Posts Tagged ‘rom files’

Installing EEMame to play MAME games on Nokia 9300i / Turn your Nokia mobile to arcade game statition

Monday, May 31st, 2010

EEMame Nokia 9300i

Since I’m keen on old school arcade games I checked online if I can install and play MAME (Multimedia Arcade Machine Emulator) games (roms) to my Nokia 9300i mobile.
The information on the topic on the Net is pretty much muddled so it took me a while until I found that in order to install a MAME port for Nokia 9300i I will have to use EEMame – MAME for Symbian Mobile Phones .
The first thing I came across before I finally found EEMame was EMame 9210 .
Emame is a port of Mame that is compatible with Nokia 9300i since the 9300i mobile has backward compatibility with the older 9210 phone.
To save memory since the Nokia 9210 has low memory capacity the Mame 9210 application is actually separated in 4 applications each of which containing a set of drivers for a number of mame rom game files.:
The whole application Emame9210All.sis is separated into the following parts:

EMame9210Set1.sis
EMame9210Set2.sisEMame9210Set3.sis
EMame9210Set4.sis

For convenience the developers has provided also a .sis file containing all the up-mentioned 4 parts in one .sis archive
For some convenience I have created a mirror from which you can download EMame9210All.SIS

Though the Emame9210 would install on the Nokia 9300i and you’ll be able to run each of the 4 exe files from the Nokia file manager I couldn’t make the application work with any of the listed roms that are marked as a tested on the Emame9210.
Honestly I didn’t really spend much time trying, so it could be my fault that I couldn’t bring the Emame9210 on my 9300i mobile. Be aware that trying to run some rom files downloaded from romnation.net and listed as compatible with the 9210 arcade emulator led the Emame9210 programs to crash.
So assume the Emame9210 is not really compatible with the Nokia 9300 phone. Anyways this first time though mournful was just a plunge-board to the “real deal”, e.g. the real joy experienced when I found out that the EEMame port is available for Nokia 9300i
To install the EEMame on my Nokia 9300i I downloaded and installed the eemame-series80-1.1.SIS . The file is also available through EEmame’s official website download section along with few other EEmame for a few other Motorolla and Nokia powered devices.

Another thing I really liked about EEMame is that it’s released under the GNU General Public License

So far so good ’till now I was having a complete working version of MAME to my Nokia 9300i mobile but I was lacking any games and I was absolutely lazy to scrape through the internet to find some working rom files for the EEMame, not to mention that only a exact set of rom files is compatible to the device and you have to check and download the compatible games one by one … this is pretty much insane especially if you’re a busy man as I am.
I assumed somebody has already done the hard task of downloading and creating a pack with rom files that run on the EEMame so I spend approximately some half an hour to look for a preliminary prepared pack of rom files that would run on the EEMame mobile (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator).
The original announce for the availability for download of eemame 218 rom games which are compatible with EEMame could be red here

You can download MAME_S60v3_and_working_ROMSET_by_herbalb.rar here

Herein I will include herbalb original message found along with his 218 rom games pack for EEMAME :

Some time ago I made a romset that includes 1320 of 1321 Roms known to work with EEMAME (also included). Hope some of you will like it and have fun playing these original arcade games (i.e. Wonderboy, Ghost N Goblins, Joust, Arkanoid, 1943, Burger Time, Contra ...).
By the way, when starting a game and you read 'press OK to continue' just push left and then right on the directional pad on your phone and the game will start.

I tested them (many of them) on my N95.
You can also try this version of EEMame to use with the Set above (I have not tested this version as i am using the one includet in the set)Happy new year and peace to everyone.

herbalb

NOTE: I am happy if you share it with others but please do not say it would be your own work. It took me hours to do find all necessary games for this set, so please be social, thanks.

As you can see in herbalb’s message the ROM games for EEMame are not tested with other mobile phones except the N95.
I downloaded and tested his EEMAME rom pack set and I have to confirm almost all the game are loading with EEMame perfectly fine.
However there is two minor down-sides of the EEMame on Nokia 9300i. First you will probably have to play the rom games without a sound, because when sound is enabled almost all the games will work slow as hell, and second most of the MAME emulated games will occupy just a small portion of your screen and you won’t be able to enjoy the joy of playing the game on a full wide screen on your cellphone.
Anyways life is not perfectly anywhere, being able to play all this wonderful oldschool arcade directly on your Nokia 9300i mobile turns your mobile into a sophisticated game station and guarantees you a lot of fun.
I have prepared a list of all the rom files included with MAME_S60v3_and_working_ROMSET_by_herbalb.rar, you can check the whole list of roms available for EEMame on Nokia 9300i here

I have also made some few modifications in the readme of the herbalb’s archive and have included the necessery sis file to install and run EEMAME on Nokia 9300i the new archive can be downloaded here.

Just in case if you need to download some specific rom files from the whole collection please select your preferred EEMame ROM file here
Well, That’s all folks! All left now is to truly enjoy your classic nitendo & arcade games playable directly on your Nokia 9300i mobile! 🙂

Install xmame from source on Debian Linux 7.0 (Wheezy) to play for better MAME (Arcade Games Emulation)

Thursday, May 30th, 2013

xmame logo install xmame on latest stable debian

Whether you're keen on playing old school arcade games. And you just updated or installed latest stable Debian 7 Wheezy. You will find out current installable Mame (Arcade Emulator) package cannot play many of the hot Games, even though game rom files are okay and you might have played those games in some previous versions of Debian with now obsolete but apparently better working emu  xmame.

As playing Captain Command, Xain'D Sleena, Cadillac & Dinosaurs and Punisher Classic Arcades is one of my great entertainments when I have some free time. I took the time to find out if xmame is still installable either by deb package or from source.

Unfortunately xmame for latest Debian releases is not available from unofficial repositories, so I proceeded with installing it from source. Thanksfully source install was successful. Hence, below is explained how to install xmame from source on Debian Wheezy and Debian testing/unstable.
First before compiling install a bunch of development packages necessary for proper compilation:

# apt-get install --yes zlib1g-dev
# apt-get install --yes libexpat1-dev
# apt-get install --yes libghc-x11-dev
# apt-get install --yes x11proto-video-dev
# apt-get install --yes libxv-dev

Download xmame 0.103 source archive (xmame-0.103.tar.bz2)

Tar archive doesn't have configure script so to compile it just run make ;

# cd /usr/local/src
# tar -jxvvf xmame-0.103.tar.bz2
# su hipo
cd xmame-0.103
$ make
...
....
$ exit
# make install
.....


In case some header .h file is still missing and compile fails, as it happened to me on few occasions. You can install and use apt-file;

One important note is xmame's build will take very long on my machine with 2Gb of Memory and Dual Core 1.8 Ghz it took about 1,.30 or 2 hours. 

# apt-get –yes install apt-file
# apt-file update

To find from which package the the missing .h file can be installed

# apt-file search Header-Name.h

Then just install package which will provide needed header.

Next step is to create xmame config file:
# mkdir /usr/local/share/xmame/
xmame-0.103$ cp -rpf ./src/unix/doc/xmamerc.dist /usr/local/share/xmame/xmamerc

In xmamerc set proper location for Mame ROM files:

# vim /usr/local/share/xmame/xmamerc
Find line;

rompath                 /usr/local/share/xmame/roms

and change it to whether Rom files are located. In my case they're in /disk/Games/Mames/roms, so change rompath to;
 

rompath                 /disk/Games/Mames/roms

There are some other configurations which you might want to tune. A well configured xmamerc that works fine for me is here

Finally link xmame.x11 to /usr/bin/xmame

# ln -sf /usr/local/bin/xmame.x11 /usr/bin/xmame

After having properly configured XMamE'S roms Directory to launch a game, for example punisher.zip or captcomm.zip:

$ xmame punisher
....
 $ xmame captcom
....

captain_commando_arcade-game-logo running on xmame Linux

I've build xmame from source on Debian but I suppose same guide should be working okay on Ubuntu, Mint and rest of Debian distributions. I'll be happy to get feedback if someone succeeded running xmame on other distro. If you do please drop me a comment with distro name and specifics or problems faced.

Playing Mame Arcade old school games on Debian Wheezy 7.0 Linux

Wednesday, May 29th, 2013

Play arcade games on Debian GNU Linux 7 Wheezy Tux arcade logo

To play the good old arcade on Debian Linux in previous releases I used GNOME's xmame frontend gxmame in Debian 5.0 Lenny and in Debian 6.0 gxmame was no longer working fine so I was using a KDE package frontend called kamefu.

Yesterday I just re-installed my laptop with latest stable Debian 7 Wheezy and after installing re-installing all packages I regularly use it happened gxmame and kamefu are no longer available in Debian 7. It was kinda of shocking since I already so much get accustomed to kamefu that I don't want to switch to other Mame GNOME GUI frontend.

I tried building kamefu from source (btw kamefu is still in very early development stage 0.1 with no luck). After the epic fail and my laziness to look for what kind of header files part of KDE I have to install. I read what is written on Mame in Debian Wiki here and found out about existence of new package in Debian 7 – gnome-video-arcade, as well understand the so far well knon xmame package is substituted by one called mame. Though name changed mame is not much different from xmame. In theory mame pack should be complete substitute for xmame but in practice my experiments showed xmame was running much more ROM files than the new mame binary.

Here is what I did to have running most of my Mame ROm files on Debian 7 Linux;
 

1. Install mame gnome-video-arcade, mame-tools and xmame-tools debs

noah:~$ apt-get --yes install mame mame-tools xmame-tools
...


2. Create default config file for mame bin
noah:~$ cd .mame
noah:~/.mame$ mame -cc

mame -cc command generates mame.ini config file;

noah:~/mame$ ls -al mame.ini
-rw-r--r-- 1 hipo hipo 6660 май 25 18:31 mame.ini

3.Add location to Mame Rom files in config file

noah:~/mame$ vim mame.ini

Near beginning of file there is section:

 

#
# CORE SEARCH PATH OPTIONS
#
rompath                   $HOME/mame/roms;/usr/local/share/games/mame/roms;/usr/share/games/mame/roms;

At the end of rompath include location of MAME ROMs in my case ROMS are located in;
/disk/Games/Mames/roms
 

rompath                   $HOME/mame/roms;/usr/local/share/games/mame/roms;/usr/share/games/mame/roms;/disk/Games/Mames/roms;

Further on to test which ROMS will work and which not compatible;

noah:~/mame$ mame -verifyroms |grep -i good
1941j       : yi22b.1a (279 bytes) - NOT FOUND - NO GOOD DUMP KNOWN
romset 1942a [1942] is good
1943        : bm.7k (65536 bytes) - NOT FOUND - NO GOOD DUMP KNOWN
1943kai     : bm.7k (65536 bytes) - NOT FOUND - NO GOOD DUMP KNOWN
1943u       : bm.7k (65536 bytes) - NOT FOUND - NO GOOD DUMP KNOWN
romset 1944 is good
romset 1944j [1944] is good
romset 280zzzap is good
romset 3kokushi is good
romset 3stooges is good
romset 4dwarrio is good
.....

 

4. Launch gnome-video-arcade binary

noah:~/.mame$ gnome-video-arcade

On first run, you will have to wait a about 10 minutes for program to Index all Rom files it loads up the CPU severely and looks like the program is hanged …

GNOME video arcade debian Linux play arcade games GUI program screenshot
 

As you can see the interface is very simplistic, there is Preferences (menu) but there is almost nothing to configure;

GNOME Video arcade Debian Linux preferences general

AA
Gnome video arcade games on debian linux preferences columns One very unpleasent thing is many of the best games didn't work anymore. Some great arcade games like Punisher, Captain Command, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs who worked perfectly fine on old xmame + kamefu, don't work anymore with mame + gnome-video-arcade.

Besides its simplicty gnome-video-arcade has the precious feature to Record Played Games. To record yourself playing and later replay it use menus;

Game -> Record

or use shortcut (CTRL+R)