What is Reddit's opinion of
Mame?
From 3.5 billion Reddit comments
100 reviews of this app found across Reddit:
An emulator developer usually focuses on emulating an entire platform, not a specific game. Implementing or improving things, even if they seem completely unrelated, may have allowed Oblivion to work as well as it does. This happens all the time. Semi-recently, in MAME, by fixing the keyboard emulation on a seemingly unrelated home computer, the devs coincidentally improved a much more demanded arcade game substantially (see http://mamedev.org/?p=440; second to last paragraph).
The developers might not have spent any time working on specifically getting Oblivion to run. It may be a byproduct of general emulation improvements. Besides, even if they did, that's their own choice. They're not our employees nor do they owe us anything and we're incredibly lucky there are people giving us the opportunity to re-live our past for fucking free. I don't want to come off as rude, but I think it should be pointed out that no one here is entitled to anything.
Seeing a lot of folks citing Capcom as being the party responsible for this product (understandable since the product is a big ol Capcom logo), but I'm not certain they played an active role, here. They licensed out to Koch Media GmbH. If anything, it looks like Koch Media reached out to Barry Harris, who granted the license, despite the clear prohibitions in FB Alpha's license.
Relevant in that license are the explicit statements:
> You may not sell, lease, rent or otherwise seek to gain monetary profit from FB Alpha
and
> FB Alpha would not exist without a lot of code from the MAME project. The MAME project is subject to it's own license, which can be found at http://mamedev.org/legal.html. Due to the use of MAME code in FB Alpha, FB Alpha is also subject to the terms of the MAME license.
It's pretty clear that no one person has the authority to alter FBA's license to grant its use in a commercial product. The non-commercial statement makes that that evident.
It also relies on code from MAME, which likely predates its move to a GPL license. In order to come under GPL, MAME had to talk to reach out to all contributors to get approval and jettison and rewrite code to make it compliant. If something like that had happened with FBA, contributing developers would know about it. That doesn't appear to have happened.
The X-Men arcade game with 6 players and 2 screens disagrees.
Quick edit: As a reminder, any of you can play these games if you go and download MAME (Multi Arcade Machine Emulator) and the ROM you want. There are TONS of sites you can find the ROMs on.
Well the only thing the MAME team can tell you not to do is use 'MAME' in the name of your program.
By calling it ia-mame it looks like it is in some way associated with the MAME project, which it is not. You can see already that some people have confused this for a derivative of MAME itself.
Due to the high risk nature of the piece of software you're offering there is no way that the development team / trademark owner for MAME is going to approve of the use of 'MAME' in the name of your software.
http://mamedev.org/legal.html "MAME® is a registered trademark of Gregory Ember. The "MAME" name and MAME logo may not be used without first obtaining permission of the trademark holder. "
So while nobody from the team can stop you producing this software (even if I personally think it's a terrible idea with no possible good outcomes and the 'least bad' outcome being archive.org no longer host these) they can request that you do not include 'MAME' in the title of your software as it is harmful to the actual MAME brand.
No, the mame software license prohibits commercial use, including free play in a commercial establishment. Even if you were to obtain roms with a license which allowed you to play them, you would stiill be infringing on mame's license. http://mamedev.org/legal.html
Well, you were certainly the ones who made these reports popular, but you definitely weren't the first. MAME beat you to it by over a decade; they put out WIP reports from 02/1999 to 07/2004 -- see: http://mamedev.org/oldwip/wip9902.html.
Yours are a lot more thorough and informative (and enjoyable :D) but saying you were the first to do progress reports is incorrect.
Oh man, a ton of things. Dodonpachi II, PGM improvements, Raiden II and Raiden DX (these were huge), many new Cave games, more STV games, more Data East games, a bunch of 3D Konami games, rewritten cores, 7-zip support, improved sound in almost every driver and most importantly, assloads of bugs fixed, probably on the order of thousands. Hell, they even added Pong back in. You can take a look at the individual whatsnew.txt files or read some end-of-year retrospectives at Haze's blog.
you can play the original arcade rom here:
https://archive.org/details/arcade_defender
It in particular has some specific setup setups in the instructions you have to perform before it will work. I didn't get it to work myself but should be possible. You can also download and install Mame to play the game image yourself which may give better luck.
I considered building my own arcade cabinet and powering it with a raspberry pi, cheap monitor and an arcade stick. to play some old-school games with a vintage feel.
Although on that note... if "nobody plays it" you could potentially make an offer to buy the thing.
The other question is: if I can legally use the ROMs, can I legally use the emulator itself?
For Mame, the response is no. Sadly Mame is not Open Source, precisely because it forbids commercial usage: http://mamedev.org/legal.html
Why don't people just use this? I've been using this along with a front end and a little PC in an Arcade Machine Cabinet to have a massive emulator in my room, its pretty easy to use and bug free!
You really need to get familiar with MAME.
It gives you access to virtually every arcade game ever made, including all the shmups you could ever dream of.
Once you discover the epic awesomness of the Metal Slug series, you'll cry of happiness.
MAME still supports 32-bit targets. We test that 32-bit builds work on Windows, Linux, and macOS. We build 32-bit Windows binaries alongside the 64-bit Windows binaries. However, we strongly recommend using a 64-bit OS as you'll get a significant performance improvement (typically 30% better).
You can find the latest 64-bit and 32-bit Windows binaries on our release page or at the linked mirrors.
Legally there's no issue with EmulationStation and/or the emulators themselves.
As far as free legal games, there are these: http://mamedev.org/roms/. Some DOS games have been released for free but you'll need to setup controls individually. Other than that, you're limited to homebrew games and freeware ports, many of which are not "arcade-friendly".
Reading between the lines, the short answer is no. You won't find games worth playing.
Yes but probably without games.
From http://mamedev.org/legal.html
Q. Can I put an arcade cabinet running MAME in a public location?
A. Yes, but please note that you also need to have rights to ROMS you are using.
If you're specifically opening an arcade bar and y'all didn't think of this, get another lawyer or more informed advisors. Game licensing sounds like it's a critical aspect of your business model.
1) Technically possible but violates most licenses.
2) No. A console game is not the same code and not purchased/licensed in the same manner as arcade titles.
Edit: "...cabinet with the console in it" Oops. Doubtful due to personal-use licensing restrictions.
3) Probably not shut down. Few entities have the authority to "shut down" a commercial business. Lawsuits OTOH...
Read all license agreements carefully or hire an expert to read them for you. For example, MAME license prohibits commercial use, including free play in a commercial establishment. Even if you were to obtain roms with a license which allowed you to play them, you would stiill be infringing on mame's license. http://mamedev.org/legal.html (source: /u/lehk)
Also consider searching for multi-cade amusement machines sold for commercial use.
Edit: And good luck with your business. Thanks for trying to keep some aspects of arcade games alive.
Were I to guess, probably a barebones PC and MAME. Funny enough, I've been recently pricing out my own arcade cabinet build, so I've been doing a large amount of research already.
I've also heard of folks using a Raspberry Pi instead.
Edit: For buttons and the like, Adafruit has buttons, switches, etc that will work, and are even explicitly designed for arcade use.
As for the actual system build-out, here's a good, basic guide for how to do that.
You can still enjoy the original arcade game using M.A.M.E. (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator)
The game is called "Ironman Ivan Stewart's Super Off-Road".
There's also a track pack called "Ironman Ivan Stewart's Super Off-Road Track-Pack"
Use Google to find the ROMs (offroad.zip and offroadt.zip).
You can find ROMs that have been released into the public domain here: http://mamedev.org
You are allowed to raise money with MAME but only if you have the legal right to the ROMs being used for that purpose. Those from the above site should be okay.
The object of a project like MAME is always to get the best experience into the hands of the most people possible.
This is not the object of the MAME project.
From http://mamedev.org/
MAME is strictly a non-profit project. Its main purpose is to be a reference to the inner workings of the emulated arcade machines. This is done both for educational purposes and for preservation purposes, in order to prevent many historical games from disappearing forever once the hardware they run on stops working. Of course, in order to preserve the games and demonstrate that the emulated behavior matches the original, you must also be able to actually play the games. This is considered a nice side effect, and is not MAME's primary focus.
Absolutely not, please do NOT do this - it will cause even more legal issues for MAME, yourself, and the emulator community as a whole.
Even if the games you had on were properly licensed, the use of MAME itself in public areas is against their license. Read this from the MAME site itself.
You are mistaken. Free software does concern itself with people can do with their copy. It ensures that people can do anything they want with their copy as long as they distribute the source code if they distribute the binary.
That is why the JSON license "do no evil clause" made it non-free software from the FSF perspective. It put a restriction on use.
MAME itself is Free Software now. They managed to relicense themselves to GPL v2.
SOLUTION:
Do not use the "new" tools promoted on the official page - they cause errors. Instead use an earlier version - this version is proven to work:
http://mamedev.org/downloader.php?file=tools/mingw-mame-20121207.exe
Download the latest romset via torrent from a source like GameEx/Emunation or Pleasuredome instead of downloading individual roms from random websites. When you download the roms, note what MAME version they are, and download that MAME version from http://mamedev.org/
You'll need to use the "autosave" functionality of MAME since the actual cab also lost scores when powered off. That also means you'll want a button that does a soft power down so MAME exits and saves properly.
Tapes came around around at the earliest 2004, which means around 0.85 would have been the version (source: http://mamedev.org/oldrel.html)
If you set CPU0 to 99% speed in that version of MAME (or any version up to version .118 I believe), you get this exact finger:
https://i.imgur.com/Oyvlzol.png
I just did that myself with MAME .80 in fact to be thorough. Enabled cheats, set CPU0 to 99%, then used Shift and P to step by step look at each frame.
My pleasure, just head right over here and download the emulator.
Once you install it, visit here and find the Rom's that you want to play. I'm behind a corporate firewall but just google mame roms and you'll find tons of sites.
Enjoy!
Which part of it?
The basics is just download your romset (Can't post links here) and make sure your version of mame is the same as the romset version. Run mame once which will create all the configs etc... and directories needed. Then just dump all the roms you downloaded into the mame/roms directory. Run mame. Press tab to configure controls.
This is basically all you need to do to have a fully playable setup.
After that, you might consider a frontend like attract mode or hyperspin etc... They all have their own ways of getting setup but that is completely seperate to the first steps I listed which you have to do first anyway. Once you have the basic setup working then you can ask questions or google how to setup the frontends and things like video previews etc...
When did work start on it? I know MAME has been going for a long time now- ever since it was Nicola Salmoria's multi-pac emulator in the 90s.
http://mamedev.org/history.html
Edit: Yikes- you're right- 1996, and that was version 0.5: https://stella-emu.github.io/changelog.html First version of MAME was in 1997, but if you count the multi-pac emulator as part of MAME's history, then there might yet be some competition.
Aaron has a young son and has discovered his singing voice, neither of which I'm going to fault him for :-)
http://mamedev.org/history.html and http://mamedev.org/full_mame_history.html
can give you some idea what's been going on in the meantime as well :)
http://toddmoore.com/arcade/ http://www.pcgamer.com/how-to-build-a-kick-ass-mame-arcade-cabinet-from-an-old-pc/ http://mamedev.org/
You basically want to tap into the MAME community for this. You have the hardest part taken care of. The working MAME portion should be pretty easy and low cost and then you'll have all the arcade games you could ever want!
If they cannot be used as laptop anymore, you can build emulation arcade machines with them :
- install linux
- install MAME
- build an arcade cabinet
- fit the screen + motherboard + PSU from the laptop in the cabinet
- expose usb ports to plug controllers
This is an idea for laptops that are too old but are still able to emulate games, provided the OS does not eat all the resources.
You can play them in your browser like you saw or locally on your PC via emulation as you're given the ROM file.
You can play with the included emulator or with your own, example being mame.
Mame download :
There's a wiki there to answer setup questions etc.
Compiling MAME is easier than ever with the new build tools:
The hiscore / no nag diffs are available here:
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=64298.0
I can confirm the .162 diff is working as intended.
You can read every whatsnew.txt file on mamedev.org, starting with http://mamedev.org/releases/whatsnew_0152.txt, then just changing the version number to see the older releases. They will list every new and working game.
Off the top of my head, some PGM stuff has been made playable (Dodonpachi II, more versions of Knights of Valour, other stuff), Ridge Racer 1 and 2, Offroad Challenge, Cool Riders, Mortal Kombat 4 (super slow though), Tekken Tag Tournament, Soul Calibur, tons of new shoot 'em ups, a lot of interesting prototypes, and of course clones out the ass. They're also adding support for a multitude of Cave shooters in 0.153, the next release. That's the one that I'm waiting to upgrade for.
Best reason to upgrade though is the tons of bugfixes made to already playable games, plus they added 7zip support, which has made my folder much smaller, and raised the speed of the emulator as well.
Updating's a pain in the ass, but there are plenty of MAME torrents out there (pleasuredome tracker is my site of choice), and clrmamepro is a good rom manager/updater, though I hate its interface.
Now if they ever manage to emulate Raiden 2 and DX, my wishlist will be complete.
Not a game itself, but as a means of gaming, I have to recommend the <strong>Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator</strong> project. It's this kind of work that prevents decades of content from being unusable, and therefore lost, for the general public. The ROMs themselves are widely distributed as torrents in the 10s of gigabytes.
Because that's not their priority. Again, I have to be careful because I am not a MAME dev (although I've contributed to the project) so I can't speak for them. But if you look at their stated purpose,
> MAME's main purpose is to be a reference to the inner workings of the emulated machines. This is done both for educational purposes and for preservation purposes, in order to prevent historical software from disappearing forever once the hardware it runs on stops working. Of course, in order to preserve the software and demonstrate that the emulated behavior matches the original, you must also be able to actually use the software. This is considered a nice side effect, and is not MAME's primary focus.
No where in there does it say anything about being able to comfortably navigate their menus through a controller from your couch.
So if someone wants to take responsibility for creating and maintaining a MAME core for RA, great on them. But that's outside of the scope of what the MAME team is concerned with, and they should not be held responsible for trying to maintain it.
Just an update on this, I found that one way to sort of do what I want to do is to simply convert from GDI to CHD.
The application chdman.exe included with MAME is a command-line utility that is used to do various tasks with CHDs. Little did I know that in the last couple years(?) CHD went from "just for harddrives" to being useful for a bunch of different stuff, including Sega CD and other disc-based systems.
The primary benefits here are that you get immediately-playable ROMs that are compressed, so they take up less space on disk.
The Marvel Vs Capcom 2 dump I referenced above that takes 1.1 GB of space in its uncompressed state? 145 MB in CHD format.
The main drawback I can see to this is compatiblity. I'm pretty sure there's no GDEMU that can run CHD files, so this is not a good destination format if you're going to use real Dreamcast hardware. For ReDream it works just fine :)
The command syntax for chdman.exe is simple:
chdman.exe -createcd -i <path to GDI file here> -o <path where you want your output CHD file here>
Internet Archive has a DMCA exemption, so presumably linking to them is OK under the rules here, but if not I've put this in a separate post so only this part gets deleted.
https://archive.org/details/messmame?sort=-publicdate
you can even browse individual files
in this case rbisland.zip and cchip.zip and a copy of the official version of MAME 0.197 ( http://mamedev.org/release.php ) will solve your problem.
If the rules here don't allow linking to the Internet Archive then I apologise, I believe due to the DMCA exemption linking to them is legal tho.
I would suggest looking at MAME - http://mamedev.org/
If you've not come across it before it's a vast emulation of arcade machine hardware, much of it from the 70s & 80s. Which means the CPUs are old enough (and relatively straightforward enough) that you'll find huge amounts of documentation on them.
There are tons of posts from people who have reverse engineered entire games, commented disassemblies of many, patched/trained/modified them.
Mame has an integrated debugger which is the second good reason for picking this as an intro. It's a pretty nice environment and from the source code for a game driver you get useful info like the memory map, IO spaces and everything you need to start off with a full picture of the hardware/software combo you're going to take to bits, so it's a bit like having the teacher's answerbook which is great when you're learning and you get stuck.
This might not seem to have a huge relevancy to the OP's topic, but once you've taken to bits and understood a few simpler games you'll have a much better appreciation for reverse engineering. I'd say it's basically like the beginner version, with the benefit of huge amounts of existing information so you're not breaking new ground.
It's also pretty fun :)
mame and fba are both arcade game focussed emulators. mame is more cpu intensive than fba but offers better emulation quality across the board as well as suppoting more hardware and games.
if you have a good pc then its an absolute no brainer to downliad and use mame if you want to play metal slug as close to the original hardware as possible.
And a connected recent piece of news: "Morten Shearman Kirkegaard and Peter Wilhelmsen (recently featured here in connection to their success in dumping Gaelco protection programs) have built another FPGA-based rig that allowed them to dump the internal programs from the ARM CPUs for Oriental Legend 2 and Knights of Valour 2 New Legend."
> Edit: Also I think it's not usually allowed to include Mame name and logos, but maybe /u/mamehaze can weigh in on that.
You'd need permission to use the MAME trademark. http://mamedev.org/legal.html
"Trademark
MAME® is a registered trademark of Gregory Ember. The "MAME" name and MAME logo may not be used without first obtaining permission of the trademark holder. "
Using MAME, you can run quit a lot of fighting games. My personal recommendations are Street Fighter II, Street Fighter Alpha and King of Fighters. Those games are also on other platforms (like SNES and Genesis), and that might be preferable because MAME can be a bit of a pain to set up.
For open world games, I'd recommend any Metroidvania game. That includes Castlevania games past Symphony of the Night (or Castlevania II on the NES), and any Metroid game.
Okay, it helps that you're working with software lists as that makes things much easier.
If I open my mame.ini this is how my rompath option is set.
rompath J:\MAME ROMs;J:\MAME CHDs;J:\SOFTWARE LIST ROMS;J:\MESS CHDs;I:\MESS CHDs
This way by default MAME finds everything when trying to launch something.
Now the other key to this is the hash folder which has a lot of XML documents and is essential for softlist loading. By default MAME expects it to be in the same location as mame64.exe
If you have the above setup correctly then you even have the option of using a simple command-line syntax to launch games.
mame64 nes smb1 mame64 snes ctrigger mame64 genesis sonic
Please visit the official site and try extracting a package into an empty folder so we can rule out of anything being b0rked. http://mamedev.org/release.html
Then create a fresh mame.ini by executing mame64 -cc set rompath and see if the Internal UI gives you a different result.
Don't worry it's probably something simple. We'll get you sorted. There's a QMC2 guide in case you weren't aware of it.
http://wiki.batcom-it.net/index.php?title=The_%27ultimate%27_guide_to_QMC2
You'll want to use the command-line binary from mamedev.org http://mamedev.org/release.php
There's no point in using MAMEUI especially if using HyperSpin because you'll never see the UI part of MAME and you inherit all of it's problems right now such as the crashing you describe.
When 0.172 releases it will be extremely easy to get nice settings. There's a presets folder included that contains ini files that you can simply copy over to the ini folder that provides nice HLSL settings for raster, vector, gameboy, etc.
Definitely check it out!!
(The release note contains list of updated games. The list isn't long, just glance the .readme txt)
http://mamedev.org/releases/whatsnew_0170.txt
I usually download the emulator then put my old ROM on it. See what's broken. Then add new games that I want to play, and fix broken ones. (I only play few games. so this might not work for you.)
.
people discuss specific games here sometimes.
http://www.retroroms.net/modules/newbb/viewforum.php?forum=1
.
Otherwise, just wait until the complete 0.170 ROM torrents is posted. It's so very new, not widespread yet.
After struggling with this issue myself for a couple of hours, I finally figured it out. The flashing command prompt you saw was caused by MESS not being able to find the software list hash files and shutting itself down instantly. Here's how I got it to run (using a freshly downloaded Retroarch with only the MESS 2015 core added)...
First of all, make sure to use unaltered hash XMLs from a recent version of MESS (MESS has been merged with MAME recently, so use the hash files from MAME 0.168, which you can get here: http://mamedev.org/release.php) at least while testing my solution, so we can be sure your file names are identical to everyone's. Then follow these steps:
1) Go to 'C:<your retroarch folder>\retroarch-core-options.cfg'; change the line 'mess_boot_from_cli = "disabled"' to 'mess_boot_from_cli = "enabled"'
2) In Retroarch, go to Settings -> Directory (the 2nd to last entry in the list) -> System/BIOS Dir -> set it to C:<your retroarch folder>\system\
3) In 'C:<your retroarch folder>\system\', create a subfolder named 'mess'
4) Copy the 'hash' folder from MESS into this subfolder, so the whole thing looks like this: 'C:<your retroarch folder>\system\mess\hash\coleco.xml'
5) Make sure your ROMs are properly named and placed:
-> The BIOS ROMs must be in an archive (.zip, .rar or .7z will work) in your main ROMs folder. It is crucial that they're named properly; in case of the Colecovision, the correct name would be 'C:\Roms\coleco.zip' (or .rar/.7z)
-> The game ROMs must be in an identically named subfolder, i.e. 'C:\Roms\coleco\' (it MUST be 'coleco'!); they have to be zipped, rar'ed or 7zipped as well and named according to the software list as well, e.g. 'C:\Roms\coleco\qbert.zip', containing qbert.bin
And voila, meeting the prerequisites of the software lists being in the right directory and the ROMs matching the names and checksums in the software lists should allow MESS via Retroarch to work :)
Try testing with the free ones on the mamedev website, at least you know those ones are the right roms! They might not be the games you want but they have the right files in them.
I followed the short instructions from http://mamedev.org/tools/ last night, and have the hiscore / no nag diffs from http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=64298.0 but nothing was clear with where to go after that. I'd really like to know how to complete the process, so I can do it myself when big changes happen in the future.
is there a how-to or video out there you know of. My main reason for trying to upgrade everything is due to the new GT06 that is working, and this is a new cabinet that I am completing in the next 2 weeks. and again, thanks for the help
How about funding further development of the app and expanding the amount of material available?
I mean, those are the first two options that I think of... especially since technology ain't exactly stagnant, you dig?
What works fine on today's tech might not work so well on tomorrow's, which is why things like MAME, DosBOX, and V.O.G.O.N.S. exist.
> I modded the pots on the gunblade guns to a USB analog pad and will have it hooked up to a Hyperspin pc with a library of shooting games.
You are aware this is against the MAME licensing agreement, correct?
>Question for you. Can mame machine be used for coin op and be put out on route?
The short answer is not legally, no. The slightly longer answer can be found on the MAME legal questions page. Pretty much anything involving money and MAME is in violation of the license terms.
If you go into the MAME menu and General Inputs, you will see "Trackball" inputs down the list. That's where you can configure the X and Y axis of the mouse. Also check here --
http://mamedev.org/devwiki/index.php?title=FAQ:Controls#Why_doesn.27t_my_mouse_or_trackball_work.3F
Fire up a MAME emulator, get a bunch of PC controllers and play Oldschool 2 player video games.
Whenever someone dies, the controller moves to the next person.
It's amazingly fun.
I doubt N64 will work all that great on a rPi. BUT, fear not, There still is hope. You could install MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) and play classic arcade games. As for installing The OS, you have two options, 1) just use NOOBS. This is honestly the easiest. All you do is drag the folder contents into the SD card. No burning Needed. the Second option is a lot harder compared to NOOBS. First you need some sort of Image burner. Then You need to download the OS of choice and burn what is most likely an .ISO file to the card. I cant give you details as I've only ever done his on hard drives and I just use noobs on the raspberry pi because I'm lazy. As for Which OS to use, That's your choice. NOOBS comes with a variety of OSes for you to choose (I should have mentioned that NOOBS is an installer, NOT an OS). How ever the most used one is Rasbian. It has plenty of support online and is also a Debian derivative so you get tons of packages and support from Debian users. However Noobs has other OSes to choose form like OpenELEC and RaspBMC (both Media Centers), Arch Linux, RISC OS, and pidora. But like I said, Rasbian is probably the best choice for a beginner because Its the most extensively supported.
EDIT: I forgot to mention that NOOBS is always on your card after you install it and allows for recovery in case of a corrupted SD card, so you might not have to reformat and re install stuff to your SD card. Oh and Rasbian is the official supported OS of the raspberry pi foundation. Just thought that was Worth noting.
Ill be the old fart of this thread; You should also check out mame for literally 10 of thousands of old arcade games.
Suddenly you realize that a lot of games you though were innovative and new, was actually made in the 80`s
Here's MAME's stance on commercial use. I'm not entirely sure how it would go for other emulators and such. For PS1 emulation, maybe you could use the emulator on the PC and have a physical copy the disc you purchased running on the machine? Or at least an ISO file you ripped yourself?
As someone has said before, I would consult someone who understands law. I'm not sure of the legal standpoint regarding commercial use. Good luck though!
There aren't many, but I know a few sources:
Nintendo's Virtual Console, of course, just consists of rom + emulator bundles, and there are many other services that work the same way. However they're encrypted and as far as I know there's no easy way to extract the rom, though by now a crack might exist. I'm fairly sure it would be legal to do so, just as you can legally rip a rom off a cartridge you own.
PDRoms for free homebrew games - no actual commercial titles.
The Atari Action Pack had a collection of roms + an emulator with no DRM, such that you could simply take the rom files and use them with other emulators. I think there are some other bundles like this out there, but I can't find much info. All I know is that this one is mentioned in Stella's FAQ.
First off: MAME. Use MAME if you want an arcade game emulator. Here's someone who made an arcade cabinet from scratch, which in his guide, you may find some stuff that may help you: Rob's MAME Cabinet. To get the buttons working on a pc you could either buy a pre-made arcade control set, or you could make it yourself. If you plan on making your own controls, head over to [/r/arduino](/r/arduino) and ask there about what you want to do.
Good luck in your project. I hope this helps, and I look forward to seeing what you end up doing.
Sorry , but it has been years since I tinkered with mame. I recall needing to place the roms in a folder called roms. The roms I linked to work with mame What emulator are you using?
r/MAME does not support using MAME through RetroArch. In all likelihood, you may not experience this problem if you use real MAME. Try using actual MAME from http://mamedev.org, and if you still have the problem, repost.
You don't need RetroArch to do this. You can just use ordinary MAME, and you don't need to do ANY of the stuff mentioned in this guide, the games just work. Using RA to accomplish this adds several unnecessary steps. Head to http://mamedev.org to download the latest version of MAME. It's much easier.
The biggest problem is that people try to accomplish everything in one fell swoop and that never works.
- RetroArch is great for console and handheld emulation, but it is terrible replacement for MAME. Do not use RetroArch for MAME, use MAME. Download it from http://mamedev.org.
- Get MAME working. Don't worry about a front-end. Just get the emulator to work the way you want it to. If you get the emulator working, you will understand what it needs to work, and how to make a front end launch it. If you try to skip this step, you will never know if the emulator is messed up or the front end.
- Once you're satisfied that you have MAME working, or any other emulator you like, THEN worry about the front-end. LaunchBox is a good choice, especially for beginners, as it takes a lot of the pain of setting up off your hands, but nothing is perfect, and you will likely have to do some work to get it set up the way you like it. But again, if you try to do this step before you are certain that you have your emulators set up correctly, you will have a very hard time debugging your setup.
So your next steps are to download MAME from mamedev.org, get it set up on your system, and make sure you can successfully launch games with it. Don't go any further until you've completed this to your own satisfaction.
All I said was don't ask for roms. You can ask all the questions you want, as long as you're not asking where to get games from. Typically when people ask for "complete setups," they're asking for the emulators, front-end, and roms all in one package. We don't allow that particular kind of request. If you want to get started, head over to http://mamedev.org/ and download MAME.
It sounds like the roms you downloaded don't contain the files that your copy of MAME is expecting to find. If you downloaded from a source that has relatively (within a year) up-to-date versions of roms, then trying to run them against a 3.5 year old version of MAME could be a problem.
What I would recommend is to try using vanilla MAME (from http://mamedev.org). Just start mame64, and choose the "Available" filter on the left side. You will see a bunch of computers unfortunately, but you should also see which games you downloaded are recognized by the version of MAME you run. (From there, you can add those games to your Favorites, and then use the Favorites filter to only see those.)
"Terms of Use" is a contract, not a copyright license.
Copyright licenses can prohibit commercial reproduction, but I don't think it's entirely clear if they can actually prohibit commercial use. E.g. the old MAME license wasn't vetted by any lawyer, and the "nor may they be used in a commercial ... activity" clause only kind of works since the copyright holder controls who can publicly display their works.
Proprietary software doesn't use copyright license to prohibit commercial use (e.g. for student editions of expensive CAD software), they use EULAs (contracts).
You might try letitgo or freecycle to get an old PC that's free or close to it which is not so ancient.
Not sure on the MAME compatibility, might try visiting their website to check the requirements.
Presuming your mapping is correct, this isn't possible to be happening in the latest mamedev.org supplied download(version 0.200, both 32 and 64-bits) here @ http://mamedev.org/release.html
There is only one time in recent memory where the firing for exidy440 games was not functioning properly due to lack of tracking and that was in version 0.186 only, corrected for 0.187: http://mametesters.org/view.php?id=6596
Unfortunately, I can't think of any other reasons it wouldn't work as expected.
i think you may want to start by trying it using the latest vanilla MAME release from http://http://mamedev.org/ to see if that solves your issue. It's easier to debug from the latest version as well, since many of us here are running it. :)
Wait really? My dateless MAME core is stuck at 0.174. I've tried updating the core but it's still 0.174. I even downloaded the nightly and it's standard MAME core was also 0.74... Is there something special I have to do to get 0.198?
Is the MAME core platform specific? I ask because I'm on a Mac and am wondering if that matters. As in, each platform gets the latest compatible version (ie: Retroarch on Windows would get 0.198 with the standard MAME core
I need 0.198 because Oriental Legends 2 isn't gonna emulate itself!
I don't do any C64 emulation personally but Zombeaver over on the main forums uses CCS64 and he's generally a pretty good judge of emulators, others may have a different opinion. Link: http://www.ccs64.com/
For Amiga FS-UAE is a very good choice and it's the one I and several others use. Zombeaver did an amazing tutorial video on it. Link:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VNsisdSJNI
For the Mame 0.37b5 rom set you should use the version of Mame for that rom set which can be found here: http://mamedev.org/oldrel.html
Using Retroarch for these systems is not something I would recommend at all.
Not sure I believe that almost the same clock speed on Atom is twice as fast as Pi3b, especially running Windows.
>They've contacted Atari to officially license the bundled Atari roms.
You seem pretty knowledgeable, where are you getting this information and is it publicly available? I also want to know what other emulators are being included.
>A lot of the people who have done Retro Pie builds say it can't really do N64 and PS1 emulation.
Rertropie does PS1 already. N64 also works even though some games have performance issues. Expect the same of this product.
Edit: Also I think it's not usually allowed to include Mame name and logos, but maybe /u/mamehaze can weigh in on that.
Does this look like something which would work with the shot to click?
http://mamedev.org/release.html
Or perhaps
http://www.arcadeguns.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=35_36
Thanks for the input, I'm new to this software, and I think these games would make for excellent practice with the shootoff software.
The only downside is that MAME doesn't stand for "Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator" anymore. (Reference - http://mamedev.org/ Under "What is MAME"). It is an old acronym which does not properly reflect the project as it is today. While MAME still deals with Arcade games, it is in no way its primary focus.
From what I know, Frank Cifaldi just wants to make another useless Virtual Console, except this time it would be called 'Digital Eclipse Console', using MAME or whatever. It's all just a hustle, the GDC talk was just a slimy 'pitch' for this which people again took at face value, and he thinks that for some weird reason the MAME license gives him a free lunch to take whatever emulation code he wants and then sell it. The MAME FAQ itself pretty much dispels this and says that various code parts are still owned by the various authors it's attributed to and there is no such 'free lunch', so maybe he, like so many others, is just misunderstanding the GPL incorrectly again.
"The code in MAME is the work of hundreds of developers, each of whom owns the copyright to the code they wrote. There is no central copyright authority you can license the code from. The proper way to use the MAME source code is to examine it, using it to understand how the games worked, and then write your own emulation code. Sorry, there is no free lunch here."
Wouldn't be the first time some guys from or near the Valley start running with stuff they don't understand and throwing millions at the wall and seeing what sticks instead of exercising their brain first and trying to find out if they might not have fundamentally misunderstood what the hell they were trying to do in the first place.
Anyway, it's all pretty much cynical 'monopoly games' again as far as the games industry is concerned, and honestly, emulation needs to stay the way it is. None of this commercialization crap furthers preservation and all of the people that certain devs here love to pretend they are all for, until selling closed-source license exemptions for some weird reason became all of a sudden some priority. People have jumped the shark and it's time for somebody else to keep things the way they were, this is not working.
> Fatal error: Fatal error: Too many live texture instances
Googling the above error message led me to this MAMETesters bug...
http://mametesters.org/view.php?id=6264
I'm not sure where to go from here. I guess you could always try MAME 0.174
It sounds like you're trying to do too much at once and as a result you're confusing yourself and making mistakes.
The new MAME 0.172 comes out in a couple days (Wednesday) When this happens go to mamedev.org and download the appropriate archive. Hopefully you're 64-bit
http://mamedev.org/release.html
Extract it into an empty folder preferably on a secondary drive. execute mame64 -cc this creates a mame.ini that you can open with Notepad ++ or equivalent and set options. In your case the most important seems to be rompath option so MAME can find all your ROMs, CHDs, software lists.
rompath J:\MAME ROMs;J:\MAME CHDs;J:\SOFTWARE LIST ROMS;J:\MESS CHDs;I:\MESS CHDs
After which you have the option of using MAME's internal UI or hooking up QMC2.
http://wiki.batcom-it.net/index.php?title=The_%27ultimate%27_guide_to_QMC2
I'm definitely not using autosave, as every image boots up from scratch each time. I don't know if GameEX has some tricks it pulls?
It definitely saved my hi score in Ms. Pac-Man the other day, unless it's possible that running it, closing it, then running it again, caused it to access the same points in real memory that did not get changed between executions, which seems like it would be a serious security flaw.
I grabbed the MAME 171 from http://mamedev.org/release.html
Per MAME's about page: >MAME is strictly a non-profit project. Its main purpose is to be a reference to the inner workings of the emulated arcade machines. This is done both for educational purposes and for preservation purposes, in order to prevent many historical games from disappearing forever once the hardware they run on stops working. Of course, in order to preserve the games and demonstrate that the emulated behavior matches the original, you must also be able to actually play the games. This is considered a nice side effect, and is not MAME's primary focus.
An emulator that plays games "as a side effect"... heh,heh no.
I'm well aware. I too have been to mamedev.org. Since we're quoting folks from the MAME project, here's Miodrag Milanovic talking to Gamasutra about why they're trying to change the licensing: >Our aim is to help legal license owners in distribuiting their games based on MAME platform
And you're not saying fuck the police. You're literally saying it should stay illegal (aka fuck the users).
I have a games computer that i use a $100 lenovo netbook for. I installed mame, and one of these bad boys and it is one of the best low price game machines money can buy. You can probably play it through your tv.
There's been a change in this situation in the last 24 hours !!!
MAME has announced they are going full open source and are endorsing developers making "commercial use" versions of MAME
they still require OWNING the roms, But a Multicade cabinet, and a Small box of licensed roms in your safe is now a perfectly reasonable option (you'll need a developer to fork MAME and add coin counting abilities)
Most LED TV's have higher refresh rates and less lag reduction than traditional CRT monitors. Also, they make USB Adapters for genuine NES controllers to be plugged in, and Zsnes is one of the fastest emulators out there with the broadest compatibility. There's virtually no difference. I'm sure there's some, but yeah. Also, let's not forget that with a PC you can also play:
M.A.M.E., Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. I haven't updated in a long time, but it had around 2000 classic arcade games. all emulated just fine last time I played.
Gameboy, Gameboy Color, Gameboy Advance, Hell, i believe Citra (Nintendo 3DS emulator) is coming along quite nicely, so if you want to jam out to some Mario Kart 7...by all means.
NES, SNES, N64, Gamecube, and I believe there's a Wii emulator already in process.
NeoGeo, SMK, TurboGrafx16, TI-99 4/a, Oddessy, Atari 2600, Amiga Workbench, Linux, Windows, Sega Genesis, Saturn, CD, Master, uh... well. I could keep going but we'll just leave it at "Almost every console and arcade game released in the last 30 years."
There's PS1, PS2, and limited PS3 functionality (remember, your PS controller has native drivers in windows) and i believe the original xbox is done, and progress is being made on the 360, so even console exclusives like Halo will eventually be fair game to PC users. no word on the Wii U, but given the proprietary controller, i'm not sure that's even feasible.
All this and over 200,000 actual PC titles from the last 20 years with more games added every day (many of them PC Exclusives) and while consoles have their place, there's almost literally nothing you can't emulate on the PC with varying degrees of success.
If you actually want the real games, get MAME: http://mamedev.org/ You can find MAME for Smartphones too. Check Torrent search sites to get the roms.
I tried to dothe right thing and buy them from steam whenever possible. But then every single time I end up just using MAME because of shitty ports.
I got Metal Slug 3 from steam, and they totally gutted it. Instead of cool looking cartoon characters like the original, they re-made all the menu and title screen artwork with SVG graphics that looked like Japanees Magna porn. They then went even further by tweaking the gameplay.
magical Drop 5 is another f-king joke. Once again they went for the japan porn, SVG look, rather than using sprites. It makes it look and play like a cheap webgame.
Where did you download your copy? The official MESS page (http://mamedev.org/release.html) only has binaries for Windows. If you did in fact download a Linux binary, it may be compiled for x86 processors which won't be compatible with your Chromebook.
Look into MAME.
> What's the legality of it?
MAME and emulation in general is legal, downloading ROMs is not (aside from ones that have been released online by their copyright holders).
Final Burn Alpha is the one I use, though there are plenty of other options out there (like WinKawaks or, of course, MAME) since Neo-Geo emulation has been more or less perfect for the better part of a decade.
BYOAC Build Your Own Arcade http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/
MAME Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator http://mamedev.org/
I've just started building one myself, search for Lusids plans they seem to be the most popular, and IMO the best looking. http://www.lusid.net/arcade/
Oh I get it. In that case check out the Whatsnew files from each release here: http://mamedev.org/oldrel.html
They list what new clones and fixes were added. I'm not sure there's been any totally new roms added in quite awhile, but clones are added all the time.
You mean MAME vs whatever?
Uh, well... MAME is emulation software used to emulate a ton of different arcade machines using a standard PC. MAME literally stands for "Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator".
A lot of people will build a "MAME Cabinet", which essentially a PC stuffed in a nice looking cabinet and then filled with a ton of arcade ROMs. This is probably the type of thing you are looking at doing.
Alternatively you can get real arcade hardware and install it. Typically arcade games are just a single game per board (they are usually just a motherboard with some EEPROMs storing the game, no disk drives or anything). There is a lot of older stuff floating around, and there is also "newer" arcade hardware that was designed to make it easy for arcade owners to swap games. One popular hardware set was called he NAOMI, which was very similar to a Dreamcast (I have a couple NAOMI boards and a few games, which is why I use it as an example). I'm taking a guess this isn't the route you'd go.
There is a third option of sticking a standard game console in there, but if you're wanting an arcade machine you're probably going to look at a MAME setup.
Based on what you've said and the picture, it sounds like you have just the cab and no electronics or mechanics. This is the equivalent of if you were building a home theater and all you have is a tv stand that needs refinishing. For an authentic setup having a real cab is nice, but by the time you repaint that cab you'll probably be a weekend and about a hundred bucks of materials ahead compared to going from scratch. Of course, if that is wrong and there are usable parts inside that can't be seen it could be a completely different story.
(I'll post a follow up with details on what you likely need to build a MAME setup)
Build a MAME arcade in a full cabinet.
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/how_build_kickass_mame_arcade_cabinet_old_pc
http://www.tmsoft.com/article-arcade.htm
EDIT: Goal: Build an arcade cabinet from pieces of wood, paint, plexiglas. Build your own computer to go inside of the cabinet. Buy various arcade pieces (joysticks, buttons, etc) and connect them to the PC via science. Play thousands of games on your new arcade!!
I was at something called Code and Kegs Hackathon a couple of weeks ago. There were a few guys from the local hackerspace that had an old arcade cabinet that they gutted and installed a pc with MAME running and got it working in less than 24 hours. They did use the original joysticks and monitor so I imagine with usb joysticks and a computer monitor it would probably be easier. There seemed to be plenty of space left over. I didn't measure it, though.
u6 doesn't indicate a minor revision, it indicates a beta release.
0.142 stable => 0.142uX => 0.143 stable
Roms change because the previous dump was incomplete or incorrect. FAQ:ROMs
Here's a little more advice:
- Did you read the mame documentation? Start with the faq.
- Here's some official roms that the mame website lists as both legal and working. It's probably best to test with these.
- Roms go in the roms directory in mame (not c:\roms, but c:\mame\roms, if mame.exe is in c:\mame) This is listed in the faq
At this point, I'm pretty sure your issue is that you're putting roms in c:\rom instead of c:\mame\roms. There is a way to do this, but you have to tell mame where to find them if the roms aren't in the default location.