MAME

 

Playing arcade games on FreeBSD.

 

 

I don't know if you've seen them in real life, but I only remember them from movies from the 80s and 90s. It's a big box with a screen that is designed, if I'm not mistaken, to run only one game. But on FreeBSD we will be able to play a lot of these games, like we would have a lot of arcade machines. There is a cross-platform MAME emulator that is designed to recreate the arcade electronics as software and so we can play these games on FreeBSD.

 

First of all, let's install the MAME emulator by running the following commands:

 

 

pkg install mame

 

 

or

 

 

cd /usr/ports/emulators/mame

 

 

make install clean

 

 

To set up MAME, we need to create a mame.ini file. I have FreeBSD 11 amd64 so MAME will be sixty-four bits and all commands will run as mame64, but if you have a 32 bit system then just mame.

 

Let's begin:

 

 

mame64 -cc

 

 

And let's create a directory .mame, where our games will be stored.

 

 

 

Now we have created our mame.ini file and look for a line in it:

 

 

# CORE SEARCH PATH OPTIONS

 

# CORE OUTPUT DIRECTORY OPTIONS

 

# OSD VIDEO OPTIONS

 

 

The lines # CORE SEARCH PATH OPTIONS and # CORE OUTPUT DIRECTORY OPTIONS show the path of your ROMS, cfg, and so on.

 

rompath /home/user/.mame/roms/

 

cfg_directory /home/max/.mame/cfg

 

And on the # OSD VIDEO OPTIONS line

 

instead of

 

video auto

 

Write

 

video opengl

 

For example if you want the game to open in a window instead of full screen, then instead of

 

window 0

 

write

 

window 1

 

All ROMS roms games placed in the folder /home/user/.mame/roms, with the configuration is done. To run the MAME emulator in the terminal run the command:

 

mame64

 

After that will open the menu of arcade machine emulator MAME with a list of your games. Now you can enjoy arcade games on FreeBSD.