If you have a fondness for old arcade games and want to play them again, try the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME), a free emulator that lets you recreate the look and feel of old arcade game systems in software. While it's written for Windows, you can run this open source application under Linux.

MAME produces highly accurate video and audio emulation of every component of the original arcade games. Since the emulated games are usually older ones, which originally ran on 8- or 16-bit CPUs at (by today's standards) slow speeds, a 1GHz Pentium is fast enough to run MAME, though you'll want a faster machine for more recent games.

MAME was first released in February 1997 and is currently up to version 0.121, released not under the General Public License (GPL) but rather a special license. It's getting close to being able to run 4,000 different games and is in active development.

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