Updated requirements for MAME
Posted: Mon Apr 06, 2026 9:34 pm
Updated requirements for MAME
I hope you enjoyed our April Fools’ Day announcement. With that out of the way, it’s time to discuss actual upcoming changes to MAME. We’re upgrading the development language standard from C++17 to C++20 and winding back support for obsolete configurations. We’ll also be reducing the frequency of releases a bit, so there will no longer be a release nearly every month. There will be no April release; our next release will be near the end of May.
A summary of updated requirements:
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I hope you enjoyed our April Fools’ Day announcement. With that out of the way, it’s time to discuss actual upcoming changes to MAME. We’re upgrading the development language standard from C++17 to C++20 and winding back support for obsolete configurations. We’ll also be reducing the frequency of releases a bit, so there will no longer be a release nearly every month. There will be no April release; our next release will be near the end of May.
A summary of updated requirements:
- A compiler and C++ standard library with a reasonable level of C++20 support. GCC 11 is the oldest version of GCC that we will support. You can also use a reasonably up-to-date version of clang.
- Windows releases will require an updated installation of Windows 10 or later. Microsoft has already discontinued mainstream support for Windows 10, as well as all prior versions of Windows Home and Pro, and Windows 11 is already four years old.
- MAME’s Qt-based debugger will require Qt 6.
- The 32-bit x86 (i686) recompiler back-end. It’s been over two decades since the x86-64 architecture was introduced. All major x86 operating systems have supported x86-64 for years, and 32-bit x86 support is being wound back.
- Support for compiling on OpenSolaris and other System V UNIX systems. There are no actively developed OpenSolaris distributions remaining, and no other System V UNIX variants have a meaningful presence on desktop systems.
- Specific optimisations for PowerPC host systems. PowerPC and OpenPOWER currently have no meaningful desktop presence, and the Libre-SOC project to produce a completely free, high-performance OpenPOWER implementation has stalled.
- The obsolete aueffectutil tool for macOS. This tool is no longer relevant with MAME’s new audio output system, and it had not been updated to work with recent versions of macOS.
- The pre-built MSYS2 environments with included development tools. There are multiple issues with our MSYS2 environment that we can’t practically solve.
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