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MAME with Raspberry pi3?

Chris Bardon

Well-Known Member
Nov 15, 2012
1,301
158
63
Mississauga, ON
Anyone tried building a MAME off a Pi3? A friend at work had a spare kit and some arcade stick parts, so I offered to help put together a box for the office. I've got all the hardware working with RetroPie, and the console stuff seems to work OK, but the MAME romset I have for my cabinet is way out of date. Seems like the versions that can run on a Pi are pretty specific.

So, since I haven't updated my roms in probably a decade, if I want to get MAME working here, I need a new set. Before I start digging through the web for a decent, malware-free download option, has anyone got a romset/image already set up for this?

It'll be interesting to see how this works. My other MAME build has just been PC based, and that might be a fallback in this case, but I'm curious how capable this little board is.
 

mwong168

Administrator
Staff member
Nov 14, 2012
6,652
1,397
113
45
Toronto
I believe you need MAME romset 0.375b which I have in case you are interested in. I never got around to setting this up in Retropie as my friends were only interested in playing NES and SNES.
 

Chris Bardon

Well-Known Member
Nov 15, 2012
1,301
158
63
Mississauga, ON
It's actually pretty complicated-depends on which of the MAME flavours you want to run on the pi: https://retropie.org.uk/docs/MAME/

0.37b5 is the lowest version that's supported (by mame4all). It looks like lr-mame2016 supports the 0.174 set though.

I'm going to see what I can find with romcenter and a copy of the .37 binaries. I can see why the MAME folks don't like the raspberry Pi stuff though-that's a 2000-era MAME build!
 

brad808

Member
Feb 28, 2013
656
24
18
Brantford
The pi boards aren't really the greatest but they can get the job done. I have couple preconfigured files that you can copy to SD card if you need, but they are pi3b+. Think 32gb and 128gb? In Brantford.
 

Chris Bardon

Well-Known Member
Nov 15, 2012
1,301
158
63
Mississauga, ON
Which romset/core were you using, and did you use anything to clean the roms beforehand (e.g. Romcenter, CLRMamePro)?

I've only managed to get a couple of games working so far, and I ran into a strange issue whereby I'd quit MAME, and then the controls in the Emulation Station frontend would be messed up. Going to try resetting the joystick configuration and see what happens.
 

Fifty

Active Member
Apr 22, 2014
605
149
43
50
Ottawa, Ontario
I started downloading ROMs and I wasn't having any success. So I went over to Etsy and bought a ROM package for like $10. It had everything on it. I just tweaked it to my liking and removed features I didn't want. Saved me a ton of time finding working ROMs.