Dumping roms and other mame processes

[eds1275]

I often read about people dumping roms, and it never interested me until today when I read paigeoliver say that if a rom isn't dumped he had a real board and could do it.

I assume dumping a rom refers to taking the memory from an arcade machine and putting it into a file that can be accessed by more modern computers. And then the mame side of things interprets that data and then tries to emulate the rest of the circuitry from each game? And that if several games used the same base hardware such as the CPS2 then the emulation only has to be coded once for all those games?

How does one dump a rom? Does it require special hardware?

[Malenko]

How does one dump a rom? Does it require special hardware?

Basically you hook up the rom reader to the rom and read it, and "dump" the data to a PC.  That's the stripped down super simple watered down summary of whats done. 

http://members.iinet.net.au/~lantra9jp1/gurudumps1/

has some info