MAME, the go-to emulator for arcade heritage preservation, is announcing several structural changes to its development. Fewer updates, raised requirements: the team is making the necessary decisions to keep the project viable for the long term.

Windows 7 is gone

On April 7, 2026, the team published a post on mamedev.org detailing these upcoming changes. Most notably, future versions of MAME will require Windows 10 as a minimum. With Microsoft having ended mainstream support for all prior versions, maintaining compatibility with systems nearly twenty years old no longer makes sense.

A modernised technical foundation

A bit of technical detail for the more advanced among you: the development language standard is moving from C++17 to C++20, an evolution that will allow the team to take advantage of new language features. GCC 11 will be the oldest supported version. MAME's Qt-based debugger is dropping Qt 5 in favour of Qt 6, now available across all major Linux distributions. Several components are also being removed: the 32-bit x86 (i686) recompiler back-end, support for compiling on OpenSolaris and other System V UNIX systems, specific optimisations for PowerPC host systems, the now-obsolete macOS aueffectutil tool, and the pre-built MSYS2 environments, which have become too complex to maintain.

Less frequent releases

The other notable announcement concerns the release schedule: near-monthly updates are now a thing of the past. There will be no April release, and the next one is expected near the end of May. Longer cycles, for a project that is giving itself the means to last.

And while we're at it, a little teaser: if you're a hardcore arcade enthusiast and MAME and Final Burn Neo hold almost no secrets for you, stay tuned — we have some good news coming tomorrow ;)

Sources: mamedev.org, timeextension.com