Important

⚠️ On Windows 11, AAE must be run as Administrator for the LED lights to work correctly.

A July 2026 Windows security update changed the permissions needed to drive the keyboard LEDs, which is how AAE lights cabinet start and player lamps. Without elevation the lamps just stay dark — everything else runs normally.

AAE — Another Arcade Emulator

A phosphor-accurate emulator for classic vector arcade games — started in 2008, dragged back from the grave, and rebuilt from the ground up.

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Warning

ROMs are not included. You must supply your own legally-obtained arcade ROMs. AAE uses current M.A.M.E (TM) ROM names.

About

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 to surpass my wildest dreams.

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.

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 "a lot of what you see here is mine now" has been the entire journey. AAE has been built with a focus on running either in a dedicated arcade cabinet, or on the couch with a large flatscreen and an Xbox or Playstation controller.

What's new in this release

AAE now runs on Linux. The emulation core was split out from the video, input and sound engines, and complete new Linux back-ends were written for all three — no SDL anywhere. That gets AAE onto SteamOS and the Raspberry Pi, with a longer-term target of driving a real vector monitor from a Teensy or Pi.

Vulkan is now the default renderer. The entire OpenGL pipeline was rewritten as Vulkan equivalents, ported over from my own unreleased game engine. OpenGL 3.3 is still there and still fully supported — Vulkan is simply what starts by default, and AAE falls back to OpenGL 3.3 on its own if Vulkan won't initialize.

Everything else, in no particular order:

• A new glow shader — a dual-filter pyramid bloom that finally looks better than my original. That's subjective, but I like it, and it's the default now. The classic 8-pass blur is still selectable. (I also burned a ton of time on a phosphor-persistence replacement and they were all disappointing, so that one is still on the shelf.)
• Lunar Lander in-game artwork — using my own disassembly, a Braze-style ROM patch draws the mission and status on screen, so you can tell what you're flying without giving up screen real estate to a bezel. Gated behind a dipswitch, on by default. Absolutely not tested on a real PCB and I doubt it'd survive there without serious tuning.
• Controllers — PS5 DualSense and PS4 DualShock 4 are remapped to the standard Xbox layout, and the system button chords (menu, exit, pause) work from any gamepad while generic sticks can't trigger them by accident. The same combo engine runs on Linux, so Steam Input's virtual pads get working chords too.
• A Controller Guide screen — a drawn controller showing the button layout, coin/start mapping and the chords. It appears once the first time a gamepad is detected, and any time after from Y in the game list or the CONTROLLER HELP menu entry.

See CHANGELOG.txt — the complete revival diary — for everything else.

Features

• 🟢 Phosphor vector glow — bloom, beam falloff and per-vector intensity, tuned to look like a real CRT on a modern panel. Dual-filter pyramid by default, classic 8-pass blur optional.
• 🎨 CRT monitor simulation — separate colour and monochrome shader chains with shadow mask, convergence, halation and scanline controls, plus .png scanline overlays for the raster games.
• 🎛️ Live graphics tuning — glow, line width, intensity and every monitor knob adjustable from the in-game menus, per game.
• 🕹️ Vector-first accuracy — vector hardware is the primary focus here and is the most carefully emulated.
• 🎮 Gamepads done properly — Xbox, DualSense/DualShock 4, Steam Input virtual pads, menu and GUI navigation, rumble, system button chords, and an on-screen controller guide.
• 🖱️ Multi-HID input — per-device mice and keyboards with friendly names and path-stable assignments, routed per player. Built for multi-spinner and multi-trackball cabinets.
• 💡 Cabinet lamp output — start-button and player lamps driven through the keyboard LEDs.
• 🔊 Custom multithreaded audio — XAudio2 on Windows, a native ALSA back-end on Linux with an optional PulseAudio path. High-quality resampling, no crackle, no leaks.
• 🖼️ MAME-style .lay artwork — bezels, overlays and scanlines for the raster games. Vector artwork is also rendered via a different system.
• 🗂️ C++ driver registry — add or remove a game by adding or removing a single driver, no driver.c editing required.
• 🧩 Split core — the emulation core builds as its own library with no window, sound or input dependencies, which is what made the Linux port possible and what a bare-metal vector driver will eventually hang off.

Platforms and renderers

Platform	Status	Renderer	How you build it
Windows 10/11 x64	Primary	Vulkan (default) or OpenGL	aae.sln in Visual Studio 2022
Windows 7 x64	Tested	OpenGL	see Windows 7 build.txt
SteamOS (Steam Deck / Steam Machine)	Primary Linux target	Vulkan	Flatpak — scripts/linux/build-flatpak.sh
Desktop Linux (x86_64 / aarch64)	Supported	Vulkan or OpenGL	scripts/linux/build-linux.sh
Raspberry Pi 5 (aarch64)	Supported	Vulkan only	scripts/linux/build-pi5.sh
Raspberry Pi 4	Untested	Vulkan only, if the driver offers 1.3	scripts/linux/build-pi5.sh

Which renderer you get

Vulkan is the default. The chain requires Vulkan 1.3 and rejects anything lower — it is built on two 1.3 core features, dynamicRendering and synchronization2, and there is deliberately no 1.2 fallback path. If Vulkan can't initialise at all, AAE falls back to OpenGL by itself.

The OpenGL chain requires OpenGL 3.3 (its shaders are #version 330 core). Pick it explicitly with renderer=opengl in aae.ini, from the VIDEO SETUP menu, or for a single launch with -renderer opengl.

On the Raspberry Pi, Vulkan is not optional. Mesa's v3d driver tops out around GL/GLES 3.1, so the OpenGL chain is not a slower fallback there — it's a non-starter. That is the entire reason the Vulkan chain exists. v3dv reached Vulkan 1.3 on the Pi 5 in the Mesa 24.x era; an older image reports 1.2 and AAE will exit with "no suitable physical device". The fix is to update Mesa, not to patch AAE.

Pi performance came at a cost, and it's worth being honest about it: the new pyramid glow doesn't look good on the Pi, the classic shader looks right but is far too expensive to run there, and the B/W raster shader has to be disabled outright. It runs full speed, and that took three days of revisions and a lot of concessions.

Emulated games

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.

…and a few non-vector games, just for fun

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.

135 romsets are supported. The full current list is in AAE All Games List.txt, or browse it inside the app — the in-game menu lists everything AAE runs.

Building

ROMs and BIOS files are not included — supply your own.

Everything in AAE resolves relative to the executable, so on every platform the binary is placed in x64/Release/, beside aae.ini, video.ini, roms/ and artwork/. It has to live with its data.

Windows

Requirements: Visual Studio 2022 with the Desktop development with C++ workload (MSVC v143 toolset) and the XAudio2 redistributable NuGet package (Microsoft.XAudio2.Redist, version 1.2.13). How to install the NuGet package.

Open aae.sln, choose Release | x64, 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.

Linux

The build is CMake + a C++17 compiler, and the script checks your prerequisites before it starts and prints package names for your distro (apt, dnf, pacman or zypper):

bash scripts/linux/build-linux.sh

Add --check to run the prerequisite check without building. You'll need a C++ compiler, CMake, and the GL, GLEW, X11 and ALSA development packages — all four are needed to link even for a Vulkan-only run, because the GL chain is compiled in regardless and simply never called. On Debian/Ubuntu:

sudo apt install build-essential cmake libgl1-mesa-dev libglew-dev libx11-dev libasound2-dev libvulkan1 vulkan-tools

The Vulkan loader is dlopen'd at runtime and never linked, and the Vulkan headers are vendored in the tree, so no Vulkan -dev package is needed to build — only libvulkan.so.1 to run the Vulkan renderer. glslc is optional too: SPIR-V is architecture-independent, so the prebuilt .spv files in x64/Release/shaders/vk work as-is, and glslc is only needed if you intend to edit shaders.

Then:

cd x64/Release && ./aae asteroid

If it won't start, the log says why — x64/Release/systemlog.txt.

SteamOS (Steam Deck / Steam Machine)

SteamOS gets a Flatpak, and it has to: a binary built on a normal dev box links against that machine's glibc, which is newer than SteamOS's, so a copied executable dies before main(). Flatpak compiles inside its own SDK, so the result depends only on the runtime.

The manifest and launcher live in packaging/flatpak/. Build a single-file bundle with:

bash scripts/linux/build-flatpak.sh

That produces aae.flatpak in the repo root. On the target:

flatpak install --user aae.flatpak

Where the ROMs go on SteamOS

Launch AAE once. It creates these two folders for you, in your home directory where you can actually find them:

/home/deck/AAE/roms         <- put your .zip rom sets here
/home/deck/AAE/artwork      <- put your .zip artwork here

That's ~/AAE/roms and ~/AAE/artwork. In the Steam Deck's file manager (Dolphin, in Desktop Mode) it's Home → AAE → roms. Drop the zips straight in — no renaming, no unzipping, no rebuilding the Flatpak, and no path to set in aae.ini. Restart AAE and the new games appear in the list.

You can add ROMs with a file manager, or over the network from another machine:

scp mygame.zip deck@steamdeck.local:~/AAE/roms/

A ROM you put there always wins over one shipped inside the bundle with the same name, so a better dump can simply be dropped on top.

Keeping your collection somewhere else — an SD card, say? Set mame_rom_path and mame_artwork_path in aae.ini to an absolute path. The sandbox is already allowed to read your home directory and /run/media (SD cards, USB). Anywhere else needs one command: flatpak override --user --filesystem=/your/path:ro io.github.tcottrill.AAE

Settings, high scores, NVRAM, per-game configs and screenshots live separately, in the app's own data directory. That split is deliberate: flatpak uninstall --delete-data resets your settings and leaves ~/AAE and your ROM collection completely alone.

The data module packages whatever is sitting in x64/Release — including roms/, artwork/ and samples/. That makes the resulting bundle a private artefact for your own hardware, not something to hand out. It's a separate module precisely so it's obvious what comes out first.

Raspberry Pi 5

Build on the Pi — natively, not cross-compiled and not copied from another machine:

bash scripts/linux/build-pi5.sh

--check runs the prerequisite check alone, and --with-tools also builds aae_inputtest. The script treats Vulkan 1.3 as a hard requirement and tells you exactly which check failed, because on this hardware a missing 1.3 means no working renderer at all — see the renderer note above.

Raspberry Pi 4 is not something I've tested. The same script should work if your Mesa reports Vulkan 1.3; if it reports 1.2, it won't run.

Developer tools

Three extra CMake targets, none of them built by default:

Target	What it's for
aae_headless	Runs the emulation core with no window, sound or input — used to verify emulation output matches across platforms.
aae_inputtest	Prints every input state change. --leds walks the lamp sequence so you can answer "do the LEDs work here" without launching a game.
aae_audiotest	Audio back-end exercise. Requires ALSA headers.

Running

Launch a game directly	aae asteroid
Force a renderer for one launch	aae asteroid -renderer opengl
Release the mouse	F9 (click to recapture)
Controller guide	Y in the game list, or the CONTROLLER HELP menu entry
Everything else	aae.ini, or the in-game menus

Cabinet lamp output needs a little help from the OS: on Windows 11, since the July 2026 security updates, AAE has to run as Administrator for the keyboard LEDs to work — see the note at the top of this page. On Linux your user may need to be in the input group.

Documentation

• AAE Command Line Options.txt
• AAE Configuration Options.txt
• AAE Xbox Controller Guide.txt
• RENDERING_TUNING.md — the graphics knobs and what they do
• CHANGELOG.txt — the complete revival diary
• Build Notes.txt · Windows 7 build.txt

Acknowledgements

• 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 ccpu core: 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.

Contributors

• Tim Cottrill (@tcottrill) — author & maintainer.
• Claude Code (Anthropic — Claude Opus 4.8) — branding & docs.

License

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.