A phosphor-accurate emulator for classic vector arcade games — started in 2008, dragged back from the grave, and rebuilt from the ground up.
⚠️ ROMs are not included. You must supply your own legally-obtained arcade ROMs. AAE uses current MAME (TM) ROM names.
AAE began in 2008 as an unapologetic M.A.M.E (TM) derivative — a poorly written fork of early MAME (0.29 through .90) mixed with code of my own, built solely for my own amusement and learning, and offered here only as an archival experience. The whole point was to make vector arcade games look right — glowing, phosphor-soft beams instead of flat lines. After sitting untouched for the better part of 17 years, it's back, and it's been rebuilt almost beyond recognition.
The audio engine, input, frame timing, rendering pipeline, ROM loader, artwork handling, memory handling, the back-end driver registry — and, one by one, every CPU core — have been rewritten as custom, non-MAME code. The milestone I'm proudest of:
I have now removed ALL MAME CPU cores from my "MAME clone" emulator except for ONE. The last MAME CPU core in my code is the Cinematronics
ccpucore by Aaron Giles — and that is a work of art that will never be replaced.
Make no mistake: at its core this is still a MAME derivative, and it stands entirely on the shoulders of the MAME team's work. All MAME code used (and abused) in this emulator remains the copyright of the dedicated people who spend countless hours creating it — see Acknowledgements. But the climb from "early-MAME fork" to "almost everything here is mine now" has been the entire journey.
⚠️ Mid-renovation. This code is undergoing a complete overhaul and some command-line options are temporarily broken. See CHANGELOG.txt — the full revival diary.
- 🟢 Phosphor vector glow — bloom, beam falloff, and per-vector intensity rendered through an OpenGL 3.3 shader pipeline, tuned to look like the real CRT on a modern OLED.
- 🎛️ Live graphics tuning — per-game knobs for glow, line width, and intensity.
- 🕹️ Vector-first accuracy — Atari AVG/DVG and Cinematronics hardware are the focus and the most carefully emulated.
- 🎮 Keyboard + gamepad — full XInput controller support including menu/GUI navigation and rumble.
- 🔊 Custom multithreaded XAudio2 engine — stereo streaming, high-quality resampling and filters, no crackle and no leaks.
- 🖼️ MAME-style
.layartwork — bezels, overlays, and scanlines for the raster games. - 🗂️ C++ driver registry — add or remove a game by adding or removing a single driver, no
driver.cediting required. - 🪟 Windows 10/11, plus a tested Windows 7 x64 build.
Vector games are the whole reason AAE exists. Atari and Cinematronics vector classics — Asteroids & Asteroids Deluxe, Tempest, Major Havoc, Battlezone, Red Baron, Gravitar, Space Duel, Black Widow, Lunar Lander, Star Wars & The Empire Strikes Back, Aztarac, Cosmic Chasm, Star Castle, Rip Off, Armor Attack, Warrior, Omega Race, Solar Quest, War of the Worlds, and many more.
Somewhere along the way the renderer grew a raster path, so a handful of raster (non-vector)
games came along for the ride — purely for fun, not the mission. Things like Warlords,
Galaxian, Galaga, Bosconian, Pac-Man / Ms. / Jr. / Super Pac-Man, Millipede, Centipede,
Missile Command, Mappy, Dig Dug, Rally-X, Gyruss, Phoenix / Pleiads, Xevious and Space Invaders,
complete with current MAME .lay artwork.
The full, current list of supported romsets (100+) is available right inside the app — open the in-app game menu to browse everything AAE currently runs.
ROMs and BIOS files are not included — supply your own.
Requirements: Visual Studio 2022 with the Desktop development with C++ workload (MSVC v143
toolset) and the XAudio2 redistributable NuGet package
(Microsoft.XAudio2.Redist, version 2.9 — Microsoft.XAudio2.Redist.1.2.11).
How to install the NuGet package.
Open aae.sln in Visual Studio 2022, choose the Release | x64 configuration, and build.
The executable is produced at x64\Release\aae.exe.
Legacy build: older revisions linked against Allegro 4 — add the bundled allegro include, lib, and dll files (see the project Include and Library folders). This dependency is being phased out. See Build Notes.txt and Windows 7 build.txt.
- AAE Command Line Options.txt
- AAE Configuration Options.txt
- CHANGELOG.txt — the complete revival diary
- Build Notes.txt · Windows 7 build.txt
- The M.A.M.E (TM) Team — AAE is based on early MAME (0.29–.90), and all MAME code used in this project remains the copyright of the MAME team and the original authors. I thank everyone who has worked on MAME and I am in awe of all that they have created.
- Aaron Giles — the Cinematronics
ccpucore: the one MAME CPU core kept on purpose, because it is a work of art. - CPU & sound lineage — John Butler's 6809 (since replaced by a clean-room core), the Musashi 68000 (wrapped, now being phased out for a clean-room 68000), Mike Chambers' 8080 (base for the 8085A core), and MAME sound references for the AY-3-8910, POKEY, and TMS36xx.
- Clay Cowgill — homebrew vector games (Tempest Tubes, Battlezone Plus, and more).
- Recent work was assisted by Claude Code, ChatGPT, and Gemini.
- Tim Cottrill (@tcottrill) — author & maintainer.
- Claude Code (Anthropic — Claude Opus 4.8) — branding & docs.
AAE is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 — see COPYING.
The GPL covers AAE's own source only. It grants no rights to any arcade BIOS or game ROMs, and it does not cover the MAME-derived portions of the code, which remain the copyright of the MAME team and the original authors. You are responsible for the legality of any ROM images you use.
This is an independent, non-commercial, archival project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by any rights holder. MAME is a trademark of its respective owners.