The MAME emulator supports (contains the emulation code) to run many machines all built into the program, this is the machine hardware. What isn’t supplied is the software that runs on the hardware, the reason being copyright, distributing the software would be piracy.

MAME software primarily consists of ROM files that are dumped from the ROM (Read only Memory) chips found on machine circuit boards. MAME expects these ROM files in a machineName.zip all named correctly.

This searchable database allows you to query all the MAME machines and display information like what ROMs it requires to run.