MAME VS Emulators?

[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).

[Tiger-Heli]

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

Actually, I mention this often on my sites so let me explain what I see as the differences -

MAME is much more powerful and flexible than ohter emulators.  You can play over 5,000 games.  You can use any keyboard keys, OR combinations for Inputs, AND combinations for inputs, NOT combinations for Inputs, up to eight independent mouse and joystick inputs, etc. etc.

Therefore, setting up a cab to play MAME is fairly simple.

If you look at other emulators (Stella, ZSNES, Visual Pinball, System16, Chankast, NeoRage, etc.) or PC games, you might not be able to redefine inputs at all, or if you can, you probably can't assign OR combinations to inputs.

So designing a cab for a favorite PC game and MAME instantly becomes more complicated.

Another source of confusion is that the KeyWiz designer refers to his product as a keyboard emulator rather than a keyboard encoder, but I don't think that is what you were referring to.

[Bgnome]

MAME is much more powerful and flexible than ohter emulators.  You can play over 5,000 games.  You can use any keyboard keys, OR combinations for Inputs, AND combinations for inputs, NOT combinations for Inputs, up to eight independent mouse and joystick inputs, etc. etc.

that is a flagrantly bold statement.  it surprises me how a well-informed person as yourself can make such a statement.  this is the definition as found on dictionary.com:

em

[Tiger-Heli]

MAME is much more powerful and flexible than ohter emulators.  You can play over 5,000 games.  You can use any keyboard keys, OR combinations for Inputs, AND combinations for inputs, NOT combinations for Inputs, up to eight independent mouse and joystick inputs, etc. etc.

that is a flagrantly bold statement.  it surprises me how a well-informed person as yourself can make such a statement.  this is the definition as found on dictionary.com:

em

[[derek]]

Compaq has always been an x8[6|8] shop.  They licensed software from Microsoft and IBM.  They created "compatible" hardware, not emulated hardware.  I spose you could get techincal and classify their purchase of DEC or even the tandem stuff as going past that x86 realm, but that was more of a marketshare decision.

Technically Mame is just collection of software emulation packages that emulate various implementations of hardware.  That doesn't necessarily qualify as "better" or "worse" than any other implementation. It's not "more powerful" or anything else.

In fact, if you browse through a lot of the code of Mame or a handful of the other emulators.  They share some common code.  Generally a person will write a really robust CPU emulator and someone will adapt that into their package.

The devs then go back and optimize and adapt that code into their packges. Emulation is an awesome subject.  In my book, they are all impressive.

- derek

[enchntr]

Compaq/IBM

IBM created the first DOS based PC with off the shelf parts to quickly compete with Apple.  The only proprietary piece of software was the IBM BIOS..which is what made the PC work.

However, Compaq, seeing that it could compete with IBM in the marketplace, REVERSE ENGINEERED the IBM BIOS.  It's not emulation, as they did write a new BIOS, however, they used IBM's BIOS as their model for writing one.