Running MAME on a Raspberry Pi

Wocka-wocka....MAME on a Raspberry Pi

Introduction

The other weekend we stopped off for a pub lunch and my boys spotted a coin operated video game table. They'd been given a coin to play after their lunch and the food just couldn't arrive quick enough. But it wasn't that long before they got their first tastes of Pac Man, Galaxian and Centipede.... games of my youth were surprisingly just as amazing to my own kids.

The MAME table we found in the pub.

Right there I hatched an idea to look into running MAME on our Raspberry Pi and maybe even built a gaming table that was something like it. I've seen joystick/control kits on ebay, and read various blogs where impressive cabinets have been built around the diminutive computer, so I figured there'd be plenty of help out there. (I wasn't wrong)


I did some research this weekend; there's a few software projects providing more or less the same thing, with PiPlay (formerly PiMAME) being one of the common choices. I decided to look for something that needed the least amount of effort and I found a project called Raspicade which supports USB controllers or direct wired connections to the GPIO.

Installing Raspicade

Download the card image from the Files page (I chose raspicade-samba-gamepads-keyboard-pikeyd_ready-B-B B-GPIOready-ES-20150513.img.gz), unzip the file and then use DD to write the contents to an empty MicroSD card.

On my Mac the command would be something like..

sudo dd if=raspicade.img of=/dev/disk4

(nb. I shortened the img file name, and ensure you find out what disk number the card is mounted on - use "diskutil list" if you need to find out.)

I did try using diskutility to do this, but it can only handle a single partition. The image has two partitions, one dos and the other linux.

it's a 2.5Gb image, it took a long time!.. but after that it was a case of inserting the flash card into the Pi and booting. After the usual linux boot messages you are asked some questions about sound, input type and which front-end to use. Then you get an amazing looking start-up screen and a simple, easy to interface.

Update - 13/10/15
Before you go much further if you are using a card bigger than 4Gb it's a good idea to resize the linux partition to fill your card. I used gparted to do this. It has a nice easy to use GUI and only takes a few minutes.


My first issue was how do I install ROM files?... even though Samba and ftp should be included, it had failed to correctly set my wireless network up (which isn't surprising). I had to resort to shutting it down and mounting the file on a Linux system (I used my Raspbian install) and copy the ROMs over via USB.


The ROM files are NOT freely available, I guess the content owners (from 30 years ago) haven't released the copyright because there's been a lot of reboot type stuff available on android/ios. So you have no choice but to find a torrent.


I downloaded the MAME 0.37b11 mame4all ROMs and installed them in the following folder..

/home/pi/mame4all-pi/roms/

I also copied the artwork and samples to the following directory:-

/home/pi/mame4all-pi/

Interestingly there's a folder in roms for SCUMMVM too,.. something to look into, as the boys have been known to play Day of The Tentacle from time to time. But I couldn't see an option in the menus in which to load them.

After replacing the card into the Pi we powered on and found all of our old arcade games ready to play. Most seemed to work (the odd one refused to start) but it was apparent that we had no sound. There was no obvious setting (other than the questions on boot-up) so I searched the forums.

Fixing the Sound

Initially I checked to see if the sound was being routed to the 3.5mm jack socket, but nothing there either. There had to be a setting fix because it works fine in Raspbian.

So you can press escape to exit to the console, and the Raspicade forum suggests two things that might fix the sound:-

1) Set the output source on the sound mixer to 2 (HDMI)..
  

sudo amixer cset numid=3 2

2) Then enable HDMI sound..

sudo nano /boot/config.txt

Find and uncomment the line..

#hdmi_drive=2

After I'd saved and then rebooted, the splash screen burst into life with glorious sound, and moments later our selected game responded with glorious 8 bit retro tones.

Big Smiles All Round :o)