Arcade developer UltraCade has applied to trademark the name MAME – the popular arcade emulator for the PC. Despite Internet reports to the contrary, the company is not seeking to sue the developers of MAME, but seeks merely to trade using the well recognized MAME name and logo.
However, it's not clear whether UltraCade actually has the correct permissions to successfully gain a trademark for the MAME application, which was started in 1996 by Nicola Salmoria, but now involves dozens, if not hundreds of non-profit developers working on the sometimes controversial job of emulating previously released arcade games.
UltraCade does have significant relevance to the MAME name, though, since the company already manufactures arcade cabinets featuring multiple games officially licensed from companies such as Capcom, Taito, Jaleco, Atari and Williams. This new move comes, according to the company, as a response to pirated cabinets containing a PC running MAME and multiple, illegal, arcade ROM sets.
According to an official statement by UltraCade CEO David R. Foley: "We are making an effort to stamp out the commercial sales of MAME based systems that advertise the ability to play thousands of games while relying on the customer to obtain the ROMs which cannot legally be obtained. What we are not doing is trying to claim ownership of the MAME open source emulator or sue its authors. We are concerned about the commercial marketplace, and not the readers of the many MAME user groups and forums."
