MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator)

MAME's website "documents the hardware and software of arcade games" from the 1970s on (excerpted from the Charles Babbage Institute's website). 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.... MAME is strictly a non-profit project. Its main purpose is to be a reference to the inner workings of the emulated arcade machines. This is done both for educational purposes and for preservation purposes, in order to prevent many historical games from disappearing forever once the hardware they run on stops working... All of MAME's source code is either our own or freely available" (excerpted from MAME's website).