compiling MAME

[papaschtroumpf]

I'm interested in displaying the controls.dat info when the game is paused (or another key in mame), so it looks like I should learn how to build it.

The instructions on the MAME page apply to v0.61. (http://www.mame.net/compilewin.html).
Are there better/more up to date instructions somewhere else?
In particular do I need updated version of mingw or anything else?

Thanks

[screaming]

Nope, those instructions worked for me!   It helps to make sure your MingW/bin directory is in your path too.

-Steve

[papaschtroumpf]

Thanks.

I found slightly different instructions here: http://www.emuchrist.org/compile/compile.html

And the required files for these instructions are on the official mame Main Downloads page (the main differnce is the presence of the mingw_over.zip file)

I'll give it a try.

[screaming]

Hmm. I suppose I should have double-checked the page!  I think they changed it recently, but essentially they are the same thing.   I suspect the mingw_for_mame.zip includes the mingw_over.zip stuff.

-Steve

[papaschtroumpf]

yeah, that's my guess too. The reason I got suspiscious about the "mingw_for_mame" is that it's not in the main download page anymore, so I worried that it might be outdated.

But the way in the link I mention above (EmuChrist) you should ignore the last bit about extracting the MAME32 source on top of the MAME source since I assume that everyone here doesn't want MAME32  


A few mistakes not to make:

I would have preferred to install MingW in c:\Program Files\MingW (in fact I did the first time   ) but the makefile doesn't appear to know how to deal with path names that have spaces in them. I ended up re-installing in the default c:\MingW.

If you have a DOS box up before you change the path environment variable, you need to close it and open a new one: the DOS box loads its environment at startup and will not register any changes after that.


Edit:
Also, these instructions basically "take over" the development environment on yur machine. That's fine if you're not a programmer but I'd rather not permantly map "make" to the mingw (GNU) version, so i will remove the path from my path and write a batch file that fixes the path before I build MAME, just not in a permanent way.

All in all, easy as pie... (well, it's still building   )

[jelwell]

I think they changed it recently, but essentially they are the same thing.

Yeah, I setup a development environment, what seems a month ago, and the mame compiling documentation for win32 looked nothing like it did then. So they must have updated it, which means it's likely a lot newer than the emuchrist page so I'd stick with the mame.net doc.
Joseph Elwell.

[papaschtroumpf]

Well seems to work for me and the downloads referenced from the EmuChrist page are from the official download page from mame.net so I'm not going to worry about it for now.

I do have a question though, if you go here: http://redump.emubase.de/mame.php they have an athlon XP optimized version of MAME, but I don't see it as an option in the makefile. Is this something that I need to patch for? My cab is running an athlon XP so I figured if I'm going to compile MAME, I might as well optimize it for my cab.

[papaschtroumpf]

OK, I found the answer to the optimization question: this version of gcc has a -march=athlon-xp option.  

mameatxp.exe here I come!

[SirPoonga]

Good.  They haven't updated the compiling docs.  Basically you download everything in the compiling section on mame.net and uncompress those files in order in the same folder, for the most part.