Design
The MAME core coordinates the emulation of several elements at the same time. These elements replicate the behavior of the hardware present in the original arcade machines. MAME can emulate many different central processing units (CPUs), both in number or types, including processors, audio and video specific chips, integrated circuits, microcontrollers, etc., including the needed elements for them to communicate together such as memory regions, RAM, data buses, peripherals, storage devices, etc. These elements are virtualized so MAME acts as a software layer between the original program of the game, and the platform MAME runs on.
MAME supports arbitrary screen resolutions, refresh rates and display configurations. Multiple emulated monitors, as required by for example Darius, are supported as well.
Individual arcade systems are specified by drivers which take the form of C macros. These drivers specify the individual components to be emulated and how they communicate with each other. While MAME was originally written in C, the need for object oriented programming caused the development team to begin to compile all code as C++ for MAME 0.136, taking advantage of additional features of that language in the process.
Although a great majority of the CPU emulation cores are interpretive, MAME also supports dynamic recompilation through an intermediate language called the Universal Machine Language (UML) to increase the emulation speed. Back-end targets supported are x86 and x64. A C backend is also available to further aid verification of the correctness. CPUs emulated in this manner are SH-2, MIPS R3000 and PowerPC.
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