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Part 0: The Beginning
M.A.M.E. — the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, in case you didn't already know — is a project that is near and dear to my heart. I grew up in the classic video games era, and spent many hours of my youth playing games at the local 7-11, or at the Putt Putt Arcade. Arcade games also motivated me to learn how to write computer software so that I could program my own games.
I discovered emulation back in 1996, when a couple of Apple II emulators started making the rounds in the Macintosh community. I was intrigued also by a program called Stella, which was an emulator that ran the classic Atari 2600 cartridges. I contacted the author of Stella, and asked if I could be in charge of porting it to the Mac. Thus was born the Macintosh port of Stella, currently maintained by John Stiles.
About a year later, I finally came across MacMAME, the Macintosh port of MAME. I was astounded: here was the real, original game code for all the games I grew up with, running on my Mac! Of course, at the time (early 1997), the number of games supported was just a handful, but soon my path was revealed. I suddenly realized that I really didn't care much at all about any kind of console or computer emulation. The only reason I wanted to see consoles or computers emulated was to gain access to the better arcade ports. But now I suddenly had a way to play the real arcade games on my computer! I was in heaven.
What follows is an attempt to describe my involvment with the MAME project. I hope you'll find it interesting. It may take a while to document everything, but keep checking back for more updates. Eventually I'll get through it!
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