mame multi-purpose emulation framework

MAME's purpose is to preserve decades of software history.

MAME’s purpose is to preserve decades of software history. As electronic technology continues to rush forward, MAME prevents this important "vintage" software from being lost and forgotten. This is achieved by documenting the hardware and how it functions. The source code to MAME serves as this documentation. The fact that the software is usable serves primarily to validate the accuracy of the documentation (how else can you prove that you have recreated the hardware faithfully?). Over time, MAME (originally stood for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) absorbed the sister-project MESS (Multi Emulator Super System), so MAME now documents a wide variety of (mostly vintage) computers, video game consoles and calculators, in addition to the arcade video games that were its initial focus.

Getting and configuring Mame

Visit MAMEdev.org > Downloads > Latest Release. I believe that it's only available in 64 bit version.

The download is a self-extracting zip file. Double click on the file and choose a location to extract the files to. It will default to extracting to the folder you saved the download to so please change this to somewhere more suitable that your downloads folder 😃. Wait for all the files to extract.

Now, we have to create the Mame config file.

Open command prompt: START > cmd + ENTER.

Type

cd <full path to mame folder>

and press ENTER to navigate to the installation directory. Don't literally type though 🤦.

Now tell Mame to create it's config file by typing

mame -cc

mame -createconfig

and pressing ENTER.

You should eventually see three files,

mame.ini

ui.ini

and

plugin.ini

appear in the folder where mame.exe appears.

Leave the command prompt window open - we will need it later on...

Now it's time to get Mame started. There are two ways to do this.

Double clicking on 'mame.exe'.

Running mame from the command prompt.

Mame will probably start up in full screen mode. You can toggle between full-screen and windowed mode with ALT + ENTER. If you want to force Mame to always open in windowed mode (I prefer this), there is a setting you can change which is shown in the next section.

Futher tweaks

There are some further tweaks you can do to Mame to make it perform a little better. We are going to make these changes in

mame.ini

but you can do it through the On Screen Display (OSD) if you prefer.

If you double click

mame.ini

in the mame folder, it should open in Notepad. If it doesn't, right click it and choose 'Open with > Notepad' or 'Choose another app > Notepad' if it isn't listed. Find the following settings and get tweaking!

window : Change from

This will force Mame to open in windowed mode. You can use ALT + ENTER to switch if you like.

rompath : Add any further ROM directories, semi-colon separated.

I like to keep my ROMs in separate folders for each machine but Mame will only look in the root ROM folder. So, if I add a folder in ROMs for, say, sord_m5 ROMs, I would add

;roms/sord_m5

to the end of the

rompath

setting. Note, you'll have to restart Mame for the changes to take effect.

video : Set to

d3d

This will enable Direct3D as the default which is required for the following settings to work.

filter : Change from

This will disable the pixel smoothing effect which will make the next settings work better.

hlsl_enable : Change

→

HLSL simulates most of the effects that a CRT monitor has on the video making the render look more realistic.

hlsl_oversampling :

→

Makes the HLSL effect more convincing.

Restart Mame and enjoy the genuine CRT experience!

Issues I had that you may or may not have

I had a few issues when setting up my Mame emulator. Firstly, for some of the games that run on the Sord m5 emulator, they would only work up to and including version 0.214 because the Mame developers introduced some changes which made the Sord m5 driver misbehave. Secondly, I have multiple screens on my desktop PC and one of them is set to display at 125% (my eyesight isn't what it used to be). However, the Direct 3D driver doesn't seem to like this so and Mame seems determined to open on that screen (typical). There are two ways to fix this; set the display to 100% (can't see it properly) or force Mame to display on one of my other screens by setting the

screen

parameter to

\\.\DISPLAY1

mame.ini

ROMs!

There are quite a lot of ROMs available for download directly from the MAME website 🙏

Mame is pretty useless without ROMs. Unfortunately, there is no real way that I can provide you ROMs because, for most consoles and computers, distributing the contents of the ROMs breaks copywrite rules. But even though you have to find them yourself, I'll try to give you some pointers.

Downloading ROMs from emuparadise.me

As of the time of writing, it's not possible to download ROMs directly from emuparadise.me due to legal restrictions. However, there is a workaround (shhh). When you visit the first download page for the ROM and find the download link, it's possible to change it to a direct link, by-passing the restrictions.

Visit Emuparadise

Choose the ROM to download.

Inspect the URL for the 5 digit number at the end. Make a note of this.

The direct download link is of the format...

https://emuparadise.me/roms/get-download.php?gid=[ID]&test=true

...but you can't simply visit this link because the website will complain about the link being from an invalid referrer and will not let us download.

Assuming you are using a decent web-browser, press F12 to bring up DevTools and click the Elements tab.

Use the 'element inspector' (cursor icon) to select the text of the download link.

The hyperlink text should be highlighted in DevTools. For instance for Atari 2600 Pac-Man...

<a href="/Atari_2600_ROMs/Pac-Man_(1982)_(Atari,_Tod_Frye_-_Sears)_(CX2646_-_49-75185)/91465-download" title="Download Pac-Man (1982) (Atari, Tod Frye - Sears) (CX2646 - 49-75185) ROM for Atari 2600">Download Pac-Man (1982) (Atari, Tod Frye - Sears) (CX2646 - 49-75185)</a>

Double click on

href

attribute and edit the URL to, in this case...

/roms/get-download.php?gid=91465&test=true

Press the ENTER key to set the new URL.

Leave DevTools open and go back to the Emuparadise webpage and click on the link.

Chances are, if you are using a newer version of Chrome, that you will see absolutely nothing happen! This is because of a security protocol in Chrome which prevents content being delivered over insecure connections from secure websites.

Now switch back to DevTools and click on the 'Console' tab.

You should see a red error message with a link in it. For this particular 2600 game, the link is...

http://50.7.189.186/happyFJUja181NACLukHITRY719/Atari%202600/Games/Pac-Man%20%281982%29%20%28Atari%2C%20Tod%20Frye%20-%20Sears%29%20%28CX2646%20-%2049-75185%29.bin

This is the actual link to the ROM.

Click and save the ROM in your ROMs folder in Mame.

Alternatively, you can use a Chrome plugin called Tampermonkey to automatically change the URL for you using Javascript. Use this script:

// ==UserScript==
// @name         EmuParadise ROM Workaround
// @version      1
// @description  Replaces the download button link with a working one
// @author       Mark Mills via infval (Eptun)
// @match        https://www.emuparadise.me/*/*/*
// @grant        none
// ==/UserScript==

(function() {
  'use strict'; // Strict mode - require all variables to be declared
  let id = document.URL.split("/")[5];
  let downloadLink = document.getElementsByClassName("download-link")[0];
  let div = document.createElement("div");
  div.innerHTML = `<a href="/roms/get-download.php?gid=`+id+`&test=true" title="Direct Download">Direct Download</a>`;
  downloadLink.insertBefore(div, downloadLink.firstChild);
})();

Last modified: March 4th, 2022

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