Last month, on 4 March 2016, I heard that the MAME (formerly Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) emulator has become free and open source software, starting with Git revision 35ccf865aa366845b574e1fdbc71c4866b3d6a0f and version 0.172. Official news:
http://mamedev.org/?p=422Current source code repository:
https://github.com/mamedev/mameCurrent release (as of this writing):
0.172The MAME project as a whole is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, 2 (GPL-2.0) [or a later version of that license], since it contains code made available under multiple GPL-compatible licenses. A great majority of files (over 90% including core files) are under the BSD-3-Clause License and we would encourage new contributors to distribute files under this license.
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Starting with version 0.162, the MESS (Multi Emulator Super System) project has been merged with MAME, so now this project not only emulates arcade game machines but also some vintage computers, video game consoles and calculators.
On this page,
http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/PluginPacbox, the license info for MAME should be changed to reflect the new license change. If porting will take place soon:
- I suggest the port being named "mamebox".
- When the user launches it, it shall display a list of available drivers for the user to select and run.
- There should be a menu to display some information about each driver, accessible with another button or by long-pressing on one.
I know that not all of the machines supported by this project can be emulated well on the lower-end CPUs (the audio players that Rockbox run on), so if there will be port of this emulator, some drivers will have to be cherry-picked (most likely some 1970s and 1980s game machines) in order for the emulator to be usable on as many Rockbox targets as possible.
I'm just relaying this license change to all of you, to spread the news. I hope that this change can spark some development work in the near future, and perhaps bring support to more games.