Home Page Forums MAME MAME The name of MAME... (more than Arcade)

To unknowing people, MAME has still the reputation of being only some kind of piracy tool for strange freaks playing outdated arcade games instead of paying for proper new game apps.

But not least since the join with MESS it has become much more than just an arcade emulator, and particularly the scientific research and culture preservation aspect is barely transported by its current abbreviation.

MAME = "Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator"

The name MAME should stay as the well known brand, but the backronym should change into something serious that reflects the strive for scientific accuracy and preservation of knowledge about simulating the inner working of all kinds of digital (and some analogue) hardware to emulate historical software as an archeological task. It is more like walking a round in a big virtual computer museum - a cabinet of wonders to explore and try out all kinds of miraculous cyberage artifacts those seemed long time forgotten to modern people and doomed to bitrot if not saved. Recreating everything from the earliest electronic brains to PDA, CGI render machines, music keyboards, industrial controllers, LCD games to chess computers and talking calculators it approaches to cover the whole world of everything that no commercial gaming oriented emulator would ever bother to care about. Some use it for data recovery or analysis of ancient microcontroller code at universities for things very unrelated to arcade games. So the general purpose platform and aspired scientific quality standard of MAME should be expressed by the abbreviation.

So I suggest something like this:

"Multi-Architecture Museum-grade Emulator"
"Multi-platform Archeological Museum-quality Emulator"
"Multi-platform Archeology by Museum-grade Emulation"
"Manifold Archeological Museum-grade Emulator"

Well it may still sound a bit meaningless. So here are some word suggestions sorted by letter. You may swap both "M" for more variants. The word "arcade" was omitted on purpose.

1. M

multi-

multi-platform
multi-purpose
multifunctional
manifold

2. A

-
architecture

archeological
archeology
accurate
analytic
aspiring

3. M

museum-grade
museum-quality
museal
memorial

4. E

emulator
emulation


If you have better ideas, further suggestions are welcome.

I don't know where you get that "MAME is just a piracy tool"-idea from

It's just a name. It does not have to mean anything. MAME can stand for itself these days. It's like people claiming that the version number should be 1.xx because somehow 1.xx means something else than 0.xx...

Yes, maybe MAME could use a better name, I don't know. But trying to invent some funny backronym to make MAME more popular is probably not the way to go here

I mean the public image of MAME when mentioned in computer magazines (those generally tend to be (c)-trolls in fear of deterring their own paying advertisement sponsors). I do not try to make a fun of the name MAME at all, but in the opposite suggest to make it more serious/respectable because (unlike e.g. Linux) most don't consider it as a research and cultural heritage preservation project, but rather something embarrassing they don't want to get associated with. (Or have you ever e.g. heard a culture minister on TV positively speaking about MAME?) The situation is still much like when in 1980th acid house was more considered "a synthetic noise designed to further drug abuse" than a respected type of music, or when graffiti was mostly considered vandalism rather than art.

We’ve been through this before – it’s just “MAME”, it doesn’t need a backronym. The Connecticut Leather Company didn’t see a need to backronym CoLeCo, GEICO isn’t the Government Employees Insurance Company any more, EPCOT never became the Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow, 3M isn’t really Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing any more. They’re just names now.

I thought it meant "MAME is A Multi-Emulator" or something along those lines :-D

Pretty sure it is Mutilating All Martian Enemies...

I used to support a software suite called GAP... General Accounting Package... NOONE called it that. Then they called it TechGAP... not sure what it is called today (and don't really care because that was 23 years ago)

Mame is established no point in changing it unless you want to lose all goodwill / cred and start from scratch.

Unless of course you want to go with some funky symbol and be known as the Emulator formally known as Mame...

Maybe "More than Arcade - Museum-quality Emulation". (IMO not precise enough. This sounds like an ad.)

It was not meant as a rant. I am only fed up with the hypocrisy with that official media treat MAME. When computer magazines e.g. report about a home arcade cabinet DIY project (again the cliche...), in best case they mention that MAME exists "because" a dozen of legal roms can be played on it (and warn not to try out anything else). In worse case they will instead refer to a homebrew pacman clone in python as the purpose this cabinet was built for. This is like reviewing a vibrator as "facial massage rod", and despite its special shape with clitoral stimulation mechanism, nobody dares to mention such features nor that a clitoris even exists.

Culture (like a pot plant) is not preserved by locking away into a safe for some 100 years until copyright expires. It's the same lordly attitude with that colonial museums locked away first nation's artifacts without ever minding to ask the natives. Culture belongs to the people those live it, not those sell it! For the human right of culture preservation we need at minimum clear and unambiguous abandonware laws.

When the Duchess Anna Amalia Library burned (leaving thousand ancient books burnt, scorched and soaked with quench water), everybody screamed about the irreplaceable loss of cultural goods, and how badly the nation needs document emergency task forces with scientific specialists to handle archive disasters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duchess_Anna_Amalia_Library

Same kind of uproar when islamists destroyed archeological sites and museums and blasted Palmyra to pieces. But about the ongoing silent culturocide by bitrot and daily disposal of electronic artifacts as e-waste nobody seems to care. May be this is partially result of new-goods lobbyists trying hard to distract from anything "outdated" to push sale of new products. Of course you unlikely get jailed just for reviewing historical MAME games on Youtube, but to official culture ambassadors, talking about emulators still has the embarrassing smell like decades ago graffiti was argued that something that relies on vandalism and hence formally crime can not be art or culture. Who fights to change this? MAME does not have found its Banksy yet.

For culture preservation in cyberage, MAME is as essential and necessary as the existence of national libraries and museums. Emulation of abandonware needs the same kind of officially respected visibility like the LGBT-something community. Talk in social media is not enough to escape the closet (or arcade cabinet?). That's why I appeal for a better acronym to stress the scientific and archeological nature of the project.

Thanks for another rant and a pointless history lesson.

You're barking at the wrong tree. You keep complaining about how the media "treats" or "represents" MAME, and you seem to think that this is MAME's fault.... And that it would all magically solve it self up if you create some funny backronym for MAME. Spoiler alert: It is not, and it would not.

Take your rants to the "media" and complain there. The "Duchess Anna Amalia Library" didn't burn down because it was not named "Library of Cultural History that Needs To Be Preserved For Fucks Sake".

I agree that digital culture is lost very easily, particularly with copyright law being the way it is, DRM, the move to streaming rather than buying media and so on. However, renaming MAME isn’t going to change anything. If you want to make a difference, lobby for copyright reform, or support a political party that does.

We're not changing the name. Period.