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GE-03: HOWTO: Arcade Emulation


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GE-03: HOWTO: Arcade Emulation

 

Always wanted to play those old arcade games again? Want to relive your youth by playing 'Galaxian', 'Pole Position' and 'Jungle King'? Here's a HOWTO....

 

Getting the emulator

 

To play these games we have to use an emulator and the one I like best is xmame. Go download/untar the source.

 

Compiling the emulator

To compile the program we have to edit the 'makefile.unix'. I won't say much about this because it's different for each and everyone but if you're not sure just follow the defaults. When your done editing you give 'make -f makefile.unix' and watch xmame being compiled.

 

If everything goes as it should go you'll end up with an 'xmame.x11' file. I don't bother with installing so I sugest you don't either :).

 

Installing the GUI

Next we need a GUI. You can use the command line but I find that this soon becomes very tedious. The best GUI I have found is KAF. Download the binaries or the source just as you like. Both work fine. I don't bother installing KAF either. Just put a link in your $PATH and your set.

 

How to set PATH

 

Path can be set in the file ~/.bash_profile. Below is an example of assigning things to PATH:

 

PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin

 

To add entries to PATH, you append them to the end of this line after a colon. For instance, to add the directory '/randomdirectory' to your path (just as an example), you would do this to the previous line.

 

PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin:/randomdirectory

 

Now we need the game information. Download the 'mameinfo.dat' from here.

 

Getting some games...

 

Last we need the games. This is a bit difficult. There are some legal questions about using ROMS. If you're not sure about the legality of this I suggest you stop here :(. Otherwise, you can find some games on the xmame site, you can buy CD's with games or you can try Suprnova.org. They usually have (X)MAME roms on offer.

 

The games come in zip files. You don't need to unzip them.

 

We now have evrything to get started so fire up KAF, press F8 (or choose mame, paths and make sure all the paths are correct (xmame=/home/yourname/....../xmame.x11, same for the dat file, roms, etc etc). KAF will now begin to build a gameslist and after that's done you only have to load the games by pressing F5 (searching for available games).

 

You're ready now to play. You can edit the options (rapid fire is always usefull :), fullscreen or windowed etc etc) but it's not really neccesary (with esc you end the game if you're stuck fullscreen :))

 

Happy Playing

 

(**Warning** There are 'adult' games (it's a category). If you download roms better make sure you get what you want and nothing more)

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