Nicola Salmoria is an Italian software developer. He is the original developer of MAME, an emulator application designed to recreate the hardware of arcade game systems in software. In December 2002, he graduated from the University of Siena with a laurea in mathematics, with a thesis written about MAME.
Before his fame as the author of MAME, he was active in the Amiga software development scene, producing utility programs such as NewIcons.
He has defeated numerous encryption algorithms, including but not limited to, the CPS-2 program ROM encryption (together with Andreas Naive), the Kabuki (sound) program ROM encryption and the graphics ROM encryption in the later Neo Geo games.
He is no longer coordinating the MAME project, but he is still active in the day-to-day development.
Salmoria was also involved in the development of the commercial Taito Legends and Taito Legends 2 classic Taito arcade games packs.
He currently lives in Poland and was working for Empire Interactive until it closed down in May 2009.