Main > Raspberry Pi & Dev Board
Raspberry Pi MAME Arcade Project
kahlid74:
When I got my Pi's I ran into the same issues with Debian and advMame. After being disappointed with the performance I rolled Arch Linux and proceeded to bash my head into a wall for several weeks. In the end I somehow got xMame working on it and I got the performance you saw at 900Mhz only without overclocking. I liked the results but I didn't have a clue as to what I did to get there, which I hate. So I stopped working on it and started up my Battletech Pod build again.
Once my 3D printer comes and I can build a case to house my Pi and 7"inch Car monitor together for my son to watch movies/play games I'll revisit this.
Grasshopper:
Wow, you guys really expect a lot for $35. I don't think you can really blame the RPi developers for MAME's general slowdown and bloat in recent years. I used to run MAME .36 (or thereabouts) on an AMD 225mhz processor and it ran all the classics just fine.
I was really excited about the Raspberry Pi about 6 months ago and got very close to buying one. However, a couple of things made me pause.
Firstly, there was the lack of RAM. At first glance 256mb seems more than adequate. However, it turned out that up to half of that was reserved for use by the graphics chip. 256mb is plenty for a small Linux distro. However, 128mb starts to look a bit iffy.
Secondly, the lack of open source graphics drivers was a real problem for a device so heavily biased towards GPU performance.
However, I've just been on the RPi site for the first time in ages, and it appears that new boards are now being shipped with 512mb of RAM, and Broadcom have also just open-sourced their drivers!
link
Strictly speaking the "binary blob" is still not fully open source because the firmware part of it remains closed-source. However, it's still a huge leap forward.
Zobeid:
After waiting and waiting and beginning to wonder if I'd ever live to see the day, I finally got my very own Raspberry Pi in my very own little hands yesterday. It's the original 256MB model with no mounting holes in the board, too. Oh well... I hooked it up with a phone charger and composite video to my TV and verified that it'll boot. Yippee! I'll wait until I get a HDMI cable for a real monitor before I do much playing around with it.
My thoughts on the Raspberry Pi and arcade cabinets....... It really is poorly suited to running MAME, for a lot of reasons you guys have already talked about. The ARM core is basically a tiny corner of the chip, with the rest taken up by that monster VideoCore GPU -- but even though the GPU interface is now open-sourced, the interface is pretty high-level, and the internals are still opaque, and there's probably no practical way to apply any of it to MAME's performance. So, we've got a powerful chip, but it's just a really poor match for the task at hand. (You might consider springing for an Odroid-X instead? Then again, you can get all the refurbished Dell GX280 SFFs that you want off fleaBay for $50-60 each.)
However... When running native code and flogging the GPU (with OpenGL ES), the Pi should be capable of amazing things. I can definitely see building a cabinet around this device. The question is, who's going to create those native games to run on it?
Maybe we should. Or maybe we should hook up with some indie game coders who have the skills and interest in that sort of thing. Maybe it's time to elevate our eccentric little hobby to the next level and start creating our own custom games to go in our custom cabinets? Don't get me wrong, MAME has been great... I've built a couple of MAME cabinets and love them, but I do think it would be cool to go beyond that eventually, and this seems like a good opportunity. In the Raspberry Pi we now have a hardware platform that's inexpensive, standardized, compact and capable. Shall we see what we can do with it?
johncl:
I got a Pi as well but I havent really found the time to tinker and compile mame for it and all. I follow Shea Silvermans Blog as he has had success running the classics on the Pi and hopefully he will also make some images available at one point too:
http://blog.sheasilverman.com/
My DK bartop project is working fine now, but the hardware bit is really making the bartop case a bit small for my liking. Motherboard, Soundblaster, 3 power adapters, poweroutlet thingy, Ipac, amplifier... The Pi could for me seriously cut down the amount of hardware inside this thing. So if I get the Pi working with the Ipac (which acts as a keyboard really) and fullscreen DK, PacMan and other early classics - I will do the swap in notime really. It is likely a brilliant alternative for mini-arcades like the ones by Jigenjuke also.
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