X-Mame Frecuently asked questions and Installation guide NOTE: This is a short guide extracted from X-Mame Project Home Page see at http://www.dit.upm.es/~jantonio/mame Wellcome to X-Mame, the X11/Unix port of the MultiArcade Machine Emulator project. 1- Frecuently Asked Questions on X-Mame What is X-Mame? X-Mame the X11 port of Mame project. It makes Mame arcade emulator available on *ix machines using the X11R6 X-Window system Mame is a virtual machine emulator: it includes a Z80, 6502 and lastly I86 uP emulators, joined to several arcade machine hardware emulators. Each arcade emulator contains a full description about hardware, mem maps, video, sounds and so, making possible that if you have original ROM images of a supported arcade game, you can play the game. You NEED the rom images to play a game: this is not a game emulator, just an arcade machine one. Mame is an Idea of Nicola Salmoria X-Mame Primary work thanks to Dick the Ridder and Allard Van Der Bas Differences between Mame and X-Mame Ideally none: X-Mame is always Mame based. I mean: last revision of Mame is last revision of X-Mame too. Development series of X-Mame are incorporated to Mame on each new release. There is no plan to independent development. NOTE: Due to several reasons, It may occurs that official Mame release does not compile in UNIX. Don't worry, XMame versions X.YY.1 are allways the same as official, but tested and patched -if needed- to run. Which Machines and *IX are supported ? At this moment are supported: arch/OS X11 sound joystick Ix86/Linux yes yes yes (1) Ix86/FreeBSD yes yes no Ix86/NetBSD yes no no Sparc/SunOs yes no no Sparc/Solaris yes preliminary no SGI/Irix yes yes no (2) IBM/AIX yes yes no HP-9000/hpux yes no no (1) Need to be loaded joystick kernel module (2) There are an analog input channel on some Indy that could be used to support a PC-Like joystick Which ones are NOT supported ? Following machines are not (yet) supported , Mainly due to lack of information and/or time to port and test. help wanted ... DEC/Ultrix ( volunteers asked :-) ) I386/SCO Unix ( no info on portings :-) ) My machine is supported, but Mame gives me some strange errors and fail X-Mame needs a 8-bit color plane to run. If you use 16-bit or greater, your are asking for problems. With the upcoming of release 0.20.1 the program warns if cannot run. If this is your case restart X in 8 bits ( eg "startx -- -bpp 8" in Linux ) What about non-X11 **IX ports of Mame ? There is a svgalib based Linux port of Mame. Other ports are too hardware dependent to implement it. See references at home page How to compile and run X-Mame ? Follow these steps: 1. Get and uncompress X-Mame source files 2. Edit "makefile.unix" and change settings according your system 3. Type "make -f makefile.unix" in top of your source tree 4. It should compile without problems. If not, report to the author :-( 5. Copy files xmame. and sndserver. to your favorite games dir as xmame and sndserver 6. Copy file src/unix/xmamerc.dist to your home as .xmamerc 7. Edit your newly created ${HOME}/.xmamerc with your preferences 8. Be sure that MAMEDIR , DISPLAY and PATH environment variables are correctly set. if needed edit your .profile ( or .login ) 9. Fire up!!. and enjoy... If things go wrong... If you cannot complete installation steps check these items: + Be sure that MAMEDIR points correctly to base directory of rom images + Be sure that ROM image filenames has correct uppercase/lowercase names + Did you properly configured your .xmamerc file? + Are xmame and sndserver in your PATH? + Are you using a 256 color screen?. X-Mame doesn't work on 65536 color ones ( with a few exceptions ) If things still fail, send email to the author Not sure about what is the role of .xmamerc file... Very simple. A normal xmame invocation looks like: "xmame pacman -sound -nojoy -frameskip2 -heightscale 3 \ -widthscale 2 -display host.domain.org:0" It's horrible to type in. Due to the fact that a normal user allways use the same ( or very similar ) command line, i saved all personal confs in a file that resides in each user's home directory. In this way the user has only to type specific options on specific game, leaving all other defaults as desired. This is a common way to work in the UNIX World Other reason is keyboard remapping. Some unix keyboards are not close to PC ones, and this is the only way to remap extra keys. ( the F8 key available on most of games has no way to work here... ) Where can I get last release of X-Mame ? The main site is the X-Mame Home Page: http://www.dit.upm.es/~jantonio/mame Where can I send fixes, bug reports, suggestions, blames, money :-).. ? mailto:mame@drake.dit.upm.es Legal questions and Copyrights The Main question is about ROM images: They are under copyrights of their authors, and CANNOT be distributed in the same package as Mame. Download them at your responsability Mame itself is Copyright of Nicola Salmoria. It should be distributed under terms of GNU General Public License Some portions of X-Mame source code are copyright of Dept. Ingeniería Telemática at Universidad Politécnica of Madrid. This copyright should be present in all source distribution in order to use them Who is Who in Mame Project ? Nicola Salmoria Fathers of the creature: Allard van der Bas Mirko (Mix) Buffoni Original UNIX/X11 port: Dick the Ridder Mirko Buffoni ( General Mantainer) Mantainers: Juan Antonio Marínez ( X-Mame especifics ) Arcade Repository ManagerAllard van der Bas Lots of people helped us giving info, patches, rom images, improvements ( see acknowledgements ) 2- X-Mame Patches And Pending jobs You can retrieve patches and updates from Juan Antonio's ftp site ftp://drake.dit.upm.es/pub/emulators/mame There Are several jobs pending: + Most important is entire rewritting sound code: Actual -timer based- sounds horrible and is hardware dependent ( needed to manually adjust timer frec and recompile ). It's is under work and should be finished in a couple of releases. + Another one is video improvement: Some patches done to speed up video, but not enought. Two developments on it: - Multi-screen ( over a network ) support for two players - Support for true-color displays - Speed up video code + Porting to other non-standard **ix is also pending. No machines to port and test availables. Help wanted + Joystick support is only available under Linux. I't will be desirable to use X11R6 pointer features to get a standard and portable joystick support. + My golden dream: Network support for two players and several watch-points. Should not be too difficult: X is network based, and working sound jobs too. Little help is needed in order to know peeks & pokes for detecting which player is in turn If you think you can help in any areas, ( or any other you consider interesting ), please mail to X-Mame mail folder 3- Mailing lists: Actually no mail list defined. ( if thing grows, i'll create one) See (and post) articles on USENET group comp.emulators.misc + To send UNIX especific X-Mame questions mail to Juan Antonio's mailto:mame@drake.dit.upm.es + To send General questions on Mame talk to Mirko (Mix) Buffoni mailto:mame@lim.dsi.unimi.it ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Created by jantonio@dit.upm.es on 20,May,1997 -----------------------------------------------------------------------