Game · Consoles, homebrew & emulation

MAME

MAME is a multi-purpose emulation framework.

Completely free
Windows and Linux
Open source

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Download from the official source

Link to the official download page, ad-supported (Clictune): an intermediate page may show for a few seconds. Direct link to the download

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Geographic availability: No geographic restriction found in our sources; availability is not checked country by country.

Technical details

Pricing: Completely freeconfirmed by Flathub
License: GPL-2.0+ — Open source (copyleft)confirmed by Flathub
Open source: Yes
Commercial use: Yesconfirmed by Flathub
Account required: not documented
Credit card required: Noconfirmed by Flathub
Watermark: Not applicable
Ads: not documented
Platforms: Windows and LinuxEstablished by Linux: Flathub · Windows: Winget
Publisher: MAMEDev and contributors
Latest version: 0.289 (31 July 2026)
Latest activity: 31 July 2026
Source code: github.com/mamedev/mame

At a glance

All of MAME is free: no feature is locked behind a paid plan, and its code is open.

Its licence (GPL-2.0+) is a copyleft open source licence: you may use, study, modify and redistribute it, including commercially; modified versions must keep the same licence.

Strengths

Open source code
Commercial use allowed

About

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.

Description from Flathub — AppStream (Flathub)

Sources and checks

Facts collected from Flathub (credit card, source code, publisher, licence, free status, platforms, commercial use, version) — 10 November 2026
Facts collected from Winget (Windows Package Manager) (source code, publisher, platforms, version) — 6 November 2026
Last technical check: 6 November 2026
Description from Flathub — AppStream (Flathub)

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