Back to the eighties with this arcade emulator! The Mame program runs all kinds of classic computer games from the most diverse systems from the seventies, eighties and nineties.
Mom 0.210
PriceFor free
Language
English
OS
Windows 7/8/10
Website
www.mamedev.org 8 Score 80
- Pros
- Fun to play old games
- Support various roms
- Filter options
- Negatives
- Installation process somewhat complex
Mame is a so-called emulator and can thus mimic different computer systems. To install the program, create a new folder on your system and extract the exe file.
Filters
It is important to know that the program is only an emulator and does not contain any games itself. You have to download this separately. This is because most games are not just available for free and you have to download 'less' legal versions of the game. What the program does do is display a database of all the games that Mame supports – there are more than 35,000 at the time of writing. You can search by game and if you select one, you immediately see its status. At the bottom you see behind Overall whether a game does not function, partially or completely. Below it is shown exactly what may not work. You can also filter links on games that function completely or filter on certain properties such as year, maker or the ability to save your progress.
roms
Now that you have Mame running, look for so-called ROMs for the program. On the Mame site you will find a few licensed ROMs that you can download. For other games you'll have to google it; there are many sites where you can find thousands of games. It is important that you save any zip file unzipped to the folder roms copies, otherwise Mame won't recognize it. If you placed a rom in the folder, open it by launching it from Mame. If there is something wrong with the rom, Mame will give an error message. For example, you may have an outdated version of the rom. It is sometimes a lot of work and it takes some trial & error before you have a game running.
Conclusion
Once you get the hang of Mame's way of working, it's a fantastic source of retro games. The big advantage is that you know exactly what works and what doesn't in a game before you download a rom.
