![]() The free-for-all on labels in software lists is not working. There's no consistency, labels are getting excessively long, people are starting to use non-ASCII characters in labels making it harder for others to type them when manipulating files on the command line, and there's too much markup being put in labels. The length limit is 127 characters, same as for labels in MAME itself. This should be long enough to be descriptive. Remember that the Win32 path limit is 260 characters, and many applications and frameworks have issues with longer paths, including Windows Explorer and the .NET framework. Labels are used as filenames, so concessions need to be made for this. I have not abbreviated excessively long labels myself - they're currently causing 135 validity errors. Someone else can fix them. Printable ASCII characters are allowed, with a few exceptions. The exceptions are limited to characters most likely to cause issues for interactive shells and scripts: * ! - csh event substitution (very difficult to escape properly) * $ - sh varibale expansion * % - csh job control, cmd variable expansion * / - UNIX directory separator * : - sh path separator, Windows drive qualifier * \ - sh escape, Windows directory separator Most of the labels that had to be edited were using ! for markup, or using ! and % for titles in labels. Strangely, titles in labels are often forced to lower case, despite this never being enforced for software lists. There are also various other edits to titles used for labels, such as moving articles to the end (with or without a comma), or replacing spaces with underscores. As I already said, there's no consistency at all. There is far too much markup in labels. They're even being used for notes in some cases (e.g. at least one case where a dumper's name is in the label). The XML schema supports metadata - use it. For example, you can use part_id for an unrestricted display name for a software part. You can also use XML comments for notes. And while on the topic of metadata, vgmplay.xml is putting the same thing in the part_id as well as the label. The part_id should have the actual title, not the title mangled to make it more suitable for use as a filename. Addressing this would be a lot of work, given how large the file is. For now, empty data areas in software lists cause a verbose message rather than a validation warning. There are thousands of software lists using empty data areas to indicate the size/width of cartridge RAM/EEPROM/etc. |
||
---|---|---|
3rdparty | ||
android-project | ||
artwork | ||
benchmarks | ||
bgfx | ||
ctrlr | ||
docs | ||
doxygen | ||
hash | ||
hlsl | ||
ini | ||
keymaps | ||
language | ||
plugins | ||
projects | ||
regtests | ||
roms | ||
samples | ||
scripts | ||
src | ||
tests | ||
web | ||
.appveyor.yml | ||
.drone.sec | ||
.drone.yml | ||
.gitattributes | ||
.gitignore | ||
.travis.yml | ||
COPYING | ||
dist.mak | ||
makefile | ||
README.md | ||
uismall.bdf |
MAME
Build status for tiny build only, containing just core parts of project:
OS/Compiler | Status |
---|---|
Linux GCC / OSX Clang | |
Windows MinGW | |
Windows MSVC |
Static analysis status for entire build (except for third-party parts of project):
What is MAME?
MAME is a multi-purpose emulation framework.
MAME's purpose is to preserve decades of software history. As electronic technology continues to rush forward, MAME prevents this important "vintage" software from being lost and forgotten. This is achieved by documenting the hardware and how it functions. The source code to MAME serves as this documentation. The fact that the software is usable serves primarily to validate the accuracy of the documentation (how else can you prove that you have recreated the hardware faithfully?). Over time, MAME (originally stood for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) absorbed the sister-project MESS (Multi Emulator Super System), so MAME now documents a wide variety of (mostly vintage) computers, video game consoles and calculators, in addition to the arcade video games that were its initial focus.
How to compile?
If you're on a *NIX or OSX system, it could be as easy as typing
make
for a MAME build,
make SUBTARGET=arcade
for an arcade-only build, or
make SUBTARGET=mess
for MESS build.
See the Compiling MAME page on our documentation site for more information, including prerequisites for Mac OS X and popular Linux distributions.
For recent versions of OSX you need to install Xcode including command-line tools and SDL 2.0.
For Windows users, we provide a ready-made build environment based on MinGW-w64.
Visual Studio builds are also possible, but you still need build environment based on MinGW-w64. In order to generate solution and project files just run:
make vs2017
or use this command to build it directly using msbuild
make vs2017 MSBUILD=1
Where can I find out more?
- Official MAME Development Team Site (includes binary downloads, wiki, forums, and more)
- Official MESS Wiki
- MAME Testers (official bug tracker for MAME and MESS)
Contributing
Coding standard
MAME source code should be viewed and edited with your editor set to use four spaces per tab. Tabs are used for initial indentation of lines, with one tab used per indentation level. Spaces are used for other alignment within a line.
Some parts of the code follow Allman style; some parts of the code follow K&R style -- mostly depending on who wrote the original version. Above all else, be consistent with what you modify, and keep whitespace changes to a minimum when modifying existing source. For new code, the majority tends to prefer Allman style, so if you don't care much, use that.
All contributors need to either add a standard header for license info (on new files) or inform us of their wishes regarding which of the following licenses they would like their code to be made available under: the BSD-3-Clause license, the LGPL-2.1, or the GPL-2.0.
License
The MAME project as a whole is made available under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later (GPL-2.0+), since it contains code made available under multiple GPL-compatible licenses. A great majority of the source files (over 90% including core files) are made available under the terms of the 3-clause BSD License, and we would encourage new contributors to make their contributions available under the terms of this license.
Please note that MAME is a registered trademark of Gregory Ember, and permission is required to use the "MAME" name, logo, or wordmark.

Copyright (C) 1997-2020 MAMEDev and contributors
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2, as provided in
docs/legal/GPL-2.0.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT
ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for
more details.
Please see COPYING for more details.