I'm doing some PC upgrades, and my now-aging MAME cab got fresh hand-me-down PC upgrades out of the deal (from a Pentium G3258 to a Ryzen 1600)... I wiped the old PC back to a fresh Windows install, and decided I'd have a better time unloading it on Facebook Marketplace if it had an OS and a PC case.
So, no PC case inside my cab anymore, because what's the point when you can bolt everything to the cab itself. And I decided to go with an Ubuntu OS install on the new hardware (I know I could just use un-activated Windows forever, but where's the fun in that?). This has been....
an adventure. I'm about 2 weeks in, and I think I have about 75% of the software configuration work done. Anyone who tries to say that any flavor Linux is ready for prime-time with normies is full of
.
Stuff I've Done (that I really should've taken notes on):
- Basic Ubuntu configuration ---smurf-poo---
- Installed & configured MAME & AttractMode (harder than it sounds)
- Culled MAME full ROMset down to something mostly manageable (via ROMLister in Wine and the "All Killer No Filler" list here on BYOAC) -- Fun Fact: For whatever reason, AttractMode in Ubuntu is unable to "see" any ROMs that you copy to a folder via automated Bash script. You have to use "cp -r /path/to/sourceRoms/{comma.zip,delineated.zip,list.zip} /path/to/destinationRoms/" in the Terminal
- Tweaked AttractMode Nevato theme to work on dual monitors (without the display getting all jacked up when coming out of games)
Stuff to do still:
- Get the network mount to my SMB shares working consistently
- Try and get any Windows/GameEx functionality I previously used working with AttractMode/Linux (getting the last-played game's marquee auto-embedded on my-blog-that-nobody-reads is about my last hurdle)
- Autoboot into AttractMode (shouldn't be too hard)
- Batch-reconfigure controls for stuff like Street Fighter, and re-generate the control panel instruction cards (that display in the admin panel) which I neglected to archive (Hopefully CPWizard works in Wine)