MESS emulated portable and console gaming systems, computer platforms, and calculators.

MAME and MESS were once separate applications, but were later developed and released together from a single source repository.

[5] MAMEDEV member David Haywood maintained and distributed UME (Universal Machine Emulator) which combined much of the functionality of MAME and MESS in a single application.

Generally the emulation only includes raw hardware logic, such as for the CPU and RAM, and specialized DSPs such as tone generators or video sprites.

A desoldered IC is placed into a chip reader device connected to a USB or serial port of another computer, with pin sockets on the reader specifically designed to match the chip package shape in question, to perform a memory dump of the ROM to a data file.