A few years ago I put together an Mame arcade system using an old laptop, X-Arcade Tanksitck, and a Xtension Mini Arcade Cabinet. Over the past few months the laptop has become flaky and now needs to be replaced. I figured the Beaglebone would be the perfect replacement as it has enough horsepower to run Mame, and low power enough that so I can just leave it running all the time.
Unfortunately I was not able to locate a prebuilt image that included Mame. Getting X to work properly with sound, and then finding a version of Mame that’ll compile on the Black’s arm chip turned out to be a bigger hassle than I expected. There are a number of things that need to be fixed but overall I think this image should work fine for running the games I had on the old laptop.
The image runs Debian as the OS, AdvanceMame for the game emulation, and Wahcade as a front end. It can be run either from an SD or copied on to the internal storage. Wahcade will start automatically when the system boots… just boot the system and its ready to go.
http://gencarelle.com/public_files/mamebone/mamebone-0.5.img
I’ve only included the Circus and Tankwars roms in this image. To add your own roms login with the user name mame with the password of mame. New roms go in the emulators/mame/roms directory.
If you try the image and have problems and/or suggestions let me know. I have a few more tweaks planned to make adding roms easier and will post how I got AdvanceMame to compile eventually.
Thanks for posting this
I was able to get it flashed and working, but I’m having an issue getting my joysticks working properly. I’m using an HID based off of the Xin Mo controller. By default, up and left don’t work. On a full debian or ubuntu install, the process is fairly straight forward to fix it – the kernel needs patched.
http://ithink.ch/blog/2013/09/08/patching_the_linux_kernel_to_install_the_xin-mo_dual_arcade_driver_on_ubuntu_1304.html
When I try to run the command to build dependencies, it fails because it can’t find a source package for this specific build, which makes sense.
Do you have any pointers on making this work?
Run “uname -a” to get the kernel version and then go here http://rcn-ee.net/deb/raring-armhf/ to download the kernel headers and source. Also, make sure you have my latest mame image file. Currently its version 0.11: http://gencarelle.com/public_files/mamebone/mamebone-0.11/mamebone-0.11.img.xz.
If you have problems after you have the required kernel files let me know.
Very cool! What version of MAME roms does this build use? .37b I assume? How well do the ROMS run? I only ask because I got spotty performance using anything but MAME4ALL on the raspberry pi.
Humm, have to check on the supported version of Mame. The version of advmame is the latest, v1.2. All the classics (pacman, robotron, donkey kong, etc…) I’ve tested work perfectly. Others are a bit hit or miss. I was able to get some of the marginal ones to run better by removing the dependency on X… I posted an image, look at the older posts if you are interested.
If there is a specific game(s) you are interested in please let me know and I can test for you.