Recently an iOS app appeared on Apple's App Store, which brought the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME) to iOS devices. That app lasted just a few days before it was pulled from Apple's store. Luckily Google engineers had much less of a problem with the idea of MAME and helped to get it running in Google's Chrome browser.
The idea behind MAME is pretty straight forward. The emulator allows arcade classics to be played on whatever device can run the emulator. The issue is that most of the ROMS you want to play via MAME are copyrighted, which is likely why Apple wasn't comfortable with keeping the app on their App Store.
The emulator itself isn't illegal and there are a decent number of ROMs out there that don't have any copyright issues and are totally legal to play by anyone.
Google engineer Robert Muth spent the time getting MAME up and running on Google Chrome and he did a nice post detailing the trials and challenges encountered along the way. The entire project took Muth about four days and his post is super detailed if you are into that sort of thing. He summed up the port by saying it required 1200 diff'd lines and changes to 20 total files. The whole post is definitely worth going through if you have an interest in the technical side of the port.
If you want to get MAME up and running on your version of Chrome, it's a pretty simple thing to do. One of the copyright free games, Robby Roto, is available in the Chrome Web Store right now. That should install MAME along with the ROM for that particular game. If you happen to have other ROMs lying around that you want to play in Chrome, there is a simple interface allowing you to upload those ROMs into the MAME client.
Any of you guys still interested in MAME? Will you give this a try in Chrome? Let us know in the comments.
