Newbie questions

[pinballdude]

I am an older guy trying to understand how this MAME concept works.
If I only want to play, say, a half dozen games, do I just download MAME
and pick my games or is there more to it than what I think?
I hope to one day build a coin op stand up conversion and a cocktail table.
I am just trying out the waters for now.
Thanks for your help
Terry

[shmokes]

More or less. The games are the actual code that was dumped (read: copied) by someone directly from the ROM chips on the boards inside the original cabinets. For this reason, they're called ROMs. So you feed a ROM into MAME and MAME emulates the hardware that the ROM originally ran on. To the ROM it looks like it is running on original equipment.

So yeah, you need MAME and you need the ROMs. However, the ROMs, with a few exceptions that almost certainly do not apply to you, are illegal to possess. They aren't especially difficult to obtain, but asking for ROMs here, or where to get them, isn't allowed here.

By the way, if you're just going to play a few games on your computer, I recommend MAMEUI. Regular MAME is run from a command prompt, e.g. , "mame.exe pacman.zip". MAMEUI has a built in graphical menu (the UI stands for user interface) that allows you to easily navigate and start your games. If you ever graduate to building an arcade cabinet you'll want to use regular MAME in conjunction with a frontend like MaLa or Hyperspin, which are two of many user interfaces made to look good on an arcade monitor or TV. Also, unlike MAMEUI, the frontends are also specifically designed to be controlled with authentic joysticks and buttons, rather than with a keyboard and mouse.

[Paul Olson]

The regular version of MAME now has a simple menu as well. For a small number of games, it works really well. Not pretty, but effective.

[Rando]

I am an older guy trying to understand how this MAME concept works.
If I only want to play, say, a half dozen games, do I just download MAME
and pick my games or is there more to it than what I think?
I hope to one day build a coin op stand up conversion and a cocktail table.
I am just trying out the waters for now.
Thanks for your help
Terry

+1 What they said above:

Have computer
Install MAME
Find some ROMS (some freely available ones available at the MAME site)
Start game that will look/sound exactly as you remember in arcades
Issue you will have at that point is that playing these games using a keyboard/mouse isn’t as satisfying as buttons/sticks, so you’ll have a decision to make about next steps.

Luck!