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Getting ready

You will need:

• A Raspberry Pi
• An SD card with the official Raspberry Pi OS, Raspbian, properly loaded
• A USB keyboard
• A USB mouse
• A 5V 1A power supply with Micro-USB connector
• A network connection
• And a screen hooked up to your Raspberry Pi

How to do it…

Perform the following steps for installing MAME4All:

1. From the command line, enter startx to launch the desktop environment.
2. From the desktop, launch the Pi Store application by double-clicking on the Pi Store icon.
3. At the top-right of the application, there will be a Log In link. Click on this link and log in with your registered account.
4. Type MAME4All in the search bar, and press Enter.
5. Click on the MAME4All result.
6. At the application’s information page, click on the Download button on the right-hand side of the screen.
7. MAME4All will automatically download, and a window will appear showing the installation process.
8. Press any button to close the window once it has finished installing.
9. MAME4All will look for your game files in the /usr/local/bin/indiecity/InstalledApps/MAME4ALL-pi/Full/roms directory.

Perform the following steps for running MAME4All from the Pi Store:

1. From the desktop, launch the Pi Store application by double-clicking on the Pi Store icon.
2. At the top-right of the application, there will be a Log In link. Click on the link and log in with your registered account.
3. Click on the My Library tab.
4. Click on MAME4All, and then click on Launch.

For running MAME4All from the command line, perform the following steps:

1. Type cd /usr/local/bin/indiecity/InstalledApps/mame4all_pi/Full and press Enter.
2. Type ./mame and press Enter for launching MAME4All.

How it works…

MAME4All is a Multi Arcade Machine Emulator that takes advantage of the Raspberry Pi’s GPU to achieve very fast emulation of arcade machines. It is able to achieve this speed by compiling with DispManX, which offloads SDL code to the graphics core via OpenGL ES. When you run MAME4All, it looks for any game files you have in the roms directory and displays them in a menu for you to select from. If it doesn’t find any files, it exits after a few seconds.

The default keys for MAME4All-Pi are:

• 5 for inserting coins
• 1 for player 1 to start
• Arrow keys for player 1 joystick controls
• Ctrl, Alt, space bar, Z, X, and C for default action keys

You can modify the MAME4All configuration by editing the /usr/local/bin/indiecity/InstalledApps/mame4all_pi/Full/mame.cfg file.

There’s more…

A few useful reference links:

• For information on MAME project go to http://mamedev.org/
• For information on MAME4All project go to http://code.google.com/p/mame4all-pi/

Summary

In this article we saw how to install, launch, and play with a specially created version of MAME for the Raspberry Pi from the Pi Store

Resources for Article:

Further resources on this subject:

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