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Last month, we covered how to set up and run DOSBox for the purpose of running old DOS games. Another type of retrogaming that I’m personally fond of is arcade gaming. Our Linux machines can take us back to the glory days of the 80’s video arcade in more ways than one. I’ve been a fan of MAME, the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, almost since the very beginning. Back when the project was first launched, it was updated every week, and I remember the times when support was first introduced for games like Zaxxon, or Asteroids, or Defender, very prominent and popular arcade games that were not initially supported when MAME launched. It was quite exciting to anticipate what games would get support next. I was very surprised when they were able to translate vector based games like Asteroids and Battlezone to run on a raster monitor!
How MAME works is that owners of the original arcade games dump the contents of the games’ ROM chips into a format our computers can read. MAME has core emulation built in for the common CPU’s of the time (Zilog Z80, Motorola 6502 and 6809, and others). Emulation is built in for the original arcade machine sound and displays, and the ROM code is run to reproduce the original arcade machine precisely. The project has grown by leaps and bounds over the past 20+ years, and hundreds, possibly thousands, of classic arcade games are now supported.
As to the issue of ROM’s, only a relative few sets have been released as freeware or have lapsed into the public domain. We’ll be using one such set as we set up MAME on our Linux machine. Go to the MAME ROM download page at mamedev,org/roms and pick one of the free distribution ROMS available. Targ and Victory by Exidy are great games, and Looping from Video Games is an obscure gem (loved the Colecovision version back in the day!) Download the set and save it to your local drive.,
Now we need to set up MAME itself. We’re going to need to install first, which I prefer to do through apt-get. Go to the Dash in the top of the control strip and search for Terminal (‘term’ should suffice) and launch it. Type in the following:
sudo apt-get install mame
and hit Enter. Respond to any prompts as necessary, including input of your password, and allow MAME to download and install. Once it has completed, return to the Dash and search for MAME, then launch it. This will create needed folders in your home directory. Go ahead and close MAME back down. If you go back to your file explorer now and check your home directory, you should see a .mame folder. You may have to turn on hidden files to see it – click the middle icon in the top right and click Show Hidden Files to toggle the display of hidden files off or on (shown below).
It is a noteworthy and important Linux convention that any folder that starts with a ‘.’ will be hidden, so that’s exactly what has happened with the ‘.mame’ folder automatically created when we first ran MAME. Now, though, we can see it and work with it. If there isn’t a folder called ROMS in the .mame folder, create one. Click the ‘hamburger’ icon (the three bars) farthest to the right in the upper right corner and select New Folder, then rename the new folder to ‘ROMS’.
Copy the existing ROMS you downloaded earlier from their current folder to /home/.mame/ROMS. Fortunately, MAME now supports the ZIP format natively. We used to have to unzip all the ROM sets manually before we could use them in earlier versions of MAME (when we weren’t walking to school uphill, through the snow). Launch MAME so we can configure it. Below is the MAME interface.
Go to Configure Options in MAME, then Configure Directories.
Pick ROMS, Click on Add Folder. then go to .mame/ROMS. Now, once you re-run MAME, you should see the games that you have the ROM sets for, ready to be run. MAME supports an astounding number of the games we used to enjoy in the arcades back in the 70’s and 80’s in particular, so now you can get your Donkey Kong on again, if you have the proper ROM set.
Another great source of arcade classics is the now freeware collection of CHAMP games. I bought a couple of these back in the mid 90’s, and was very pleased. CHAMP took original games like Donkey Kong, and Pac-Man and emulated them pretty closely (not as precisely as MAME, as CHAMP was coded to resemble the games, not exactly duplicate them). CHAMP games also included CHAMP modes that enhanced and extended the game play. You can find the complete CHAMP collection at http://www.champ-em.com/download.htm. They can be run under DOSBox (see FCM#137 - Everyday Ubuntu column for specifics on running DOSBox) and provide a very satisfying and enjoyable arcade-type experience. And the price is right – FREE!
Next month: Part 3 of Retro Gaming!