I got AdvanceMame up and running following the great work by Nick Miller (cheers Nick) and the comments in his blog. The blog can be found here.
http://1337technophile.blogspot.co.uk/2 ... vmame.html
I managed to run advmame from the command line (i.e. not within X) by running this command:
usermod -a -G video
After hunting the Rpi Forum I managed to install the joystick package and got a USB Gamepad working a treat. I got sound working by install the ASLA drivers and running these 2 commands after booting the Rpi (I’m using Debian):
- sudo depmod
sudo modprobe snd-bcm2835
The following ROMS work a treat (video & sound arcade perfect)
commando,frogger,hyperspt,kungfum,scramble,trackfld
The following ROMS work ok (video/performance however sound is odd)
1932kai,bombjack,darwin,elevator,gberet,invaders,superman,unsquad
The following ROMS are slow (unplayable really)
1941j,asteroid,contra,ffight,ghouls,pacland,rtype2,scontra,sf2ce,simpsons,smashtv,starwars,tmnt2,pdrift(very slow)
With regards to performance on the slower roms then:
- I’ve installed both version 0.106.0 and 0.106.1 of advmame and haven’t noticed any difference.
I have tested Class 6 and Class 10 SD cards and again no performance difference.
I have also played around the 3 start.elf files on the SD card as well with no visible improvement on the emulator performance on later roms.
- arm128_start.elf
arm192_start.elf
arm224_start.elf
- arm128_start.elf
My only hope to improve performance on the slower roms is either another emulator (XMAME, SDLMAME, MAME4ALL, MAME37b5) or a newer version of Debian (or another distro) that takes advantage of the GPU.
In summary the Rpi as a MAME Emulator is great for the really old type (late 70s/early 80s) games I was brought up on i.e. Galaxian, Track & Field, Frogger but unfortunately is struggling on some of the more recent roms i.e. Street Fighter 2, Final Fight
Cheers