MAME

Free and open-source emulator that reproduces the hardware of arcade machines, consoles, computers and other systems, written to preserve them rather than to run games conveniently. It is licensed GPL-2.0-or-later as a whole, with per-file licences retained. Discovered here because VES embeds it.

MAME matters to this spoke for a reason that has nothing to do with games: its drivers cover musical instruments. Emulating a Yamaha TX81Z or an Akai S3000 is the same job as emulating an arcade board — a CPU, sound chips, a memory map and the machine's own ROM — and MAME has been doing it long enough that a plug-in maker can now treat the emulation layer as a dependency rather than a project.

That makes it the substrate under firmware-emulation, and the reason VES's accuracy is not VES's to claim: the instrument sounds as good as the upstream driver, and driver completeness varies per machine.

Connections

• embedded (patched, version 0.289) by vintage-emulator-studio
• the mechanism behind firmware-emulation

Related

vintage-emulator-studio · firmware-emulation · autodafe · vintage-recreation