I'm resurrecting an old thread here, but, with the help of a friend, I have successfully compiled MAME on my RPi and run it on the RPi as well, both with X and without. I wanted to post that here, since this seems a relevant topic. Sorry if this is against any rules.
Software rendering makes it very slow, as OpenGL is not supported by the hardware of the RPi. With an OpenGL ES implementation that MAME could use on this hardware, I think dramatic performance increases could be had.
"./mame -bench 60 25pacman" finishes in 59 seconds with no overclock. This is version 0.148 without updates.
A modest overclock (800?) and an OpenGL ES implementation that MAME can use might alone be all that is needed to emulate this game. Other games will simply be too much, I'm quite sure, but since this is the only game I'm interested in for the cabinet in question, it's the only one I've worried about. I've even gone so far as to modify the tiny target to only include this driver and its parent.
Two changes to the makefile (comment out two compiler flags) and three changes to src/emu/emualloc.c allow it to compile and run on ARM6. The rest is "make NOASM=1" and optionally "TARGET=tiny" if you modify that target rather than the main 'mame' target.
Anyone familiar with the code who has a Raspberry Pi in-hand will be able to sort it out quite handily, I imagine. I don't know C, but once my friend showed me what the cause was it looked like a bug in emualloc.c that is actually preventing the binary from running successfully when video rendering is desired. That is probably wrong, though, because of course this code runs unmodified on other platforms just fine.
I'll gladly share the changes if anyone is interested.
I am not interested in using AdvanceMAME or MAME4ALL because the single game I want is not supported on those. A person close to me had a stroke recently and that person loves video games, but now only has the use of one hand. I want to make pac-man and ms pac-man available to her in a cocktail cabinet, without any GUI outside of the game itself (important). The Raspberry Pi is how I was planning to do that, and I am now one step closer. I may not get all the way there on this hardware, but I'm learning things while I try, and that is never a waste, IMHO.
Thank you for your time.
Edited by sandheaver (03/13/13 04:39 AM)
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