When Apple decided to move to Intel, most were concerned with the performance of Photoshop or Microsoft Office on the new systems. I was much more concerned with the lack of availability of a native version of MacMAME. That is why I was so glad to find out that Dave Dribin had just ported MAME (from the original source code) to OS X.
I must say that at first I was really disappointed to find out that none of my roms seemed to work. Every time I launched the program, the application would try to load the ROMs from the corresponding zip file, and quit. At first I thought that there was something wrong with the application, but after taking a look at the console, it turned out that all the ROMs that I had tested had missing files. So I decided to download some newer ROMs designed to work with MAME 0.103. However, newer ROMs did not fix the problem. Luckily there is a bulletin board to support this MAME port and David has been very active answering all the questions posted by the users. He explained that the roms have to be copied to ${HOME}/Documents/MacMAME User Data/ROMs. It worked!
While this new version of MAME is great news for Intel Mac owners, I still miss the polished interface of MacMAME. I hope that in the future, other programmers will join the project and improve on this initial version. Still, I am very grateful to David.
So, what are you waiting for? Download the binaries from sourceforge.net and start playing!