I thought there should be thread dedicated to this. Video games (and likewise, video game emulation) wouldn't be where they are today if not for arcade games. A lot of classic games people know from the 70s/80s/90s are really just ports of their original arcade counterparts (and were often inferior due to home console hardware limitations).

Thankfully, OS X has gotten some pretty good MAME support. There have been apps like MacMAME, MAME OS X, and SDLMAME (the latter of which being updated frequently). It is also possible to play Windows-based emulators like Final Burn using Wine or CrossOver.

Here are some links:









Here is a (hopefully) brain dead explanation for how to run SDLMAME in the shell, assuming you know absolutely jack about it (I'm referring to Terminal, just in case). If you don't want to run it from the shell, use the frontend linked above.

Download the SDL runtime library from here: http://www.libsdl.org/download-1.2.php, then put the SDL.framework folder into /Library/Frameworks

Download and extract the binary. Rename if you want (I changed it to "SDLMAME") and place it wherever (I put mine in the Applications folder).

Put at least one rom in the roms folder.

Open the shell (Terminal) and change the directory to the folder you put it in. In my case that would be "cd /Applications/SDLMAME" (without the quotes)

Type "./mame -cc" to create the mame.ini file that serves as the emulator's configuration. You can open it with any text editor (like...errr....TextEdit ).

Change the paths if you want. Since I moved the main folder to /Applications, I changed all the paths as well. For example, the roms folder will be located at "/Applications/SDLMAME/roms"

Change the video mode from "soft" to "opengl"

If you want to play in windowed mode instead of full screen, change the "window" value from 0 to 1. I changed it because full screen apparently disables Spaces.

To load the emulator, just change the directory in the shell like earlier (if you didn't close Terminal it should be changed already) and type "./mame", you should see the roms list now, as well as the "Configure General Inputs" option. You can also load a game and press Tab to configure general and game-specific inputs.

You can also type ./mame gamename.zip to load a specific game directly without loading the rom list.

That should be all.

My recommended frontend for SDLMame is M+Gui

www.bannister.org/forums/ubbthreads.php?...mber=55181#Post55181

Hi maybe I'm kinda new since I haven't been here for awhile now. I use to visit this site back in 06-08 and found out there was some new changes to the site recently. The reason I'm here is that I use MAME OSX to play some arcade games which is good. At the moment I would like to play with SDLMAME, but I'm having trouble setting it up. I'm very clueless with SDLMAME for mac. I have tried to get this run, but I'm so lost. This is the hardest emulator to setup. I know very little about the terminal giving me errors and being denied. Yes I have downloaded the SDL, SDLMAME v0.136 32-bit Universal Binary, xcode. I wish this was simple as MAME osx emu, but. Yes I have read the instructions for this many times but still confused and doesn't fully explain. Would someone just upload here or bit torrent the files or write a very good details run to sdlmame. yes I read bannister forums but received unsuccessful results. Game Over!

I use an imac: 2.16 ghz, 2gb ram, mac osx 10.5.8, 128 mb ati graphics card, Intel Core 2 duo.

Perhaps it's because I forgot to mention this:

http://www.libsdl.org/download-1.2.php

You need the runtime library for OS X in order to get this to work. Put it in /Library/Frameworks and that should be it.

If you do that and still have errors, you are either using the wrong binary for your Mac or OS, or you are doing one of the steps wrong. Keep in mind that there is a PPC version, as well as a 64-bit version that only works on Snow Leopard.

What's the state of MAME on Mac? Last time I used it Mame OS X was the thing, but that one is quite outdated now.
SDLmame seems to be up to date, but well.... it has no gui, so I wanted to use a gui for it and found MAME_TUNES which looks great but crashes when importing the RomList.xml
The link to the M+ GUI in this thread leads to a MamePlus website with windows only downloads.
The other link to the bannister forum thread has only dead download links :/

SDLMAME is currently the only project that is updated often (SDL is now officially supported by the MAME team as well).

The M+GUI page certainly does have a Mac version. Click on downloads and try pressing ⌘F and search for Mac. The mirrors are the text in green.

ouch you are right, must have missed that, sorry :/
Doesn't look very mac like but at least it works.

Why is it, that it let you set the folder for everything except chds?

CHDs are placed in the zip of their corresponding rom sets. Just unzip one, put the CHD in the folder, and zip it up again.

ouch, that sucks, it's non standard

I tried to get Mame Tunes running, seems like in the SetupMAMEList.m file line 798 states:
NSXMLDocument *xmlDoc = [[NSXMLDocument alloc] initWithXMLString:xmlString options:nil error:&error] autorelease];
has to be changed into
NSXMLDocument *xmlDoc = [[NSXMLDocument alloc] initWithXMLString:xmlString options:NSXMLDocumentTidyXML error:&error] autorelease];

at least now it doesn't crash anymore, but it shows only one rom in the list, the console outputs everything right it seems. Would need more time to investigate what's going on there.

I compiled SDL MAME a while back and use it frequently. Personally I don't need a frontend for it because it comes with a basic one... all I had to do was dump my ROMs into a folder and double click the binary I compiled. I find SDL MAME is fast, stable and easy to customize. While the built-in GUI is a typical, generic, platform-independent kinda GUI, I quite like it because it is simple. Maybe that's just me though?

Since I am married I've had to ditch most of my arcade machines, but I kept a cocktail style cabinet. In this cabinet I have a 14" rotatable arcade monitor + 2 game boards. One is a 60-in-1 vertical classics (DK, Pac-Man, Galaga, Frogger... Etc.) This is a tiny JAMMA PCB that I really like. The other one is a Blue Elf... it's more computer-like and has horizontal games (X-Men, Golden Axe, Wonder Boy, SF ***...etc.) I've made MAME cabinets before, but prefer these boards any day. I guess because you get the games legally and they don't randomly crash into Linux/DOS/Windows, or activate settings menu's when you push obscure combinations of buttons.

I just noticed I didn't explain how to compile it from source. I'm sure there are some who'd rather do it themselves instead of waiting for updated binaries to be available. It's very easy. Download the source code from the official site, unzip it, fire up Terminal, and type this in:



Or you can speed up the build process if you have dual core by adding -j3, like such:



Likewise, if you have quad core you can type -j5 instead. Finally, if you want to compile a 64-bit version, use PTR64=1.



The amount of time it takes depends on your hardware, of course. I have 2.0 GHz dual core and it takes approximately 20 minutes to finish compiling. After the binary is made you can follow the same steps from above to run it using Terminal or a front-end.

i like mame a lot, especially since the devs have added cps3 games support

HDL wrote:


What if you have dual dual core (such as in the 2006 Mac Pro). What "j" option wouls I use then? With two distinct dual core Xeons I have four cores.

You got me there. I've never had to take something like that into account. If you search the SDLMAME forum (linked in the first post) you might be able to find the answer. If not, I suppose you could always test it yourself and see if there's any change. As far as I know, it only affects the speed of the build process and not the binary itself.

Another thing I had forgotten to post about, arcade sticks. Lots of people (like myself) love having that authentic feel when playing these games, so I'd like to recommend some models that are at the top of the market.

SFIV Tournament Edition
SFIV Tournament Edition Round 2
SSFIV Tournament Edition (White)
SSFIV Tournament Edition (Black)
Marvel VS. Capcom Tournament Edition

There are other sticks you can get, of course, but I list these because they are at the pinnacle of durability and performance (you get what you pay for). There are PS3 and 360 versions available. PS3 will work right out of the box, but the 360 version doesn't. Here's how to get it working:

Download and install this special version of the 360 controller driver. Download this so you can install modified controller lists. Download this list and drag it to the installer.

That should be all. The rest is just configuring the buttons in MAME like any other controller.

All of this stuff makes it difficult for me to even want to emulate MAME on my mac. My upright cabinet made out of a mint Bad Dudes machine is powered by a PC. My first thought in 2001 when I made it was to use a Mac but it just wasn't as easy and compatible with some of the hardware I had to put in to build custom rigs.

Thanks for the topic I think I'm going to give all this a try and see if it's worth porting my cabinet over depending on how it all works. But then again even with complete rom dumps my favorites folder consists of probably 200 games all from the late 70's to the early / mid 90's.

I've got to add too that setting up MAME on the Mac is becoming a pain in the arse.

Thanks for the initial posting in this thread, but it appears there are no longer Mac binaries of MAME GUI + front end.

I've downloaded SDLMAME for OS X, but I don't even know where the ROMs are supposed to go, even after reading over the docs? Can anyone help? I'd be fine with just using the simple built in game selection rather than the frontend.

- Alex

Other than SDL, installation and setup is the same on mac as it is on other formats.

Make a folder called "roms" and put your games in there. Keep in mind that romsets are also updated, not only MAME itself. Newer versions of MAME might require newer romsets. This is game-specific and only applies if some kind of change was made to them. The same goes for CHDs.

I've got a complete set of the ROMs for MAME v0.141 (without the CHDs) and placed it in the same folder as the 'mame64' executable that I downloaded for SDLMame.

It loads, but then reports (within the MAME GUI) that it can't find the ROMs. Is the same folder as the application where SDLMAME is expecting to find the ROMs?

- Alex

Has anybody tried running model 3 games in mame?

If so how do they run?

It seems a shame that both mame-osx and mac mame are no longer developed upon.