame.net/. Although it can be a bit trickier getting xmame installed and working, the real trick is getting legal software (ROMs) and getting them to run properly. (I discuss that a bit later.)

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