The end of MacMAME.net

Video Game Ramblings

Entry posted by Nathan Strum January 9, 2008

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For nearly ten years, I ran a website originally called MacMAME News and Info. After a couple of years, I bought a domain name, and it became MacMAME.net.

MacMAME was the Mac version of MAME - the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. A fantastic piece of software that allows you to play thousands of classic (and not-so-classic) arcade games on your home computer. I say "was" since even though MAME is certainly still around, MacMAME hasn't been updated in two years. The project, by all accounts, is dead. Brad Oliver had kept the Mac port going for years, mostly by himself. To be certain, others contributed to it, but nobody else ever took a lead role with it. As Brad's spare time evaporated, releases became few and far-between, and finally, stopped altogether. Some of this was due to changes in Mac OS X that would have required such an overhaul of MacMAME, it wouldn't have been worth the effort. Beyond that, a couple of other Mac variants of MAME (SDL MAME and MAME OS X) have appeared, so the reasons to continue MacMAME largely went away (save for its user-friendly interface).

Consequently, the reason for MacMAME.net itself has largely gone away. As of last week, the domain name has expired, and MacMAME.net is no more.

So why not keep the site around, and use it as a resource for those two versions of MAME for the Mac? Well, I haven't really followed their development. As MacMAME began waning, my interest in it did too. I found myself over here at AtariAge much more often than the MacMAME Message Boards, since this was a more active community. There were projects here I could get directly involved in, rather than just running a website for someone else's project.

I kept hoping MacMAME would come back, but I've finally accepted that it won't. And so when the domain name came up for renewal, I let it lapse. Even if MacMAME returned in some form, I'm really not interested in running a website about it, since support and news for that sort of thing is far better served by message boards.

The video game movie reviews on MacMAME.net will find a new home, however. Dave Dries has offered to host them at Cinemarcade. Once I get them reformatted and updated a little bit, we'll be moving them over, and I'll post a notice about it here. I put more work into those reviews than any other part of the site, and it's nice to see they'll still have a place on the web. I'd thought about moving them over to my CheepTech site, but they fit in with Cinemarcade better, and CheepTech is going to get a major overhaul sometime this year to focus in on my Atari-related projects.

So to anyone who had visited MacMAME.net - thanks! For those that haven't, it can still be found here, until that server is retired sometime later this year. A history of the site can be found here.

I miss the community that had sprung up around MacMAME more than anything else. If for no other reason, I would have liked to have seen MacMAME keep going in order to keep those people around. But people lose interest in things over time anyway, so it may not have made that much of a difference. MacMAME was exciting when it was new, and its period of popularity actually exceeded that of the arcade games it brought back to life. But all good things must come to an end, and some of the MacMAMErs ended up here at AtariAge anyway. I've made a whole slew of new friends here, kept some of the old ones, and have a brand-new time-sucking hobby on top of it all. So in the end - it's all good.

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DaveD 195

Posted January 9, 2008

Ahhh...the good ol' days of MacMAME. After I read the above I had to check the date on my version of MacMAME .36a, which for my money was the height of the MacMAME days. And it's still powering my MacMAME game cabinet downstairs. The year was 2000. Wow. Has it really been 8 years already? There certainly was an active little community supporting and contributing. A wiki popped up around that time, there were folks maintaining category files, creating icons, screenshots, lots of stuff. We had our "Games That Time Forgot" feature on CinemArcade and actually got several folks to contribute to that with their own reviews. And then there was Lemon's high score site which debuted with a contest that got even more folks involved. That was a lot of fun. Once OSX debuted things began to go downhill for obvious reasons. And in some ways the web has opened up even more since then with the debut of sites that make networking and contributing even easier. Take AtariAge for example and the ability to post your own blogs for free within a community of folks with similar interests. Back then that really wasn't a possibility unless you had your own site and programming background.