OKCOOL

I’m a game freak. I love games, especially arcade games. I used to spend some of my time as a kid wasting/spending 10p’s on Defender, Tempest and sometimes Pacman. About five years ago (it could be longer) I discovered MAME and recently I’ve been speaking to people who’ve never heard of it, so I thought I’d write a quick get started guide.

MAME – Multi Machine Arcade Emulator… Every game you can possibly think of that has ever been in an arcade is emulated in MAME. Fanatical “dumpers” around the world get the original circuit boards/roms/cartridges and “dump” them so that some other clever geeky types can figure out how to emulate the original hardware on your a PC. You can even get versions of MAME for series 60 phones.

Getting Started

You need two main programs:

MAME – Latest Version right now is mame0129b.exe

This is the emulator itself, make sure that you get the binary and not the source files.

CLRMAME – Latest Version right now is cmpro 3.106c

This program is a little more difficult to explain. Essentially it cleans up the roms that MAME uses. There are over 6,000 sets of games each made up of multiple roms. Sometimes the roms are dumped badly or updated or not unencrypted properly so they get re-dumped, which is all very complicated and CLRMAME means you don’t have to worry about any of it…

Folder Structure

You don’t need to install either of these programs, so after download make a folder called “Arcade” somewhere on your hard drive where you have quite a lot of space; some of these roms are big. The full rom set for the latest version of MAME is 16 gigs and that’s without the games that use “hard drive images”… So, now extract both zips into separate folders in the Arcade folder, so you have mame0120b and cmp3106c as two sub folders in Arcade.

Getting Games

Now comes the difficult bit. It’s not entirely legal to distribute the games/roms to play on MAME, so I can’t really help you here and what with TVlinks being busted the other day I’m not sure we can even link to a site that does either. But as always Google and bitTorrent are your friends, “MAME full roms and extras”, might, err, help.

Just get a few to start off with, put them in a temporary folder for now, probably on your desktop.

Cleaning your Roms with CLRMAME

Now start up CLRMAME, the first window you see is the “Profiler”, basically allowing you to tell CLRMAME which version of MAME you’re using and where it is. Click the “Create…” button. Find your MAME.exe file, it will be in the MAME folder in your Arcade folder, for the description enter MAME0120b then click “Create Profile”. You should now be back in the “Profiler” main window and on the right you have a MAME profile, double click it. This generates a list of all the games that this version of MAME supports. Once this has done you should see a six button toolbar.

Click “settings”, we need to tell CLRMAME where the MAME rom folder is, so make sure the little drop down box says “ROM-Paths” and click “Add…”, you need to find the folder in your MAME directory called “roms” and select it. You then need to select “Add-Paths” from the drop down and this time find the folder where you’ve temporarily put your game roms. Click the “Save As Def.” button so we don’t have to do this again. Close this window.

Almost there now, click the “Rebuilder” icon and make sure that “Use Add-Paths” is ticked and then click the “Rebuild” button. This is the magic, CLRMAME now goes through your downloaded roms, fixes them, merges them, rebuilds them and copies them into your MAME roms folder. You will always have the perfect roms set.

If you get a newer version of Mame you can add it as a new profile and this time you can use the “Scanner” instead of the “Rebuilder” and it will try and fix the existing roms in the MAME folder.

The Important bit – MAME

Lastly, the important bit. You want to play the games… Navigate to your MAME folder, double click the mame.exe file and you will get a nice list of games, from here you can also change the default keys, which I find a good idea especially for Street Fighter…