Another month has passed and development continues as usual. This month there is much to be excited for, like Tiger Electronics devices and so much more. Here’s the news posted on mamedev:
November has passed us by, and it’s time for MAME 0.250, with a distinct Konami flavour! On the arcade side, the third and fourth player positions are supported in NBA Play By Play, and lots of regional variants have been added for games running on Hornet hardware. We’ve also added support for a Konami hand-held LCD game, a Tiger LCD game based on a popular Konami franchise, and a prototype of an unreleased Game.com title in the same series. In addition to the Castlevania-themed LCD game, we’ve added licensed Tiger LCD games featuring Mega Man, Ninja Gaiden, Superman and Gargoyles characters, although the latter two are different skins for the same game.
Here’s the latest builds for MacOS!
MAME 0.250 for ARM Macs – 99MB
MAME 0.250 for Intel Macs – 106MB
So I have this working on my mac mini with Mojave…
However, I’m unable to find a Donkey Kong ROM that seems to work with it.
Any help you can give would be great.
I don’t think the romset for Donkey Kong has changed in at least a decade now and I’d be really surprised if all the results I get searching google for “dkong.zip” all had bad links. I’d keep trying sites, it does work correctly. Do other games work? You could also have messed up settings if they don’t. Posting your mame.ini would help diagnose issues if nothing is running at all.
Chances are I’m doing it wrong. That is the first rom I am trying. I have the ROMs folder set correctly in the MAME app I believe. Do I put the .zip in there as is? Or the uncompressed folder? Or all the files loose? I have thought I heard it was the .zip
Yes you just place the zipped rom files into the roms folder. If it’s your first time running mame, you must run “./mame -cc” from the terminal within the mame folder, to create the default settings. Afterwards, just run “./mame” and if your rom file is correctly placed, it should show it in a list on the left of the screen.
Yeah I’m sure it’s what I’m doing. This is the first game I’m trying to add. Says ROM/disk images for the selected system aren’t available. I’m sure I’m missing a step here. Added the dkong.zip to the rom folder.
Try reading https://retrogamesultra.com/2019/02/24/running-the-mame-arcade-emulator-on-mac-os-x/ and see if it helps you get going. It’s a few years old but info should still be good.
Yeah I got it going. Thank you. Now to give it some more memory. It’s pretty laggy. Thank you so much!!
I’m glad it worked. Excellent!
Sorry to bother you but not sure if you have any tips at all. Donkey Kong and Dig Dug are the only two ROMs I’ve tried. Both open and run but constantly stutter.
My computer:
Mac mini (Late 2014)
2.6 GHz Intel Core i5
I’ve gone on Reddit trying to find some answers.
They had me change some video settings. It worked a little better but still is unplayable.
They feel my computer should be able to handle the simple older games with ease.
Just can’t find an answer. Thank you.
I checked the subreddit earlier, and I didn’t see your post but looking now I do see it… it must have escaped my glances the first time… lol
I’d suggest removing the mame.ini file and creating a fresh one first with running “./mame -cc” just to be sure. For the video setting based on your OS and age of machine try “opengl” should yield the best results.
My Intel Mac is even older than yours and I use pacman as my test game and there is a very slight pause every so often but it should be basically smooth gameplay wise.
My advice is to check the MacOS “Activity Monitor” and click on the “% CPU” column and watch for spikes in use that will lead you to a clue about what is causing the issues. If anything takes a bunch of cpu power for a second or more every so often, it will directly effect MAME. There has to be a process running that is causing the issue.
Other things to check in the ini would be “waitvsync” or “syncrefresh” under the “OSD VIDEO OPTIONS” 0 is off, 1 is on. Mine are off. Don’t run in a window, usually “auto” is good for OSD PER-WINDOW VIDEO OPTIONS. Don’t start in a window and use the green dot to fullscreen mame, set it in the config, MacOS does something funky which can cause issues along the way.
Other options are creating a new user account, and try it there where you might not have any background apps running. Check any power saving options or 3rd party apps that would make your battery power last longer, they will make ol your cpu run at lower speeds directly affecting performance…. There has to be something going on here!
Let me know if anything jumps out at you while looking into things.. I hope we work this out, you should be enjoying full speed classic gaming by now!
I’ll try this tonight sometime. Couple questions. I hope it’s ok.
What is the “./mame -cc” command doing. Clearing the preferences or something similar?
Also, can you explain this part a bit?
Don’t run in a window, usually “auto” is good for OSD PER-WINDOW VIDEO OPTIONS. Don’t start in a window and use the green dot to fullscreen mame, set it in the config, MacOS does something funky which can cause issues along the way.
When it launches currently, the MAME app itself is fullscreen. The the ROMs open in fullscreen as well.
I created a new user.
Installed MAME .250 and dkong.zip
I think ‘opengl’ for video settings was the answer.
Tried changing only that first and it ran like a champ for the few minutes I tried. So I didn’t need to add the autoframeskip or anything.
I think this might be it. I’ll play a few games at lunch.
Thanks again. You’ve been a major help. And reddit sucks. I’m old and don’t understand it I guess. I have -6 karma comment points and was getting stuff blocked. Lol. Thanks again.
These older machines just don’t have it in them for the “bgfx” but the newer ones are fine. Default is the bgfx driver I believe and opengl performs much better on older Macs. Glad that works better for you!
The -cc is just a shortcut for —createconfig. It basically writes a new, clean config file.
One more thing I hope you can help with. I’m just not finding anything when googling..and it’s all Windows based anyway.
How can I go about loading Snapshots, Artwork, History, Marquees, and things like that? I’ve tried following one of the YT vids I saw but it didn’t work.
I really appreciate all the help so far. It’s running great. Getting a USB Joystick controller delivered today.
Artwork etc should be the same process as Windows. Download the files to the folder it says and that’s it. If you use the preset folders that the ini uses you can put them within your downloaded mame folders. You may also have to set artwork to “1” in the ini. They should all be a similar process once looking at them, most are the same topic of “loading images” the history is the only odd-man out. I’d suggest looking for a collection of “MAME Extras” on archive.org or elsewhere.
You should be able to drop in collections of media to add to mame, just like roms, into their specific folder within your mame/ dir. Many online archives are in varying degrees of completeness, so not everything will likely have artwork, but many should. If you can’t find collections for download, try searching archive.org or google for ‘pleasuredome’, there are many complete collections out there.