Yo dawg, I heard you like retro games.
Well, the iconic arcade game emulation tool, MAME, is now getting so old that you can emulate earlier versions of MAME, inside MAME. It just celebrated its 25th year anniversary, and when the developers were asked if the original 0.1 version of MAME could still run, they replied that it could! There are a number of different ways to get it working, but one way is to actually emulate it inside the latest version of MAME.
MAME developement originally began on December 24, 1996, when then-sole developer, Nicola Salmoria began working on a single emulator to handle all original arcade games from the classic eras of gaming. It was a project that would go on to spawn many iterations over the years, and MAME is still considered the gold standard of emulators today, despite increased competition from competing standards.
Happy 25th anniversary, MAME! On December 24, 1996, developer Nicola Salmoria began working on single arcade hardware emulators such as MultiPac. Nicola merged his emulators together under a single unified framework and on February 5th 1997, he released MAME 0.1. #mame #emulation
— The MAME Team (@mamedev_org) February 5, 2022
If you really want to run version 0.1 of MAME, you can download it from the official site. While it will work inside the modern version of MAME, you're much better off running it in something like DOSBOX, where you won't have quite so many layers of emulation to contend with.
If you have an old Windows 98 PC lying around, you could run it on that too.
The MAME developers also reminded everyone of the last time they did this kind of retrospective. In 2007, the 10 year anniversary saw them release a version based on 0.112 with a handful of games supported. That's still available too, if you want to play around with it.