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MAME VS Emulators?
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eyal8r:
Hey guys-
Can someone explain the difference between MAME and an Emulator? I am in the process of building a cabinet, and am seeing people talk about Emulators being different than MAME. Do emulators still run on the PC, or is this something I need to take into consideration when building?
Thanks for any info,
D
jerschwab:
MAME is the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator.

That means that it emulates arcade games.  It's the biggest and most popular arcade emulator and can play around 5,000 games.

There are other emulators for individual games, groups of games, some more console systems like NES, and some to emulate laserdisc arcade games.

Emulators run on PC's, but some of them are ported to Mac, Linux, etc.  Emulators "mimic" the original hardware for the emulated system.  Rather than have the expensive hardware in the machine, a PC will handle everything the hardware does and attempt to faithfully recreate the arcade experience.  There are of course some hardware and encryption that is much harder to emulate.  This is why we may not see Street Fighter 3 emulated for a long long time.

- Jeremy
Soulcon:
Mame is a Arcade emulator for the PC. However there has been hacks and such to play things on other systems this is the most easy and satisffing route.

There are also emulators out there for some other older home systems which also work on the PC. Just do a search for Emulators and you will get any and all questions answered.

-Soul
eyal8r:
ahhh- ok cool. Seems like I want to stick to MAME, and it gives me all the games I want anyways.  
Thanks guys!
D
Tahnok:
I think the only difference is that MAME is a multiple machine emulator. Most emulators like NES only have to support a single piece of hardware (the NES), but MAME has to support many different pieces of hardware (there are tons of different arcade machines).
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