Code Like It's 198x

Nicola Salmoria

MAME's founder

PeopleSource-checked

An Italian programmer from Siena who wrote Amiga utilities in the early 1990s, then merged his single-game arcade emulators into MAME, released on 5 February 1997. He coordinated the project until 2003, helped crack Capcom's CPS-2 encryption in 2007, and later turned to logic puzzles and puzzle games for mobile phones.

When Amiga Format put MAME on its cover CD at Christmas 1997, it introduced the program as the work of “that well-known Amiga author Nicola Salmoria (NickPrefs, et al)”. Amiga owners knew the name before arcade fans did. Salmoria had spent the early 1990s writing small, useful Amiga programs that turned up on Fred Fish’s public-domain disks. Then, over the winter of 1996, he merged a handful of single-game arcade emulators into one program. MAME, the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, appeared on 5 February 1997. Nearly thirty years later it is still being developed, and it now describes tens of thousands of machines.

Fast facts

  • From: Siena, Italy
  • Before MAME: Amiga utilities, including NickPrefs, PrintManager and NewIcons
  • Founded MAME: first release 5 February 1997
  • Project coordinator: 1997 to 2003, with a break for national service in 1997
  • Later: CPS-2 decryption (2007), logic puzzles and iPhone puzzle games

An Amiga author

The Italian magazine MC Microcomputer reviewed two small programs by “Nick Salmoria di Siena” in June 1990: Snapshot, which saved copies of the screen, and Libreq, a command that filled a gap in the operating system. By December 1992 the same magazine could call him “un tipo ben noto sulle nostre pagine”, a well-known name in its pages, who “periodically releases his little and large gems, programs for which you always want to say: ‘But how come nobody thought of that before?’”

His programs went out on Fred Fish’s public-domain disk series, and English-language magazines listed them for years:

  • Hex, a file editor (Fish disk 517).
  • NickPrefs, a set of Workbench 2 add-ons: a picture behind the Workbench window, an animated busy pointer, and a switch to stop the floppy drive clicking (Fish disk 780).
  • PrintManager, a print spooler for Workbench 2 (Fish disk 810). Amiga Shopper’s 1993 review of Professional Page 4 envied that program’s print spooler, then told owners of ordinary printers to “check out Fish Disk 810 and a little program by Nicola Salmoria called PrintManager. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.”
  • StatRam, a recoverable RAM disk, with Richard Waspe; MultiFileSystem; and AmiCDFS, a CD-ROM file system that could also read Macintosh disks.
  • NewIcons, which added a palette of its own to Workbench icons so they could show more colours. Amazing Computing described it in 1996 as “Nicola Salmoria’s NewIcons”. By early 1997 it had been taken over by Eric Sauvageau and Phil Vedovatti.

The same magazines kept his name in circulation as a puzzle solver. In 1996 and 1997 MC Microcomputer’s recreational mathematics column described him as a long-standing member of its MC-link discussion area. When the columnist formed a team of solvers, he called Salmoria “re dei problemi numerici e formidabile programmatore”, the king of numerical problems and a formidable programmer.

MAME

Edge’s 2002 history of MAME describes Salmoria as “a reclusive Italian engineer” who began in 1996 by writing separate emulators for single arcade games on the PC. The early ones included Mr. Do!, Pengo and Lady Bug, along with a program that ran several versions of Pac-Man. APC dated the start of MAME itself to “shortly before Christmas 1996”. Amiga Format’s Simon Goodwin explained the idea: Salmoria “grew sick of writing specific emulators for each classic arcade game”. The underlying hardware changed little between games, so he built “a collection of software components to simulate classic arcade hardware”. A processor emulated once could then serve every board that used it.

The first release came on 5 February 1997. Its source code, in C, was public from the start, which let others port it to the Amiga, the Mac and Unix within days of each PC release. Within weeks Salmoria had to step away: Edge reported in July 1997 that he had been “forced to join the Italian army for ten months of National Service”, leaving the emulator with a colleague. In February 1998 the Italian magazine The Games Machine named “Nicola Salmoria e Mirko Buffoni” as the two Italians who had respectively created and were running the project. Salmoria returned to lead it; APC still called him the project’s coordinator in May 2001.

He handed the coordinator’s role to David Haywood in May 2003. The 2016 announcement that made MAME free and open-source software under the BSD and GPL licences noted that the name MAME remained “a registered trademark of Nicola Salmoria”.

CPS-2

Salmoria kept working on MAME’s hardest problems after he stopped leading it. Capcom’s CPS-2 arcade boards encrypted their program code, and the key sat in battery-backed memory, so a board with a flat battery stopped working. In January 2007, on his blog Nicola’s MAME Ramblings, Salmoria described how he and Andreas Naive had cut the key from 96 to 64 bits and matched the cipher’s internal tables to the real ones. Several games’ keys, he wrote, “literally scream ‘I’m not a random number!’”. The scheme was fully worked out that month, which means dead CPS-2 boards can now be revived (see arcade hardware and Capcom).

Puzzles

In February 2013 Salmoria told his blog’s readers that he had not worked on MAME “for quite some time”: it “was an endless source of stimulating challenges, but required too much time and dedication for a hobby”. In 2012 he had released his first iPhone game, Twin Beams, and he had started a second blog, Nontrivial Games, reviewing logic puzzles for the iPhone and iPad. In 2014 TouchArcade reported that he had written a program that played the sliding-number puzzle Threes!. Public sources say little else about his later life.

Sources

  • MC Microcomputer (Italy) no. 97, June 1990, public-domain software column: Snapshot and Libreq, “creata da Nick Salmoria di Siena”.
  • MC Microcomputer no. 124, December 1992, public-domain software column: review of PrintManager, “Salmoria è un tipo ben noto sulle nostre pagine”.
  • Amazing Computing vol. 6 no. 11 (November 1991), vol. 8 nos. 3–5 (March–May 1993) and vol. 10 no. 3 (March 1995), Fred Fish disk listings; AC’s Guide to the Commodore Amiga, Summer 1994: Hex (Fish 517), NickPrefs (Fish 780), PrintManager (Fish 810), StatRam, MultiFileSystem and AmiCDFS.
  • Amiga Shopper issue 27, July 1993, review of Professional Page 4: PrintManager on Fish disk 810.
  • Amiga Computing issue 62, July 1993 (PrintManager 1.1) and issue 90, September 1995 (MultiFileSystem 2.1): public-domain reviews crediting Salmoria.
  • Amazing Computing vol. 11 no. 6, June 1996 (NickPrefs and “Nicola Salmoria’s NewIcons”), vol. 11 no. 9, September 1996 (his XFH commodity), and vol. 12 no. 3, March 1997 (“NewIcons, originally by Nicola Salmoria, has been taken over by Eric Sauvageau and Phil Vedovatti”).
  • MC Microcomputer no. 166, October 1996, and no. 170, February 1997, recreational mathematics column: Salmoria as “storico partecipante all’area” and “re dei problemi numerici e formidabile programmatore”.
  • Edge issue 47, July 1997, Retroview, Bomb Jack: MAME’s source in C and its ports; Salmoria’s national service.
  • Amiga Format issue 105, Christmas 1997: Simon Goodwin, “Arcade Emulators” (why Salmoria built MAME and how), and the cover CD pages (“that well-known Amiga author Nicola Salmoria (NickPrefs, et al) and currently updated by Mirko Buffoni”).
  • The Games Machine (Italy) no. 105, February 1998: Salmoria and Buffoni as MAME’s creator and manager.
  • APC (Australian Personal Computer), May 2001, MAME guide: development began “shortly before Christmas 1996”; Salmoria “still the project’s coordinator”.
  • Edge issue 115, October 2002, “The MAME game”: the history box, 1996 origins, first titles and the release on 5 February 1997.
  • MAMEdev, “MAME is now Free and Open Source Software”, 4 March 2016 (web, secondary): the licence change and the trademark. https://www.mamedev.org/?p=422
  • Wikipedia, “MAME” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): David Haywood as coordinator from May 2003. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAME
  • Nicola Salmoria, “CPS2 getting closer”, Nicola’s MAME Ramblings, 14 January 2007 (web, secondary). https://mamelife.blogspot.com/2007/01/cps2-getting-closer.html
  • Wikipedia, “CP System II” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): the encryption “fully reverse-engineered by Andreas Naive and Nicola Salmoria” in January 2007. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP_System_II
  • Nicola Salmoria, “Dusting off some cobwebs”, Nicola’s MAME Ramblings, 18 February 2013 (web, secondary): leaving MAME, Twin Beams, Nontrivial Games. https://mamelife.blogspot.com/2013/
  • Eli Hodapp, “MAME Developer Nicola Salmoria Builds ‘Threes!’ Playing Bot”, TouchArcade, 20 February 2014 (web, secondary; cited from Wikipedia, “Threes”). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threes

See also

Checked. Verified against primary sources and signed off by a person.