MAME

MAME (full name Multi Arcade Machine Emulator) is an emulation suite for Arcade Games. The project aims to faithfully reproduce the games using the original game data, while emulating the hardware on a general-purpose PC. MAME has spawned a sister project, MESS, which targets emulation of games consoles and old computers, and which shares significant portions of the MAME source code and uses the MAME distribution licence.

The MAME developers focus on accurate emulation so that MAME can help to archive the entertainment from the arcade gaming era from the 1970s to the present. The source code also doubles as documentation for the hardware of these old systems. To date, MAME supports nearly 4000 unique games.

MAME updates roughly every couple of months, and sometimes has inbetween releases that fix critical bugs. The program can be downloaded from the official site. http://mamedev.org/