Play MAME on a virtual Raspberry Pi

So far I've downloaded the VirtualBox VM file from here:

http://www.rpiforum.net/forum/files/file/8-raspberry-pi-virtualbox/

and have run through the instruction on that page.  I have the debian install of Raspberry Pi running which is emulated with QEMU:

When I first launched the VM, I was having horrible response time with high load along with swap increasing.  The VM from Russell Davis ran well so I modified the settings for this VM to match, including knocking the memory down from 1024MB to 768MB:

I've started going through the MAME instructions (http://1337technophile.blogspot.com/2012/03/compiling-xmame-106-on-rasberry-pi.html) and am waiting for apt-get to finish downloading the needed packages.

Cheers,

Drew

Pi MAME would be fantastic - Thanks for the hard work so far !

I think have to thank the guy who created the VM and instructions - it's been easy sailing for me so far.  Ironically, having resumed the VM just now since last night, I'm waiting for the emulated Raspberry Pi ARM environment to finish installing its namesake, Python

I did make a "mame machine" with some computer parts we scavenged from the garbage last year, i remember i used the debian businesscard iso and installed a window manager (not sure if it was openbox or 9wm) with something to make icons on the desktop which had a xmame (or xmess) script that started the games. After that I used the Matchbox DE and it had almost the same performance.

Too bad my friend liked the idea and asked me to start building the hardware so he could start selling arcade machines at a disonest price. I hope this is not what you guys are thinking.

Cool that you made a MAME machine.  But no commercial intentions in my mind - just for fun.

Alrighty!  xmame finished compiling over night and I finally got a chance to take it for a spin.  Here is a screenshot of playing the game robby (http://mamedev.org/roms/robby/):

And here's a short video clip of the gameplay:

You don't have permission to edit metadata of this video.

Edit media

Dimensions x Small Medium Large Custom

Subject (required) Brief Description Tags (separated by comma) Video visibility in search results Visible Hidden

Parent content

RE: Play MAME on a virtual Raspberry Pi

Poster

Upload Preview

Ok

Cancel

Cheers,

Drew

That emulator uses the same ammount of memory that the raspberry uses?

Because as far as remember, LXDE alone costs around 256MB.

Which modifications you have on this to make it use less memory?

Hi - that's a very good question.  I fired up the emulator again and ran top with xmame open.  It looks like it is all within the 256MB RAM.

Here's sorted by resident memory size:

And sorted by memory % utilization:

Cheers,

Drew

I hope you do realise that the RPI shares its main ram with the GPU, and a minimum of 32MB has to be reserved for the GPU!

That means that for the ARM only 256-32 = 224MB is actually available.

Still, I'm sure that MAME can work on the RPI, but maybe not on top of a full desktop OS, but rather as a framebuffer application running directly from the commandline, like MAME for DOS.

Not saying that its impossible to make MAME run on top of a desktop, but it might be harder to do it that way.

Ah, good catch.  I do now remember seeing that on the Wikipedia article which links to various forum posts:

On the model B beta boards, 128 MB was allocated by default to the GPU, leaving 128 MB for the CPU.^[57] On the release model B (and Model A) three different splits are possible: 192 MB (CPU RAM) is the default split. It should be sufficent for standalone 1080p video decoding, or simple 3D (but probably not both together). 224 MB is for Linux only, with just a 1080p framebuffer; likely to fail for any video or 3D. 128 MB is for heavy 3D, possibly also with video decoding (e.g. XBMC).^[58]Comparatively the Nokia 701 uses 128 MB for the Broadcom VideoCore IV.^[59]

It seems trade-off's are an inescapable part of life, huh.