In an era where even the Xbox 360 can be emulated on capable Android phones the size of our palms, one would think that recreating an old arcade game is just as easy, if not effortless, on modern tech. That assumption, however, falls apart pretty quickly.
Some of the games we can throw at an emulator today are decades old, run on hardware that looks primitive by modern standards, and somehow, they still manage to be far more troublesome than you’d expect.
But when you look at what MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) has actually been doing for the better part of three decades, the rabbit hole gets considerably deeper. When it comes to arcade hardware, “old” and “simple” are very different things, and many people find that out the hard way.
Your arcade ROM running doesn’t mean you’re accurately emulating the arcade machine
The difference is something you can actually feel
We’ve all been there — we’ve downloaded — or transferred a legally acquired — arcade ROM, fired up MAME, and then watched a game boot without any errors. That’s where anyone would assume that the hard part is over, since the game loads, the graphics look right, and the controller works, too. In truth, an arcade game can be playable without its emulator accurately reproducing the machine it originally ran on.
That arcade cabinet you might have played on in your childhood, though, wasn’t just a big box with a big screen and a single ROM inside. The software expected a particular CPU, memory layout, graphics hardware, sound hardware, input system, and, above all, timing behavior. If an emulator gets one of those details wrong, the game still runs, but something will always feel off, even if subtly. You might notice sound behaving incorrectly or being off its timing, the inputs from your controller could respond differently, or some timing-sensitive behavior could end up breaking an arcade game.
And some of what made these machines feel the way they did was never really digital to begin with. Many cabinets didn’t have an ordinary screen, and instead drew their graphics on vector monitors (think games like Asteroids and Tempest). Instead of painting pixels, the beam traced shapes directly, and no amount of accurate code will ever make a modern flat panel behave that way.
Then there are elements like the trackballs, the light guns, the force-feedback steering wheels, and the phosphor CRT glow. An emulator can very well reproduce the board inside the cabinet, all while handing you none of the supplementary parts that were equally important to the full experience.
MAME’s job isn’t an easy one
Countless moving parts it has to account for
If you’ve been an arcade emulation enthusiast, or know someone who is, you know very well that calling arcade emulation “weird” isn’t an understatement at all. Since there was never one standardized piece of “arcade hardware” for developers to target, manufacturers just built bespoke machines around individual games. Then, they packed those machines with different CPUs, sound chips, graphics hardware, and custom logic to best support the game they built it around.
That’s what makes MAME’s job so tough, since it doesn’t have to emulate a console that’s somehow called “arcade” and is a one-size-fits-all solution. It has the burden of trying to emulate an entire industry’s worth of increasingly strange computers.
By contrast, every Super Nintendo is (give or take) the same Super Nintendo with the same CPU, memory map, graphics, and sound hardware across every unit. If you get one machine right, you’ve effectively got the entire library, because every cartridge was written to run on those exact parts. A console is a single, fixed target that thousands of games were all built to aim at, so emulating it successfully once means that you’re pretty much done until the next generation of that console.
Emulation gets harder when you stop accepting approximations
MAME has spent 30 years proving that “working” isn’t the same as “accurate”
MAME began in 1997 as a relatively small project, but its ambition quickly became much larger than simply getting old arcade games running on modern PCs. Every new machine added another piece of hardware to understand, document, and reproduce, and that distinction has shaped the project for decades.
MAME’s progress hasn’t just meant adding more ROMs to a compatibility list. Developers have, over the years, continually updated the software with more accurate representations of the hardware underneath. However, since it’s an ever-ongoing task, a game that already “worked” can still require years of development to emulate properly.
That makes MAME less like a conventional emulator and more like an enormous reverse-engineering project. Its developers have to engage in a frankly unhealthy amount of detective work to reconstruct how those machines used to behave.
Mention Capcom’s CPS-2 boards around any emulator developer, and you can watch them wince in real time. To stop bootleggers, Capcom encrypted the games and stashed the decryption key in a sliver of battery-backed memory. This meant that when the battery eventually went flat, the key would vanish, and the board would stop working altogether. A dead battery broke the cabinet and took the game itself to the grave, and nobody outside Capcom had the key. As such, it took years before the encryption was fully cracked and folded into MAME, and only then were those games actually safe.
Other machines guard their secrets in silicon rather than software, and that’s where things get almost absurdly physical. When a game’s behavior is locked inside a custom chip with no surviving documentation, developers have resorted to a process called decapping. They literally dissolve the chip’s outer casing with acid to expose the bare silicon underneath, then photograph the circuitry under a microscope and painstakingly reconstruct its logic by eye.
Even the reward is laughably small. Cracking a PlayStation 2 would eventually lead to unlocking thousands of games, while going through those extreme lengths for one arcade chip rescues maybe a handful of titles, or even just one.
Arcade emulation may never actually be finished
Preservation doesn’t have a finish line
Truth be told, there may never come a point in time where MAME can put its feet up and finally declare arcade emulation as “finished.” New discoveries can reveal undocumented hardware behavior, obscure board revisions, custom chips, protection systems, or peripherals that an existing emulation simply approximated.
Even a game that has been playable for years can still have another layer of accuracy waiting to be uncovered. That matters because the original machines aren’t getting any easier to study. Arcade boards fail, documentation disappears, and hardware that once sat in thousands of cabinets becomes increasingly scarce.
MAME is therefore preserving more than games; it is preserving knowledge about machines that could eventually become impossible to examine firsthand. Since the goalposts keep moving with each new discovery, MAME’s greatest achievement may ultimately be that it turns disappearing machines into something future generations can actually understand, test, and experience.
The strange beauty of preserving machines we can no longer buy
It’s astonishing to see that machines built for shopping malls decades ago can still have more quirks and be tougher to reproduce on modern hardware than a top-of-the-line console from just a single generation ago. We tend to think of emulation as a convenience, but the deeper you go, the more it starts to look like digital archaeology.
It is genuinely impossible to not find MAME fascinating. It’s keeping pieces of computing history from becoming footnotes, and considering how quickly old hardware disappears, that may very well be the most important thing an emulator can do.
