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MAME stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. When used in conjunction with images of the original arcade game's ROM and disk data, MAME attempts to reproduce that game as faithfully as possible on a more modern general-purpose computer. MAME can currently emulate several thousand different classic arcade video games from the late 1970s through the modern era.

After seeing the PATHETIC effort Namco made in emulating Mappy for the PC, running under winslows'95 it was terrible. I decided it was about time someone wrote a decent Namco emulation ( for purely educational uses by owners of the original game boards ). Having already learned 6809 assembly programming, through another project, I figured that writing a simulator in x86 assembler wouldn't be a big deal, well the 6809's hardly got any registers and only a small number of instructions ( I think it's like 79 total).

So after a little coding, and a lot of debuggering, the 6809 simulator lived, a few days after that 'hey presto' the Mappy emulator was born! Unlike the official Namco release, which when run on a Pentium Pro @233MHz ( yes I overclock ) only manages 96% original game speed ( or only 31% if the screen is maximized ), mine achieves 100% speed of the original, even on an old Pentium 90 !!

The emulator was coded over a period of about 6 weeks, during the months of May to June. I was looking for something else to do rather than actually complete PC*Bert. The first release of the emulator was at the San Diego Classic Arcade party, have a look at some pictures from that event here http://www.spies.com/arcade/photos/index4.html

After getting the first version out, which were stand alone programs, I decided it'd be a good idea to merge them into one program. The core program can support multiple games, the specifics of each game are handled by a custom 'driver' to emulate the particular hardware. All emulated game share the 'core' routines which handle things like 6809 emulation, sound generation, sprite and text drawing.