GooeyMAME

A modern, cross-platform Qt front-end built into MAME.

Browse thousands of arcade machines, consoles and computers, dig through artwork and history, audit your ROMs, and play — all in one native window, with the game embedded right inside it.

GooeyMAME = MAME + a “gooey” (GUI). One executable, no launcher gymnastics.

GooeyMAME is a fork of MAME that adds a first-class graphical front-end as a native OSD (OSD=qtui). It's a clean-room Qt UI compiled directly into the emulator — so metadata, ROM auditing, and gameplay all come from the live MAME core with no subprocess round-trips or IPC. Games render inside the browser via a Qt-native OpenGL/BGFX backend, with a full in-game menu bar driving the running machine.

Based on MAME 0.288. Runs on Linux and Windows (macOS planned).

Every system alongside its snapshot/video/flyer/marquee art and a stack of info tabs (history, MAME info, command list, top scores, PDF manual, and more).

A DuckStation-style tile grid for both machines and software lists, with a size slider, selectable art source, and configurable caption. Video previews play in place.

Pick a system (e.g. Sega Genesis), browse its software list with box/cart art, and see it running with bezel artwork — all from the same window.

The game runs inside the window. A NEWUI-style menu bar operates the live machine — DIP switches, machine configuration, save states, media, rotate, throttle, and more.

Toggle cheats, remap every control, and dial in per-speaker EQ / filters / compressor while the game is running.

• Full machine list straight from the MAME driver database — Description, Short name, Year, Manufacturer and ROM Status columns, all sortable.
• Three view modes per list: List (flat table), Grouped (clone-family tree), and Grid (art tiles with a size slider, selectable image source and caption).
• Rich filter tree — Arcade vs. Computers & Consoles, Manufacturer, Year, Category, Genre, Series, Language, Best Games, Version. Collapsible, sectioned, and hides empty categories.
• Status filters (Working / Available) as modifiers on the current list, with a per-pane search box.
• Clone families, regions & versions — group clones under a representative, prefer a region, and hide bootlegs / hacks / prototypes; pick a family's default version from a right-click menu.
• Mechanical and Screenless system-type filters.
• Software lists (consoles/computers) get their own list/grouped/grid views, search, filtering and availability.

• Art tabs: Snapshot, Video (gameplay + advert, with pause/mute), Title, Flyer, Cabinet, Marquee, PCB, Logo, Artwork, Select, Versus, Score, Game Over — plus Box / Cart / 3D for software.
• Info tabs: History, MAME Info, Command, MESS Info, Init, System, Story, Top Scores, and a built-in PDF manual viewer.
• Configurable art fallback (software → host machine → clone parent), a secondary media source, per-art-type scaling, list row icons, and automatic hiding of empty tabs.

• Availability auditing for machines and software — cached, persisted, bulk-refreshable, and auto-invalidated when your ROM/hash paths change.
• Options editor that reads and writes mame.ini, a per-machine Properties dialog that writes <system>.ini overrides, and front-end folder configuration.

• Qt-native OSD: MAME renders into a QWindow via OpenGL or BGFX (no SDL video), taking keyboard, mouse, lightgun and text input from Qt. Play embedded in a pane, in a separate window, or launch straight into a game with --gooey <system>.
• BGFX shader chains (CRT effects, etc.) with a runtime backend selector.
• Full in-game menu bar operating the live machine:
  • Machine — pause, soft/hard reset, save / load / save-as state, screenshot, BIOS selection, slot devices, media mount/unmount, tape / network / barcode, DIP switches, machine config, stop.
  • Video — sharp/smooth pixels, render view, artwork & bezel visibility, rotate, aspect & scaling, zoom-to-screen, fullscreen, brightness/contrast/gamma, throttle, frameskip, FPS, speed.
  • Audio — master and per-channel volume.
  • Input — emulated vs. natural keyboard, paste, crosshair options, and a live input remapping editor.
  • Info — system information, warnings, bookkeeping, and history.
  • Cheat — global enable, reload, and per-cheat toggles.
• Audio effects editor (per-speaker EQ / filters / compressor) and a plugin options menu.
• Gamepad support — winhybrid / XInput / DirectInput on Windows, SDL game-controller on Linux, with a runtime provider selector and sensible default mappings.

• View → Style (any installed Qt widget style) and View → Color Scheme (System / Light / Dark, auto-pairing with Fusion where the platform style ignores palettes).
• Collapsible panes and full GUI-state persistence — window geometry, splitters, column widths, view modes, filters, search text and selection all restore on next launch.
• No-Nag — independently skip the system-information, warning, and loading screens.
• Application icon on every platform.

GooeyMAME builds like MAME, selecting the Qt OSD with OSD=qtui.

• A C++17 toolchain and Python 3 (same as upstream MAME).
• Qt 6 (base + widgets; optionally Qt Multimedia + FFmpeg for video previews, and Qt PDF for the manual viewer), discoverable via qmake6.
• Linux: OpenGL, X11/XInput, fontconfig, and SDL2 (used only for the game-controller module).

make OSD=qtui SUBTARGET=mame -j"$(nproc)"
./mame            # no arguments → launches the GUI

The Qt Multimedia and Qt PDF features are auto-detected; pass NO_QTPDF=1 to skip the manual viewer if Qt PDF isn't installed.

Built with MSYS2 (UCRT64) and the mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-qt6-* packages:

REGENIE=1 make OSD=qtui SUBTARGET=mame -j16

The Windows build is fully SDL-free (native XInput / DirectInput gamepads). For a redistributable build, deploy the Qt runtime next to mame.exe (see windeployqt6 plus the FFmpeg codec DLLs).

scripts/resources/unix/ contains a .desktop entry and an installer:

scripts/resources/unix/install-desktop.sh /path/to/mame

GooeyMAME is a downstream fork of MAME. The front-end lives entirely under src/osd/qtui/ (plus a handful of additive OSD modules). Everything else is stock MAME 0.288.

• Upstream project: https://www.mamedev.org/
• The original MAME README is preserved at docs/README.mame.md.

Origin. GooeyMAME was originally inspired by a wish for a cross-platform equivalent of MAMEUI (the Windows-only MAME front-end). It is, however, unrelated to MAMEUI and shares no code unique to that project — the entire front-end was written from scratch in Qt against the official MAME core.

Please do not report GooeyMAME issues to the MAME team — they are not responsible for this fork.

Same as MAME: predominantly BSD-3-Clause, with some components under other free-software licenses. See docs/legal/ / COPYING and the per-file license headers. MAME® is a trademark of the MAME development team; GooeyMAME is an independent fork and is not endorsed by or affiliated with the MAME project.

Built on the work of the MAME development team and its thousands of contributors. The Qt front-end and Qt-native OSD are GooeyMAME additions.