Ronnie Tucker

Having upgraded my old PC with an Intel Core2 Quad, 4Gb RAM and a shiny GeForce 9400 video card I wanted to put the old one to good use. Enter MAME.

MAME?

MAME is an application called Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. In short: you give it ROM’s from old arcade machines, and it plays them. MAME its self isn’t so friendly to use, or look at, so most people use a ‘front end’ application to allow you easy access to your ROMs. Since I’m using Ubuntu 8.10 for the OS, I’m going to use Wahcade as the face of MAME. My idea is to have the old PC connected to my TV using the video cards tv-out socket.

Installing Ubuntu

Getting Ubuntu on to a PC is simple. Well, normally it is. But since I’m not using a monitor; Ubuntu couldn’t decide on a resolution, but the all new singing, and dancing, bullet-proof X came to the rescue and let me (at least) load Ubuntu with a low-resolution (800 x 600) which was enough to let me get going.

TIP: If your going to use the PC for only MAME then it’s probably best to tick the ‘auto-login’ box in step 5 of the Ubuntu installation. You’ll see why at the end of this article.

With Ubuntu installed it now had to install all the latest updates, all 200+ of them! But once the updates are in place, I have access to the nVidia restricted drivers and can properly configure the video card for tv-out.

Let’s MOVE!

OK, Ubuntu is installed, but will it like my cheap Logic3 joypad? Time to find out. I installed the ‘joypad’ package, using Synaptic. Running:

jstest /dev/input/js0

Gets you:

jstest - some distros may use /dev/js0

Which confirms that the joypad is detected, and fully working. Excellent!

MAME!

Now to install SDLmame. The website at:http://wallyweek.altervista.org/ has a .deb file for download. Just click the appropriate link, and when Firefox pops up to ask if you want to save the file, it also has an option to open the file in Gdebi. I use this option as it saves time by downloading and installing it with just that one click:

downloading SDLmame with Firefox

It’s the exact same idea with downloading Wahcade: http://www.anti-particle.com/wahcade.shtml

downloading Wahcade using Firefox

With SDLmame and Wahcade installed, we’re ready to rock!

/Home On The Range

In your /home directory, create a directory called ‘emulators’, and inside that create one called ‘mame’, and inside that create one called ‘roms’. This is the default set of directories for Wahcade and means less configuration of Wahcade.

Legal Stuff

MAME is utterly useless without ROMs, so where do you get these mystical ROM files? That my friend is up to you. Technically speaking, downloading (and supplying) ROM’s is illegal in most places, so I’m unable to give links to ROMs, but try Google…

Set-up

If you check your Applications > Games menu, you’ll see some entries for Wahcade. We want to load the setup application for the moment. The only things we need to edit are: in the Emulators tab, click the List Generation, click the browse button, and give it the roms directory (/home/yourname/emulators/mame/roms)

Wahcade setup app - Emulators tab. Only thing to edit is the rom directory (highlighted).

In the MAME Only tab, click the button to generate a list of your ROMs:

MAME Only tab - red arrow points to the Generate List button.

… and finally the Keys tab. Maybe you won’t have to edit anything in here, but I had to tick the box to enable my joypad to be used in Wahcade for selecting ROMs:

Key tab - red arrow points to the joypad check box. If your joypad isn't working in Wahcade, enable this option.

Last thing to configure is SDLmame its self. It needs to know where your ROMs are stashed too. So in a terminal; run:

sudo gedit /etc/sdlmame/mame.ini

… and where it says rompath, paste/type in the ROMs directory (same one you gave to Wahcade)

Editing the mame.ini file. The line to edit is shown highlighted.

Right, time to give it a whirl! Go to Applications > Games and load Wahcade!

Default Wahcade theme showing ROMs ready to play.

The default Wahcade theme (shown above) is quite garish, but others can be downloaded from various sites.

Now, the reason to make the Ubuntu install auto-login is that you can go to System > Preferences > Sessions and add Wahcade to the startup. This means your mean MAME machine would load up Ubuntu, log you in, and load up Wahcade for you! Amazing!

Sorry, I must go and play Super Sprint again. Surely one of the most under-rated games EVER!

UPDATE: I’ve now created a simple MAME layout for Wahcade:

On the left is the ROM screen, on the left the ROM flyer, and at the bottom is the list of available ROMs.

To grab my layout, click HERE: http://ronnietucker.co.uk/mame/polaroid_1024.zip

Please note: Included in the ZIP file is my .XCF (GIMP) file. If you want to make a derivative of Polaroid, go ahead, but please credit me (Ronnie, ronnie[at]ronnietucker.co.uk) and distribute your layout with source files too.