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Does anybody run Mame on a Raspberry Pi?

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Blanka:
Just received my Pi today. Was wondering if one of the people that did not have to wait till nr. 190000 came of the production line has Mame up and running already? Preferably a low number version with a simple front-end.

Howard_Casto:
I think you hit the nail on the head right in your post.  Not many people have a Pi yet.  Now it runs on a port of a popular flavor of linux... search for a version of mame that runs on that and you might be in luck. 

As for a front-end....lol..... why do you think everybody runs their cabs in windows?  FEs are virtually non existant on linux and mac. 

Now IF people get a good version of mame running on the Pi then we might see a front-end or two pop up, but as of now, your best bet would be mame's internal menu system. 

Well Fed Games:
Yeah, I am not very knowledgeable about these things, but I see a little board with lots of inputs and composite out, and the pile of TVs I have for "future projects" and I get pretty excited. Can't wait till someone does the first Pi cab!

Haze:
The Pi is severely underpowered for MAME, it's not even the latest generation of ARM chip, has a feeble amount of RAM left after you've booted any kind of graphical OS, and you have to use closed source video drivers to get anything like reasonable video performance because the entire graphic hw spec is private and closed, no docs available.

I believe it's said you should divide the ARM frequency by about 2-3 to get the equivalent x86 MAME performance frequency so you're looking at something which runs 'classic' versions of MAME only, or a very limited sub-set of current ones, that's why all the ARM based xx-in-1 bootlegs (some of which are more powerful than the PI) only really run older games, or if they run newer ones tend to struggle (the CPS3 performance on them is hilariously bad)  Something like Final Burn Alpha would be better to port, because it's a bit lighter, although even that for some stuff it only just gets by on an original XBOX and you've probably only got around half the cpu power on a Pi.

The Pi is cheap, yes, but you get very much what you pay for.  Modern tablets and phones blow it away in terms of performance, but are also more expensive and locked down, that said even the modern mobile processors aren't that great because a lot are now focusing on multi-core support with lower overall speeds, which is simply no good for emulation.

Cool project, yes, good base for an emulation box? No.

Blanka:
I have seen some promising videos of actual games running on the pi, but they all come with 6 hour compilation stories. Don't forget those compilation CD's from Namco etc run MAME too, and they ran smooth on 400mhz P3 computers. Another example is the 60 in 1 multiboards, also a simple mame machine. The Pi is more powerful than those options. Just don't use the current frame-accurate approach versions. Mames like 0.36 are great for low power machines and capable of running most 1978-1988 stuff. Was wondering if someone has a ready-to-go image for the SD card already.

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