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Raspberry Pi MAME Arcade Project

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crippledlemming:
I posted some of this in another thread, but as I am doing this as a project, I thought a new thread is in order.

I am beginning a new project, I would like to end up with something similar to:



Except with a set of controls on each side of the table with a discrete display for each player that is mirroring the output from my Raspberry Pi.  This way it wont be too crowded on my couch when I want to play heads up against a buddy.


Phase I:

Setup Raspberry Pi

Get OS on Raspberry Pi

Get MAME emulator compiled and running

Verify ROMS will run

? Overclock Raspberry Pi

Get frontend for MAME and verify compatibility

Use keyboard to extensively test games

Phase II:

Get USB keyboard interface for controls

Get Joystick and buttons for the arcade

Wire up controls

Get USB keyboard interface to work with Debian

Test with MAME games

Phase III:

Find / Build coffee table to house setup

Flush mount monitor / controls

Wire everything up in new enclosure

Enjoy new MAME arcade

crippledlemming:
At first I didn't realize that you have to install an image to the SD card.  This caused some confusion as I could not get the board to do anything other than light up a bit.  I tried using diskutil on my macbook air to flash the Debian image to the SD card last night, but I don't think it was successful since the Raspberry Pi still won't boot.  When I get home tonight I am going to re-try flashing the SD card.  Will keep y'all posted.

crippledlemming:
So it looked like the img of Debian for Raspberry Pi didn't properly transfer to my SD card, when in fact it was just taking forever.  When I got home from work today and began work on the project again, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the RPI would actually boot from the card:



I am quite surprised with how quick this little credit card sized computer is.  Upon first boot the RPI booted into a setup program:



After setting my environment variables, disabling graphical interface start-up, running updates, and rebooting I was presented with a fully functional Debian powered beast.  The next order of business was getting a MAME emulator up and running on this ARM platform.  A quick check of the GCC and compiler environments and another pleasant surprise; they were already in place with all the required dependencies for me to be off and running.   As an aside, I was very impressed with the network transfer speed as well.  This little computer was consistently averaging 2.3 mbps from most of the locations I was downloading from online.  After wgetting advanceMAME src and compiling it, I was able to run advMAME and was able to get the Galaga ROM running with minimal issue (after setting up a proper config etc):

Unfortunately, the first run of this ROM was VERY slow and the audio was stuttering something fierce.  I had read about people overclocking these little boards with pretty good success, so back into the config files!  I settled so far on a 200MHZ overclock (up from the stock 700MHZ to 900MHZ) on the processor and a 100MHZ overclock on the memory (up to 600MHZ).  I was able to resolve the stutter and lag issues with Galaga this way and both Galaga and 1942 run flawlessly at this point:





If you've played with advMAME or a command line based MAME emulator at all then you know launching a game involves something like: ./advMAME galaga, this is not very user friendly at all and would be a huge hassle once I have this in an arcade cabinet (since this computer will run without a keyboard).  Luckily there are MAME front ends that I can utilize that will facilitate launching games etc.  Back out to the internet with a wget command yielded advMenu's src.  After compiling and installing advMENU I had a bear of a time getting it to recognize  that I had advMAME installed as an emulator.  I ended up having to manually add it to advMENU's config.  The result was a half working advMENU:



Yes the menu is working and it launches the ROMs, but it doesn't give a preview or artwork or anything in the right hand pane for the ROM.  I think this is due to missing files from unzipping the ROMs.  When I get home tonight my next round of work will center around making this look more acceptable.  The other good news about transitioning into phase II of this project is that I have two joysticks, buttons, wire, etc on order for the cabinet.  I am still unsure which direction I want to take the cabinet, but am currently leaning more towards a full sized cabinet than the original coffee table idea.  I will have to give it quite a bit more thought and figure it out before ordering graphics etc.  Stay tuned for phase II goodness!

crippledlemming:
Got the iPac working with the Raspberry MAME last night.  Also got the ipacutil and ipacgui working with the Rasp-Debian as well.  What a PITA though, I was lost in dependencies hell for a short while.  As you can see in the video low horse power requiring ROMS the twin monitor setup for my coffee table idea seem to work just fine, but when I load a ROM that requires more horse power the left screen seems to flicker a bit.  I'll have to sort that out.  This project is getting very close to the needs an enclosure stage...

pinballjim:
Why not use a VGA splitter if you're just mirroring the same output to both displays?

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