I made a free app for creating multi-game challenges in MAME
I’ve been working on something I call the MAME Challenge Engine, and I’ve finally got an early version ready for people to try.
The idea is to let you create and play custom challenges that can span multiple games in MAME.
This originally came from something that’s always bothered me when playing arcade games at home: how many credits should I allow myself? In an arcade, continuing cost money. In MAME, I can just keep inserting virtual coins forever.
I initially wanted to make something that could enforce limits on lives and credits, but the idea grew from there. The engine can monitor values in the game’s memory, so challenges can have custom starting points, win conditions, lose conditions and restrictions. You can then chain these together across different games into one larger challenge.
I’ve attached a short video showing what I mean and demonstrating the current version.
The project is still very early, and I’d really like some feedback from people who actually use MAME. I’m particularly interested in what kinds of challenges people would want to create and what features would make the engine more useful.
It’s completely free. The current build is for Apple Silicon Macs. You can download it here:
https://patreon.com/8bitpotato
I’m planning to keep the application free; the Patreon is just there for downloads, development updates and optional support.
Would love to hear what you guys think!