That Stupid Club

Note (Jan 2011): this guide is pretty much out­dated. I might write an update soon.

What is MAME? It is an emu­la­tor intended to doc­u­ment the hard­ware of arcade games sys­tems. Of course, for most aver­age users it is the side-effect of being able to play more than 3000 unique games that’s the impor­tant thing.

Well, that’s all well and good, you say, but how do I start? I’m glad you asked.

First, you will need to down­load MAME itself. If you run Win­dows, you can down­load the offi­cial release which is run off the com­mand line, but I would rec­om­mend Mame32, which has a really nice GUI. For Mac OS X folks it’ll have to be MAME OS X (not very imag­i­na­tive, yes) or SDLMAME, which is also the best option for Unix/Linux systems.

Next, you will need the ROM images*.

You can down­load some freely avail­able ROMs to test. Place the down­loaded ROM files into the roms folder where you unzipped MAME to.

To obtain more, Plea­sure­dome is the best way if you can work Bit­Tor­rent. The total size of the ROMs stand at almost 16 gigs cur­rently, and so might take a while. The MAME ROM tor­rents are ratio-free but please do not abuse the ratio. Some games require CHDs which are com­pressed hard drive images, but these are gen­er­ally not worth it as most PCs are too slow to emu­late these games properly.

Or if you pre­fer, you can request for one of the Lazarus guys to burn you a copy. Read the instruc­tions care­fully, and note that I have never used their services.

That’s really all you need to start play­ing. You will prob­a­bly want to grab the “Extras” tor­rent from Plea­sure­dome too. Lots of niceties such as screen cap­tures and pho­tos of the cabinets.

Addi­tional stuff to grab:

• Mame History.dat
• Mame­info
• Pugsy’s MAME Cheats

* down­load­ing of ROMs is ille­gal in most cases. You are down­load­ing at your own risk.