Linux Mame Arcade

Ryan Whallen and Beth GarrettEKU,

CEN/CET

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OUTLINE

We attempted to make a Video Game Emulator, on a Linux system.

This had rarely been done before.

Thus making Linux have Hundreds of games.

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MOTIVATION To make a retro

arcade machine We had the parts

already. To see if Linux can

run Mame.

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INTRODUCTION

Had a Arcade Machine in Storage. Wanted to see if we could get Old

Games to play on it. Researched how other people had

done this. Made our own Modifications.

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What we needed.

Needed to make the joysticks work on a pc.

Install more Buttons. Retrofit Monitor and Speakers into

cabinet. Needed to make Mame work on

Linux.

Making Joysticks

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Connecting Joysticks

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The Bridge

Every Button had a line to a 40 PIN IDE Cable.

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Connecting to the Computer

The KE72 Input Device took the place of a Keyboard.

Each PIN on the IDE Cable was now a key on a keyboard.

The KE72 Plugged Directly into the PS/2 Keyboard Port.

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Programming the KE72

Using a uploading program on the CD with the KE72 and With a txt file and these commands your able to make your own keyboard.

Sample:IN01:[F1]

The Button on Input Pin #1 will act like the F1 key.

After uploaded, the KE72 can be plugged into any pc and remember your configuration, until you upload a new file.

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What is Mame?

MAME stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator

It can emulate most arcade hardware ranging from the very old to the moderately new

It allows you to access multiple games at one time, which makes it ideal for arcade cabinet projects

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PROPOSED SOLUTION Originally AdvanceCD was going to

be used, but it proved to be difficult to set up properly and was very picky about hardware

Instead we went with Xubuntu (Ubuntu Linux with xfce window manager) since numerous sites about making Linux arcade cabinets seem to prefer it the most

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PROPOSED SOLUTION We tried many different MAME

programs for linux, including: gmame xmame advmame But the individual configuration

and compatibility seems to be best with advmame, so we chose it for our emulator

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PROPOSED SOLUTION We also started with a very old PC

(Pentium 2 based), that turned out to actually not be powerful enough for our needs, as it lagged heavily under Xubuntu and even in the console running only MAME

We switched to a more recent Athlon 64 desktop PC, which proved to be better, however…

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PROPOSED SOLUTION The Radeon x800 inside the

computer was not fully compatible with the things we needed to do to autorun MAME

It’s core was not supported by framebuffer drivers, causing MAME to crash

We tried an Nvidia card, the card from the old machine, and a different Radeon card, but all had the same issue

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PROPOSED SOLUTION Due to this, we did not autostart

MAME using only xserver, as it needed framebuffer support

There was also a bug that is present across all recent versions of Ubuntu…

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PROPOSED SOLUTION This bug was in how the tty1, tty2,

etc. configuration files were understood by Ubuntu

The default script syntax was changed, but if you manually edit the files to mimic it, it ignores your changes and causes errors

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PROPOSED SOLUTION You have to basically script

“backwards”, placing commands before they are normally supposed to be used in order to get around this bug

The scripts we used mostly relied on editing things such as .bashrc, which loads the desktop after the user is automatically logged in

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PROPOSED SOLUTION The autologin was accomplished

using mingetty, and the event.d file for tty1, the first terminal console

This was done so the user would not need keyboard access at the arcade cabinet to login, saving time and removing the need to accommodate for a keyboard in the structure of the cabinet

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RESULTS Murphy's Law

threw us some good curve balls, but we prevailed.

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CONCLUSIONS

Learned more about Linux. Learned how to hack Controllers. Learned a lot from helping my

fellow classmates.

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FUTURE WORK Playing more with

The KE72. (I have two driving simulators in storage.)

Making more Arcade Cabinets and then Selling them.