How did you learn about MAME?

[Jdurg]

This is always a question that I have for those I encounter in the emulation community.  How did you discover MAME?

For me, it was pretty simple.  It was the fall of 1998 and I had just gotten onto my network at college.  (Freshman year where I was introduced to a LOT of things.      ).  I went and got a TON of MP3 files as well as Grand Theft Auto.  (The Original.  God knows how many hours my friends and I wasted killing each other in that game).

I wanted to get a copy of Mortal Kombat since I loved playing it in the arcade.  So I went onto the www.dogpile.com search engine and searched for "Mortal Kombat Arcade".  On the first page, I found a link to the mame.net forums.  I then learned about how I could play the original arcade game on my computer!  I couldn't believe it.  I downloaded MAME, downloaded the ROM and had no idea what I was doing.  I registered on the forums and got the living hell chewed out of me.  I then learned that 90% of all people on emulation forums are ass-holes and aren't willing to help out the new people.  A couple of people, however, were willing to help and politely directed me to the FAQs.  I read them all, did more reading, and eventually figured it all out.  Soon, I was playing MK and SF2, and all the arcade games I remembered playing as a kid.  I was in heaven.  Soon, I learned how to compile MAME myself and eventually get rid of all the things that annoyed me.  I was in heaven.

Now, I'm building my own arcade cabinet and when all is ready to go I'll compile a personal copy of MAME with all the tweaks I want in order to play all the games I want.

Still, to this day, I will always remember sitting on my bed in my dorm room as I loaded up Mortal Kombat for the first time on my computer.  It was like heaven.  I couldn't believe it, and to this day I still can't.

So how did you all get introduced to MAME and emulation in general?

[polaris]

not as long ago, but i was searching for a way to play pac-land, took me about a year to work out mame

[Jdurg]

not as long ago, but i was searching for a way to play pac-land, took me about a year to work out mame

Ain't that the truth?  MAME is NOT easy to learn, but once you learn the ins and outs it becomes pretty sweet with how much you can customize it.  I remember seeing CPS2 get emulated, and the complete SHOCK when CPS3 was emulated.  Because of the work of some INCREDIBLE decryptors, we've been able to properly emulate both systems and I will be able to play SF1 through SF3 on my cabinet when it's built.  Amazing work.   

[danny_galaga]

it was a dark and stormy night.

hehe. actually a friend showed it to me in 2002 on his laptop. i still cant believe it didnt totally blow me away. the next year after i came back from holidays, the idea had grown on me. when i first started thinking of building a cab, i didnt even know you could buy joysticks and buttons! i was going to make them from scratch 

[MaximRecoil]

I was in Yahoo's Car Chat: 1 chat room in late 2001 talking to the resident computer expert of that room about how I wished/wondered if there was a way to play Punch-Out and Super Punch-Out on the PC. I knew about emulation because I had some of the commercial Atari and Namco Playstation discs, which emulated games like Missile Command and Pac-Man respectively. I didn't think it could happen unless Nintendo themselves, or a commercial company associated with Nintendo did it, and even then I wondered how they would deal with the dual monitor display output of the original games.

At the time I'd only had a PC and internet access for a few months, so everything was still new to me.

Then he said he found something and gave me some links. After he showed me how to work the command-line version of MAME, all of the sudden Punch-Out was displaying on my screen, and then, Super Punch-Out. Not ports, but the actual games. I couldn't believe it. I'd wished for a way to play those games at home since the 80's, and until that point, the SNES version of SPO was the closest I'd gotten.

I own an SPO machine now, along with a PO boardset that I can swap into it, so I don't need MAME for those games anymore, but playing them on MAME is what got me to seriously look into getting the real machine.

[Truecade]

I found out about MAME in a very round about way during college.

I think it was 1996 or 1997 and I was working at the computer lab help desk at college.  We used a free DOS version of a virus scanner called F-Prot to clean all of the MS Word viruses off of people's floppy disks.  (Yeah... those were the days)  One day I decided to go to their web site (the WWW was very new at the time) and download the newest virus definitions.

While I was on the f-prot web site, I looked at some of the employees profiles and happened upon Mikko Hyppönen's page.  Under his hobbies it had "Arcade emulation" and a bunch of links.  So I started following his links and discovered early versions of MAME & Raine and a bunch of other stand-alone emulators for specific games. 

I was amazed the first time I got Galaga working on my 486 DX4-100 back in my dorm room.  I followed MAME off an on for several years but it wasn't until 2003 when I discovered BYOAC that I built my first cabinet.  I have since built and sold around 4 cabinets.  It is a fun hobby.

[TOK]

Did a DejaNews (anyone remember that?) search for Donkey Kong while remembering the good old days, and was playing it by that night. Completely unaware of it, and it blew me away. I discovered it at version .33, whenever that way.

[Games001]

It was just around the fall of 1999 when I first stubbed my virtual toe on MAME.  I was hitting the net in hopes of finding a Midway's Arcade CD and one of the first sites I found had a small note about :

"Play any Arcade Game on your PC!"

So I dove for the idea and had MAME and about 200 games in a matter of hours. (all this at the time of 2MB DSL?!)

Oddly enough it never struck me to consider building an arcade cab for a 'dumped' PC and thus return to my 1980's-1990's once more.

About a week ago I started looking into eBay and such for arcade cabs and then noticed BYOAC.  Needless to say, here I am... leaping headlong into my first Cab Project - KRONOS, the Aeon Project.

This should be one heck of a funny comedy of errors.  

[shardian]

I had "known" about MAME for several years, but always thought "What is the point of running that stuff on the pc. It just wouldn't be right". So instead I went ga-ga for NES emulators. While chatting with a lost friend I had by chance ran into via slickdeals of all places, he sent me a link showing his "MAME cab", and also pointed me to BYOAC. As soon as I saw it, a lightning storm went off in my head  - " So THAT"S why people download MAME". I about went nuts thinking of the possibilities over the next few weeks. That was a little over 2 years ago, and now I have a garage and basement full of arcade crap, and a head full of yet more useless knowledge.

[SavannahLion]

The story varies depending on who in my group of friends you ask, what my mood is, and how bad my memory butchers the facts.

Here's my version.

During my college years, Duke Nukem 3D and Quake matches were all the rage. We were doing LAN parties before any one of us could afford NICS. I remember spending hours fussing with NULL modems getting network games to work. At the time, I was still an AOL baby so I spent hours browsing AwOL file boards looking for free NULL games to play at the parties. Can't tell you how many hours we wasted playing Wacky Wheels.

During one of my browsings on the file boards, someone had uploaded a copy of NESticle with a small blurb about netplay. Since my goal was to find anything to be playable at our NULL parties, I downloaded it and a couple of random ROMs I happened to locate. The emulation was really good on my K6 233.

At some point that week, I showed NESticle (and later Genecyst) to one of my gaming friends. I believe that's when he introduced me to MAME for the first time. For the next month or so, we went on a ROM trading frenzy with me downloading every NES (and Genesis and whatever) ROM I could find and he downloading every MAME ROM he could find (We discovered Go!Zilla around this time I believe). Our NULL modem gaming sessions became NULL modem ROM swapping sessions. The NULL cable was so mind bogglingly ---smurfing--- slow that we would leave our PC's on location for several days swapping each others files.

It wasn't long before we both purchased our first burners.

I would've stayed on the MAME scene, but around '98 or '99, I went on this bizarre righteous tangent where I became all religious about IP rights or some stupid ---Cleveland steamer--- like that. I think I had this crazy idea that if I wanted to become a progammer that I had better respect IP rights lest someone steals my IP. Oi, what the ---fudgesicle--- was I thinking? 

[danny_galaga]

and a head full of yet more useless knowledge.

knowledge is no weight to carry 

[RayB]

Discovered it shortly after it was perfected to play Pac-Man. (1996?)

[ssc arcade]

I was searching for some cabinet plans for our bedroom and found some people sites for their mame cabinets, about 2 month later I was building my cabinet.  I had never even heard of mame or emulators before that.  As soon as I saw mame and what some people had built I had to do it.

[knave]

I first found Mame while searching for freeware for my casio pocket PC in 2000. I had used a few console emulators but just wasn't interested at that time.  Seven years later I played a few namco games on a gameboy and decided I wanted to play them on my PC.  Poof! instant new hobby.  (Thanks to all the information and kind folks on this board)

[DaOld Man]

Two years ago, about a couple weeks before Christmas, a friend told me about this arcade machine that they had bought. I stopped by after work one day to check it out.
It had about 200 or so games on it, and it was set up for one player. He showed me the insides and I saw how it used a un-cased PC and a keyboard hack. He said as many old pcs that I have laying around I should be able to make one. (I work on PCs and build my own.) He gave me the email of the guy that built it for him. After a few emails, I found myself googling all sorts of things such as Mame.
The summer after that first encounter, I built my first mame machine.

[btp2k2]

It was about 1997 or '98. I was discovering emulators in general (WOW! I can play Zelda on my computer? Awwwww!) and ran a Lycos search for "Emulators" and found the old mame.dk site. It was like I died and went to heaven. I downloaded my first version of mame32.....0.30 or something like that.....and then downloaded a bunch of roms and never looked back.

[Mr Wilson]

mine was in 1996 i was working in a body piecing studio and one of my  friends brought his pc in and hooked it up to the net and we were talking about old arcade games so he did a search and found out about mame manged to get it sorted and played robocop and return of the jedi took ages what with the old dial up connection we was in there till about midnight! been using mame on my pc now again but finally built my first cab about 3 months ago and haven't looked back its great

[tommy]

I first came here to find out the best way to make a CP for a real cab I was making better ( mirrored CP), I then found out that I did not need to bother with PCB's and could just play any game I wanted. I would just need to have the PCB to make it all legal like but I did not have to bother plugging and unplugging jamma boards all day long. 

[Glaine]

took me about a year to work out mame

Yeah, back when I first found out about it, everything else was using GUIs pretty exclusively and I didn't even think about it wanting command line stuff. So when I clicked mame and a black box blinked and nothing happened, I didn't know what to make of it.

[SNAAKE]

I was looking for pictures of "cadillacs and dinosaurs" on aol search and found the "kalus" emulator and it actually ran the game perfectly. for a brief moment I thought it was a dream or something but I WASNT !!

then I found mame but playing with keyboard sucked so I was searching for custom joysticks too and found this site and rest is history. build many many sticks and bunch of cabinets too

this was YEARS ago..back when there was like maybe 200ish projects on BYOAC example page.