Configuring MAME on Fedora Linux

Finally sat down to properly configure MAME on my Fedora workstation.

Here is what I did and found out:

• MAME contains only emulators (machines), no games (ROMs), so the default ROMs directory /usr/share/mame/roms/ is empty
• as an ordinary user, you create your personal ini file ~/.mame/ini/mame.ini (start with a copy of /etc/mame/mame.ini) and add your directory $HOME/.mame/roms to the rompath, which allows MAME to find your ROM files

Images for MAME

MAME games consist not only of ROMs (the actual games), but also of other images:

• BIOSes: images holding dumps of BIOS ROM chips
• devices: images holding dumps of ROM chips enabling specific hardware ("device drivers")
• CHD files: some games came with a CD/DVD containing multimedia files

MAME looks for all these types of images in the rompath.
Note that each CHD image has its own subdirectory in the roms/ directory.

Downloading ROMs

The best sources of MAME ROMs I have found are on archive.org:

https://archive.org/details/mame-chds-roms-extras-complete

Here is another source:

https://pleasuredome.github.io/pleasuredome/mame/

Make sure that the version number of the ROMs matches your version of MAME, since the interface between machines and ROMs is continuously evolving as the developers learn more about the hardware and find new image versions.

The Extras are a copy of the tools on https://www.progettosnaps.net/index.php.

Software List (SL) images

Note that in addition to the ROM files for the arcade machines, there is a parallel set of so-called SL images (Software List) for the game consoles.

You can find the ROMs here:

https://archive.org/details/mame-sl

I found it easiest to keep the various ROM archives separate and add their respective directories to the rompath.

Key bindings

These as the most important generic key bindings for MAME:

1 start game
5 insert coin
TAB internal MAME menu

Front-ends

Fedora also provides two front-ends for MAME:

• BletchMAME
  https://www.bletchmame.org/
• GNOME Video Arcade

But you can always start a game using this command:

mame <game>

Installing the MAME software

I installed everything using this command:

dnf install mame mame-data mame-data-software-lists mame-tools mame-doc mamory gnome-video-arcade bletchmame