Bringing the Predators to Life in MAME

Summary

I rarely get to write about a passion of mine, and even less frequently do I get to take action on it, but the Christmas period of 2025 presented me with an opportunity I simply could not pass up. Since sometime around the turn of the century, I have been following the MAME project, Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, for anyone who may be unfamiliar with the subject. MAME is the work of an Open Source Foundation dedicated to making arcade games playable on PC and smartphones and in a world where everything is considered disposable, the collective effort on display to prevent arcade media from being lost is rare and commendable. In the past, I have even contributed toward donation drives to purchase rare titles, but I stopped when delivery promises were broken notably Taito’s Vertexer. I do not recall whether I put money forward for that one or not but I love my space games. MAME is a supermassive work, and contained within are many games that don't work or aren't even correctly recognized. I happened across a "pull request" to identify one of those arcade games while browsing the project pages earlier in December. The subject was a four-player game that was said to resemble Sinistar, it was a forgotten piece of history from Williams that I had previously read about [reference 1]. The game was known as The Predators, and based on the dialogue, it had been added to the MAME code as an unidentified gambling game earlier this year by a developer named Mark Beckford (Osso13) [reference 2]. A C language (source code) file for MAME was posted alongside the remarks [reference 3] claiming to be an extremely ancient “driver” for the game that had previously been worked on by Angelo Salese, David Haywood, and Philip Bennett. A driver is the uncompiled source code that powers the emulation of a game in MAME. I had a Christmas break coming up, time off work, and I wanted to see how working on MAME compared to the daily grind of enterprise coding. I also wanted to see this long-lo...