Contributing to MAME

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MAME is strictly a not-for-profit project that has been written with the help of hundreds of people around the world. Contributions are always welcome in the form of testing, technical information, and source code submissions.

Testing

Probably the easiest way to help out is to test the games in MAME. Many developers are not particularly strong game players, and quite often have not thoroughly tested a game from beginning to end looking for issues. If you are playing a game and notice something wrong, please report bugs to MAMETesters. Make sure you are running the most recent intermediate update and are only using the official command-line version of MAME before submitting reports.

Technical Information

If you are the owner of one or more games or game PCBs and are interested in helping out, there are several ways you can do so:

  • You can run MAME side-by-side with your PCB to look for graphics, sound, or gameplay issues. If you find any issues, please report them to MAMETesters.
  • You can make detailed notes of all the components on your PCB, including part numbers, locations, and labels. This information can then be added to the source code for future reference.
  • If you have an EPROM programmer, you can read the ROMs from your PCB to see if they are a match for what is currently supported in MAME, or if they are an alternate revision. Use mame -romident to identify ROM images that are dumped.
  • If you own a PCB for a game that doesn't currently work in MAME, let us know, especially if you have an EPROM programmer. We can potentially work with you by asking you to run tests on the game to help us get it up and running.

Source Code Submissions

If you're handy with C and want to help out, there are several ways you can do so. Source code submissions from outside developers are welcome. In fact, many of the more unexpected improvements to MAME come from folks who are not "official" MAME devs.

There is a whole page dedicated to how to submit source code changes to MAME. Check it out.

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