Without doubt the most important and efficient
arcade project is M.A.M.E. - Multiple
Arcade Machine Emulator [ Copyright (C) 1997-2002
by Nicola Salmoria and the MAME team ]
The emulator is a program which requires ROMs
of the original arcade machine in order to play
an arcade game in the PC. 
MAME was originally started in January 1997,
by Nicola Salmoria. Originally, Nicola developed
single emulators for individual games, such
as Lady Bug, Mr. Do!, Pengo, and a multiple
game emulator of the various early Pac Man games.
One month later, Nicola decided to combine the
emulators into a multiple game emulator format,
which is now known world wide as MAME. Today,
there are well over 100 people contributing
to the MAME project.
MAME is available for a wide variety of operating
systems. While it's primary developing environment
is MS-DOS, MAME is also available for such systems
as: Windows 32bit, Macintosh, Unix, Amiga, and
Acorn/RISC.
Arcade games links