So I had this old laptop with very limited resources and powed. It's a Dell C610 running a PIII with 256MB of ram.
There's not a lot to be done with this machine in today's environment but I was pretty sure it could run Mame just fine with the right setup.
I set about figuring out how to do it and found that there were indeed a few people that had done similar things even though most seemed to be running it on what seemed to me to be complete overkill considering the job at hand.
Even though there are people out there doing this I didn't find many straight forward guides on the matter and the information seems a little fragmented.
Therefore, I decided I'd compile a short (and simplified) tutorial on the subject in case it might be of some help to others trying to achieve the same thing.
So without further ado:
I went with Ubuntu 10.10 and installed a stripped version without any UI. It's important to go for the
alternate installer version when you download the iso as this will give you a ncurses based installer and the option of installing a command-line only system.
Once I had the OS up and running I installed the
Fluxbox window manager which brought along X and all the rest of the components to run a window system.
Once you have Ubuntu up installing Fluxbox is as simple as:
sudo apt-get install fluxbox
You'll also need to make sure you get xinit seperately:
sudo apt-get install xinit
With Fluxbox installed it was time to install Mame. This is also very straight forward once you have the right repository set up.
Sdlmame4ubuntu has all the instructions for it written up in a straightforward manner.
Finally I installed the
Wah!Cade Mame frontend/launcher. This was slightly more hassle but a seasoned Linux user shouldn't have to much trouble with it.
With all the pieces in place it was time to configure autologin and have Wah!Cade launch on startup.
To configure autologin simply add
su - <username> -c startx
to
/etc/rc.local right at the end just before the
exit 0 statement.
To have Wah!Cade launch on startup edit
~/.fluxbox/startup. At the end you'll find a statement that says
exec fluxbox
.
Comment that out and add
exec wahcade like so
#exec fluxbox
exec wahcade
And that's more or less it. This of course is a quite simplified guide and you're bound to run into some config issues along the way but they should all be rather minor.
If in trouble just shoot me a line on here and I'll try and help you out