Linux Mame Arcade Ryan Whallen and Beth Garrett EKU, CEN/CET

2 OUTLINE We attempted to make a Video Game Emulator, on a Linux system. This had rarely been done before. Thus making Linux have Hundreds of games.

3 MOTIVATION To make a retro arcade machine We had the parts already. To see if Linux can run Mame.

4 INTRODUCTION Had a Arcade Machine in Storage. Wanted to see if we could get Old Games to play on it. Researched how other people had done this. Made our own Modifications.

5 What we needed. Needed to make the joysticks work on a pc. Install more Buttons. Retrofit Monitor and Speakers into cabinet. Needed to make Mame work on Linux.

Making Joysticks 6

Connecting Joysticks 7

The Bridge Every Button had a line to a 40 PIN IDE Cable. 8

Connecting to the Computer The KE72 Input Device took the place of a Keyboard. Each PIN on the IDE Cable was now a key on a keyboard. The KE72 Plugged Directly into the PS/2 Keyboard Port. 9

Programming the KE72 Using a uploading program on the CD with the KE72 and With a txt file and these commands your able to make your own keyboard. Sample: IN01:[F1] The Button on Input Pin #1 will act like the F1 key. After uploaded, the KE72 can be plugged into any pc and remember your configuration, until you upload a new file. 10

What is Mame? MAME stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator It can emulate most arcade hardware ranging from the very old to the moderately new It allows you to access multiple games at one time, which makes it ideal for arcade cabinet projects 11

12 PROPOSED SOLUTION Originally AdvanceCD was going to be used, but it proved to be difficult to set up properly and was very picky about hardware Instead we went with Xubuntu (Ubuntu Linux with xfce window manager) since numerous sites about making Linux arcade cabinets seem to prefer it the most

13 PROPOSED SOLUTION We tried many different MAME programs for linux, including: gmame xmame advmame But the individual configuration and compatibility seems to be best with advmame, so we chose it for our emulator

14 PROPOSED SOLUTION We also started with a very old PC (Pentium 2 based), that turned out to actually not be powerful enough for our needs, as it lagged heavily under Xubuntu and even in the console running only MAME We switched to a more recent Athlon 64 desktop PC, which proved to be better, however…

15 PROPOSED SOLUTION The Radeon x800 inside the computer was not fully compatible with the things we needed to do to autorun MAME Its core was not supported by framebuffer drivers, causing MAME to crash We tried an Nvidia card, the card from the old machine, and a different Radeon card, but all had the same issue

16 PROPOSED SOLUTION Due to this, we did not autostart MAME using only xserver, as it needed framebuffer support There was also a bug that is present across all recent versions of Ubuntu…

17 PROPOSED SOLUTION This bug was in how the tty1, tty2, etc. configuration files were understood by Ubuntu The default script syntax was changed, but if you manually edit the files to mimic it, it ignores your changes and causes errors

18 PROPOSED SOLUTION You have to basically script backwards, placing commands before they are normally supposed to be used in order to get around this bug The scripts we used mostly relied on editing things such as.bashrc, which loads the desktop after the user is automatically logged in

19 PROPOSED SOLUTION The autologin was accomplished using mingetty, and the event.d file for tty1, the first terminal console This was done so the user would not need keyboard access at the arcade cabinet to login, saving time and removing the need to accommodate for a keyboard in the structure of the cabinet

20 RESULTS Murphy's Law threw us some good curve balls, but we prevailed.

21 CONCLUSIONS Learned more about Linux. Learned how to hack Controllers. Learned a lot from helping my fellow classmates.

22 FUTURE WORK Playing more with The KE72. (I have two driving simulators in storage.) Making more Arcade Cabinets and then Selling them.