There are many platforms for playing retro arcade games, but what makes MAME one of the most widely used? One of its strongest pillars is that it is a platform totally Open Source. Thanks to this, the community, and any interested user, can collaborate in its development and improvement. In addition, they avoid possible legal problems that we may encounter. This platform is also totally free, from your game databases to the emulator and games. We can also get BIOSes without paying, although this already borders on the line between what is illegal and what is legal.
Another of the advantages that we must highlight about this platform is that it is one of the best maintenance obtained, by users and the community. We can find updates and revisions of the romsets (packs of roms) every so often, including the new arcade games that still reach the arcades (especially in Japan). He emulator it is constantly revised to improve both compatibility with incompatible titles and the performance of games that already work.
If we had to highlight two drawbacks, we could talk about its interface (quite ugly and careless, it looks like an MS-DOS application) and the difficulty of use, since, for being the most used arcade platform, it’s the least intuitive we can find. Luckily, there are many alternatives that will help us have the same thing, but easier.
MAME vs FBA, which is better?
Surely if we have ever been interested in emulating arcade games, in addition to MAME we will have come across other similar alternatives, being one of the most popular Final Burn Alpha, or FBA. Broadly speaking, the objective of both platforms is the same: to allow us to play arcade games on the computer. However, there are some differences between both options.
MAME has been designed from the ground up to give the user strict accuracy from the original. That is to say, this emulator seeks to replicate the real operation of arcade machines, both for good and for bad. The higher the precision, the more powerful hardware is required, yes. FBA, on the other hand, is designed to run faster, making it a much better option for less powerful computers.
Also, although both options will emulate practically the same games, each emulator will stand out for emulating certain alternatives better or worse. For example, NEOGEO runs much better on FBA than MAME, while other machines are just the other way around.
As for which is better or worse, there is no definitive answer. We can bet on the most complete romset that we find on the net, which surely already comes with its own emulator prepared. In the case of FBA, we can use its own program, or resort to RetroArch, while MAME has an emulator, with a library, much more orderly and organized, being able to see the games we have, and how each of them works.
Minimum requirements
The truth is that, for an emulator, MAME’s requirements are not too demanding. Of course, we must take into account that, when emulating various platforms, some are more demanding than others, so we can have problems if our computer is very old. If we have a more or less new team, we should not have problems.
Although MAME can work with 200 MHz CPUs, if we really want smooth games, we must make sure that we have at least the following requirements:
- Pentium 4 or equivalent 2800 MHz processor.
- 2 GB of RAM.
- DirectX compatible graphics card.
- Operating system: Windows XP or later.
Console versions of MAME have no special requirements. These are perfectly adapted to work in them.
How to download and install MAME
As we have said, MAME is a free and open source emulator, therefore, although some pages allow you to download it by paying a fee, downloading the emulator is totally free, and we can do it. The recommended download from this web page are the Official Binariesand also the 64-bit version.
For legal reasons, this emulator comes as is, no games, BIOS, covers or anything. When we download this emulator we are only downloading the executable, the game database and little else. We must look for the games in other web pages (there are even complete packs of roms with the 35,000 games available), as well as the BIOS itself (dump of the processor code of the physical arcade machine) that many games need to be able to work.
This emulator is downloaded in the form of an .exe executable of about 60 megabytes. When we have it on our computer, we run it and we will be able to see the classic wizard to extract from 7-Zip. We will choose the path where we want to extract this emulator and that’s it.
When the extraction of the entire emulator is finished we will have a new folder of about 400 megabytes on our hard drive. Inside it we are going to find everything we need to make our arcade emulator work in Windows.
If we run the binary “mame64.exe»The emulator will open and we will be able to have a first contact with it, although since we don’t have games copied yet, we won’t be able to do much at the moment other than see its main interface and configure it, if we want.
What is the latest version of MAME?
MAME is a pack of games that is in constant development. This means that, every so often, updates appear that add new versions of the roms, ports, and even new games that, although we do not see them in our country, in regions where arcades are still the order of the day, they continue to come out. to the market every so often.
The latest version of the pack of roms and consoles that we can find on the net is MAME 0.243. This version is, in broad strokes, an update of the previous one, 0.242, with support for many more games. 0.242 is one of the biggest updates of 2022, as it added support for LaserDisc-based machines, its only supported game being Time Traveler. In addition, this version also introduced support for the Rockwell B5000 controllers, commonly used in many electronic toys, calculators, and Mattel products.
If we do not want these latest versions (since the new systems are still incomplete), and we want one of the most widely used and widespread on the entire network, then we recommend downloading MAME 0.241, one of the best versions of 2022, although we will lose all the news included. in the two later versions that we just talked about.
Download MAME on Linux
MAME is one of the programs that is usually included by default in the official repositories of most Linux distributions. Therefore, installing it on a distro like Ubuntu is as simple as opening a terminal and executing the following command in it:
sudo apt install mom
In case this emulator does not appear in the repositories of our distro, we can also install it by adding its repository by hand and downloading the latest version directly from it. To do this, what we will do is execute the following commands, again, in a terminal:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:c.falco/mame sudo apt update && sudo apt install mame
In the case of Ubuntu, in addition, we can also install it through its snap package in a much easier way with the following command:
sudo snap install mame
Just like on Windows, MAME for Linux comes without games. Therefore, first of all, we are going to see how we can manually add the games to the arcade emulator to start playing as soon as possible.
How to add arcade games (ROMS)
As we have said, when we download the emulator we are not downloading any game, so this task is already on us. Being quite old arcade games, most of the web pages that compile retro games will allow us to download both individual games and game packs. These games can even be found in the database of Internet Archiveso they are not very difficult to find and download, and they are not bordering on illegal either.
What is totally illegal is the BIOS download necessary to run many of the arcade games. To download these BIOSes we will have to search Google, as indicated in the MAME documentation, although they are not very difficult to find either.
Unlike the roms of any other retro-console emulator, which can have whatever name we want, we can even load them in the emulators in ZIP or uncompressed format (in nes, gb, gba, n64, etc. depending on the format). the console for which the rom is), MAME roms must save a specific structure.
If we change the name of these files, the emulator will try to locate them in its database, it will not recognize it and, although it may open it, it will not appear in the list with its real name. These roms also must always be compressedsince if we try to unzip them we will even find a series of files that would mess up the identification of the games in question even more.
When we have the games that we want to add to our emulator already downloaded, the next step will be copy them to the “roms” folder which appears in the main MAME directory. In this directory we will copy all the games, and when we open the program it will be where the emulator looks for and loads them automatically.
If we try to play a game and it needs a BIOS we can see a message like the following where it will tell us the BIOS that we are missing, in our case, the one for NEOGEO.
We must look for the BIOSes on the Internet and, when we download them, we will also copy them to the “roms” folder, just as if it were any other game.
When ROMS and BIOS are already in the directory “roms”, We only have to open the MAME emulator again to start playing any game.
MAME allows us to customize absolutely all the controls of the emulator so that users can adapt it to their needs. However, by default it comes with a series of controls that we must know if we want to be able to move through the menu without problems:
- Tab: Opens the menu.
- ~: Activates the overlay screen of options and settings.
- Q: Pause the game.
- F3: Restart game.
- F6: Activate the cheats.
- Shift + F7: Create a quick save state.
- F7: Load the fast save state.
- F12: Take a screenshot.
- Alt+Enter: Toggle full screen on or off.
- Esc: Exit the emulator.
If instead of using the keyboard we want to play with the controller, MAME will also allow us to do so. The only thing we are going to have to do is connect the controller to the computer and make sure that it recognizes it. The best thing is to bet on generic commands with Xinput support, so that Windows controls them as it considers.
Once the controller is connected, we can open the emulator again, and within the advanced options of the emulator we will have to look for the “Input” options. From there we will be able to associate each of the emulator controls to our command. We can establish a general configuration for all the games, or only apply it to the game that we have open at that moment.
A…
Facebook Comments
Disqus