"By far the greatest and most important piece of videogaming code ever written."

Those were the words, chums, of this very reporter, spoken about the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (or MAME to its friends) when interviewed by formerly-interesting videogames magazine Edge about it all the way back in October 2002. Created in early 1997, MAME rose from humble beginnings as a Pac-Man emulator created by teenage Italian coder Nicola Salmoria, and immediately started to grow at an exponential rate. Within a few short months the number of games it ran had eclipsed the previous gold standard in arcade emulation, Dave Spicer's Sparcade, and MAME streaked off into the distance without a backwards glance. At the time of writing, the emulator supports well over 5,000 different ROM sets, and over 3,000 distinct games - a very substantial proportion of the entire history of arcade gaming.

It's a little bit surprising, then (to him, certainly), that your correspondent will never be downloading another update of MAME again.