No Room For An Arcade? Check Out MacMAME! July 3rd, 2000 MacMAME 0.37b4 (Freeware) The MAME Team Now that you've checked out our recent Catakig review, and gotten your fill of Apple ][ emulation, you may be wondering if there are any other platforms your trusty Mac can emulate. Fortunately, many classic arcade games used chips like the 6502 (found in the Apple ][) 6809, Z80, 8080 and 68K series, all popular chips at the time. It stands to reason that if you could emulate these and other chips used by the game (such as sound generation) you're ready to play. This is exactly what MacMAME does. To play a game, you need to get the ROM file. This assumes that you have the actual arcade machine available to you, and know how to download the ROM contents to a file. If you don't have the tools to do this, or your house burned down, there are many friendly sites on the Internet which contain backup copies of these ROM files. Of course you must agree to be the legal owner of the ROM before being able to download it. An Arcade in Your Mac Although our own Idiots extolled the virtues of MacMAME in a 1998 piece, there have been many updates since then, making MacMAME worth another look. The most significant is a plug-in architecture for selecting the rendering engine. In addition to using built-in software rendering, there is support for several other methods, such as ATI RAGE, Glide (3dfx) and RAVE. Any of these should look better and/or offer better performance than the built-in rendering engine. There are some other great features which take this above and beyond the original games. When showing a list of your ROM files, you can sort them by year, manufacturer, or genre. For the curious, you can see what processor and sound chip the original game used. For those who want to capture their exploits for all to see, you can take a screen snapshot. In keeping with the times, screen snapshots support the newer PNG image format. MacMAME also supports InputSprocket, so you should be able to use just about any input device to play games. Have any other Mac OS Gadgets you'd like us to look at? Let John know via e-mail, or share it with the rest of us in the Mac Gadget Forum.