MAME stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. MAME is an emulator application designed to recreate the hardware of arcade game systems in software, with the intent of preserving gaming history and preventing vintage games from being lost or forgotten. 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. MAME is cross platform.