While you’re free to use MAME in such a fashion to launch your games, various programmers over the years have, thankfully, whipped up a more user-friendly interface or two. MAME is, by default, a command-line tool. You can read more about the history and current development of MAME here. What started as a bid to preserve old hardware and games like Pac-Man and Missile Command has grown into a highly developed project with monthly releases and support for emulation of hundreds of arcade-cabinet hardware configurations and thousands of games. Salmoria passed the coding torch and a series of directors have maintained the project with the help of thousands of programmers from around the world.

MAME was originally the brain child of Nicola Salmoria and released in 1997 as a way to combat the slow disappearance of vintage arcade games. Much like there are emulation programs that allow you to play old console games on modern hardware, MAME allows you to play old arcade games on modern hardware. MAME stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulation. MAMEUI64 and Xpadder/Joy2Key are all portable and can be tucked on a USB drive for gaming fun on the road.

The three optional items will come into play if you wish to easily map your joysticks/game controllers to the arcade emulator (see our guide to setting up an Xbox360 controller with Windows using Xpadder) and/or if you wish to make it a portable system.

Arcade or Game Controller (Variable price).

Public-Domain Arcade ROMs for testing (Free).

For this tutorial, you’ll need a small number of free items and potentially a few option items if you want to go the extra mile with your arcade emulation.

Arcade emulator