Featured Articles
Announcing Pi
Technical Specifications
Raspberry Pi FAQs
Win a Pi
Raspberry Pi Wishlist
Actions
Forum Thread Details
  • Replies 13 replies
  • Subscribers 677 subscribers
  • Views 2467 views
  • Users 0 members are here
Related

Play MAME on a virtual Raspberry Pi

fustini

I just came across this intriguing post on Hackaday:

     http://hackadaycom.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/mame.png

The first Raspberry Pi build is a MAME machine

http://hackaday.com/2012/03/22/the-first-raspberry-pi-build-is-a-mame-machine/

[Nick] figured he should hit the ground running, so he emulated a Raspberry Pi to get everything ready for the MAME machine he’ll build when his new toy arrives.

 

The full details are in this blog post:

 

Compiling xmame .106 on the Rasberry Pi

http://1337technophile.blogspot.com/2012/03/compiling-xmame-106-on-rasberry-pi.html

 

I had played around with the Raspberry Pi Developer VM that Russell Davis created a couple weeks ago which made it easy to cross-compile for the Pi.  This looks like a step beyond as it appears to allow you to run Pi executables in an emulator (QEMU I think).

 

I think I'll be giving this a try soon.  Anyone else?

 

 

Cheers,

Drew

Parents Reply Children
  • in reply to fustini

    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/):

     

    image

     

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

     

    Cheers,

    Drew

  • in reply to fustini

    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?

  • in reply to Former Member

    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:

    image

     

    And sorted by memory % utilization:

    image

     

    Cheers,

    Drew

  • in reply to fustini

    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.

  • in reply to mahjongg

    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.

  • in reply to fustini

    I was curious, too, so I modified the launch script for QEMU to allocate just 224MB:

    rpi@RaspberryPi:~/debian$ cat launchDebian_224mb

    #!/bin/bash

    sudo qemu-system-arm -M versatilepb -cpu arm1176 -m 224 -hda debian.qcow2 -kernel zImageDeb -append "root=/dev/sda" -usbdevice tablet

     

    xmame still did run ok:

    image

     

    However, I'm not sure how accurate all of this really is - I am emulating the ARM device on an extremely powerful (in comparison) dual core Core i5 laptop.  Well, at least it doesn't seem to be running out of memory.

  • in reply to fustini

    Nice to hear MAME runs on a desktop with just 224MB of RAM!

    That means it should run okay, don't worry about running it with a 700MHz ARM, If the compiler it is compiled with is any good, it should run most games well enough. For a slight speed and memory boost you could still choose to create a dedicated MAME machine, not just running MAME on top of a desktop. For comparison, look at the open pandora console, which is an ARM based handheld gaming device with similar specs (for 2D graphics that is, for 3D the RPI is way better).