AAE brings glowing, phosphor-soft vector beams to your modern display — the way these games looked through a real CRT in a dark arcade, not as flat lines on a screen. 100+ games. XInput. XAudio2. No emulation compromises.
Bloom, beam falloff, and per-vector intensity through an OpenGL shader pipeline — tuned to look right on a modern OLED or FreeSync display.
Most of the original MAME infrastructure has been replaced. What's here now is custom code that has been improving steadily since 2008.
.lay artwork system — bezels, overlays, and scanlines for raster games, using current MAME ROM names throughout.driver.c editing, no build scripts to update.AAE started in 2008 as a poorly-written M.A.M.E derivative — a fork of early MAME (0.29 through .90) built solely for one developer's amusement and learning. 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 seventeen years, it's back. The audio engine, input system, frame timing, rendering pipeline, ROM loader, artwork handling, memory management, the driver registry — and one by one, every CPU core — have been rewritten as custom, non-MAME code.
It still stands on the MAME team's shoulders, and that debt is acknowledged openly. All MAME-derived code remains the copyright of the MAME team. But the climb from "early-MAME fork" to "almost everything here is mine now" has been the entire journey.
Vector arcade hardware is what AAE was built for. A raster path was added along the way, which brought a handful of classics along for the ride.
Unzip to the root of your hard disk. Copy your MAME romsets to the ROMS directory or edit aae.ini to point at your existing ROM folder. Run AAE.EXE for the built-in GUI, or aae gamename for a specific title.
AAE is designed to feel familiar to anyone who has used MAME — same ROM names, same general workflow.
C:\AAE\). A modern GPU with OpenGL 3.3 support is required.ROMS directory, or hand-edit aae.ini to point at your existing MAME ROM folder. AAE uses current MAME ROM names.AAE.EXE to start the built-in vector frontend and browse all available games. Press TAB at any time to access the full settings menu. All system-wide settings must be configured here first.aae asteroids (or any game name) from the command line to jump straight into a game. See gamelist.txt or Command Line Options for the full list and available flags.