[geeks] MAME?

[Francois Dion]

Bill Bradford wrote:

>Anybody else build a MAME machine?  I just ordered a complete set (six DVD-Rs)
>of MAME ROMs (for $20), and have enough parts around here to build a 
>MAME machine... so I think I'm going to build a dedicated box and throw a 
>cheap monitor on it.
>
>Bill
>  
>
It's quite straightforward to build one, but you might get stuck at 
different stages with how to do one thing or another, just because there 
are so many choices.

For example, conceptually you can go with the command line or the GUI 
front end, for a cartridge type interface for the roms or hard disk, for 
ATX type motherboard (and then intel, mips, sparc, amd, arm etc) or from 
a workstation (Sun, SGI etc). Then comes the OS. Driven in part by the 
previous choice of course. But you can go with DOS, Linux, Solaris (x86 
or sparc), Windows, *BSD, QNX,  *nix etc... Then official release of 
MAME or one of the 100+ custom builds out there, or even your own. Then 
the GUI. Integrated or frontend, or even none?

Altough using MAME, you might want to build your arcade machine to use 
"roms" like a Neo Geo machine, using a compactflash reader or even an 
IDE->compactflash adapter and put your OS, MAME and ROM on the 
compactflash (ramdisk to mount the /cfg folder) and boot off of it (no 
hard disk, and with DOS - freedos works good for me, custom mame and 
single ROM should fit on fairly small CF cards) and custome MAME 
starting at boot, straight in the game for which the ROM is present.

At the other end of the spectrum is the more standard MAME PC, with 
something like MamePlus (integrated GUI) under Windows 2000.

In the middle is a box running linux (w/ recent kernel to support the 
faster AGP - make sure you have a card that is supported of course), 
with command line MAME.

Really, there is not a single way to build such a box. Depends how geek 
you want it, and if you want people to know if it's MAME or if you have 
the real deal... And I've not even touched the subject of hacking an old 
keyboard VS. dedicated controller boards, spinners, leaf VS. microswitch 
etc...

Francois