MAME with Raspberry pi3?

[Chris Bardon]

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working with RetroPie, and the console stuff seems to work OK, but the MAME romset I have for my cabinet is way out of date.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]

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]

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]

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.

 

[Fifty]

I set up MAME on a Pi3+B using Retropie. Works great. Easy to setup.

 

[Chris Bardon]

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]

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.