MAME roms download for the Arcade video game emulator

I am 45 years old. In 1997 I discovered the MAME emulator and video game roms for arcade games spread over several other fan pages. Nicola Salmoria and The MAME Team had this great idea on December 24th 1996 to create an emulator for the famous arcade games found in arcades in the late 70's to today.

The idea behind MAME is educational purposes and to prevent many historical games from sinking into oblivion once the hardware they run on stops working. Of course to preserve the games, you must also be able to actually play them; you can consider that a nice side effect." (taken from the readme.txt file).

Legal issues

You are not allowed to distribute MAME in any form if you sell, advertise, or publicize illegal CD-ROMs or other media containing ROM images. This restriction applies even if you don't make money, directly or indirectly, from those activities. You are allowed to make ROMs and MAME available for download on the same website, but only if you warn users about the ROMs's copyright status, and make it clear that users must not download ROMs unless they are legally entitled to do so.

If you really like playing these games then you might like the authentic feeling that playing on an arcade machine can bring that can't be reproduced on your PC. Standing at the cabinet, using the microswitch joystick and buttons, looking at the arcade monitor. Nothing beats this.

You can actually build your own, using woodworking skills or you can buy from companies the various parts that you need, like the marquees that display the name of the game to the sideart that is displayed on the side. These cabinets can contain either an original Jamma harness (for attaching real arcade boards) or a computer so you can run MAME on the cabinet.

Some games need audio samples. The games will run without samples but then miss certain or all sounds. Samples are kept in another directory than the roms. Keep that in mind because otherwise you might overwrite a rom with its sample.

Below you find my favorite game roms for download.

(Due to massive spamming and ignorancy against spam by (most?) Korean/Taiwanese/Chinese postmasters I do not accept any mails from this area)

Sort by alphabetical order

So you like Arcade game emulation? If you like to discuss about MAME games with other nerds, or have questions, feel free to join the Java chat, or use an IRC client and join at irc.foreverchat.net the channel #pleasuredome. If you use latter you need to register a nickname on that server.