Over time, MAME has incorporated similar projects out of a necessity to keep development active and prevent duplication of work (as some arcade machines often shared hardware with consoles to ease development of games) the first project to be merged was MESS at the end of May 2015 starting with version 0.162 and it functioned almost exactly like MAME but for home consoles and other esoteric devices that never got emulated elsewhere. Much like the name says, MAME was supposed to be for arcade machines like Pac-Man back when it was released in 1997. In the event you don't like MAME's own interface, there are many alternative frontends available. MAME is incredibly large, supporting thousands of machines and ROM sets, though what is supported is not what's playable your mileage may vary. The philosophy behind the project is to recreate the workings of machines through emulation, and thus the ability to actually play the games is 'a nice side effect'.
MAME (originally an acronym for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) is a multi-platform, open-source, multi-system emulator written in C++.
