• Mame Mac Os X Front End. Macos Download

If you were lucky enough to upgrade your existing Mac line up this holiday season to a, you may be wondering what to do with some of your older less powerful hardware. Rather than give my Mac mini away or recycle it, I decided to revamp and update my home built arcade cabinet running the (M.A.M.E. For short) and use the Mac mini as the engine. What is M.A.M.E. For simplicity's sake, I'll define M.A.M.E. As an archive of the vintage software that ran arcade systems from yesteryear.

The developers try their best to recreate the software systems that ran/run on arcade based computers and do so strictly via CPU emulation for that purpose. The developers avoid using GPU acceleration for the emulation because actually running of the software is simply an aside to the purpose of their mission. As a result, if you want to run some older arcade games, the best recreation aside from having an authentic arcade CPU board, would be the M.A.M.E. Completely Apple-based M.A.M.E I previously had the traditional M.A.M.E.

Setup running a Windows-based PC. It worked very well but it was unwieldy, loud, overly wired, and frankly just old. I had built up so much software cruft over the years that the system started to become quirky rather than useful in it's function. Since I was already using an old Apple Cinema Display as the monitor, I figured I'd make the cabinet a complete Apple affair with with my LED Cinema Display, my 2014 Mac mini, and my full sized Apple keyboard (a third-party trackball doubles as a mouse so that was not needed). The extra bits When building a M.A.M.E arcade cabinet you can be as authentic to a true arcade cabinet as you desire.

You can just run the emulator on your current Mac and use a keyboard and trackpad as your input devices and be done with it. Or, you can go for a more traditional experience and build a real arcade cabinet to house the computer and attach custom arcade quality joysticks and buttons for your inputs. I went the more traditional route but I didn't build my own arcade cabinet. I found a old bowling game that was non-functional from a local ad and picked that up for $100. I also didn't add custom joysticks or buttons.

Instead I opted for a pre-built joystick from for $150. The nice thing about the Tankstick is that it uses real arcade quality joysticks and buttons built into a solid casing that when plugged into your computer, is detected as a regular keyboard. The 'up' button is effectively a '1' on your keyboard for example. This means that when you are mapping user inputs on a game for your emulator, you won't run into any compatibility issues as all the emulator will see is a normal keyboard being used to map your buttons to.

On top of that, when I bought my Tankstick, it came with a CD-ROM of classic arcade games that you can legally play on your M.A.M.E. OpenEmu, a M.A.M.E.

Frontend Anyone who has used M.A.M.E. Knows that all of the options that are available to you in the default user interface can be a bit daunting. I decided to use as my M.A.M.E. Although OpenEmu is not strictly a M.A.M.E. Emulator front-end, it does provide a experimental build that allows for you to run M.A.M.E. Binaries through it's GUI. To get the M.A.M.E.

Enabled OpenEmu build simply do the following:. Head to. Click the dropdown button next to the Download Now button.

Select OpenEmu Experimental. Once downloaded, you can simply double click the downloaded file to run the application.

It's already in an uncompressed form so if you like the program, you can place it somewhere more permanent on your hard drive like you applications folder Connecting the computer components Assembly of the computer components was the easiest aspect of this project. The Mac mini was upgraded to. The LED cinema display simply plugged into the mini display port on the back of the Mac mini.

USB ports on the back of the Mac mini. You need to use up 2 port for the Tankstick with trackball. The trackball of the Tankstick also doubles as a mouse pointer for your Mac. So you needn't have an extra mouse connected to your system. Prepping the arcade cabinet I completely removed the joystick deck from the arcade cabinet. This was done so that I can simply place the X-Arcade Tankstick right onto the cabinets side walls and secure it with screws.

Mame Mac Os X Front End. Macos Download

The Tankstick with trackball is roughly the width of a standard arcade cabinet so the fit was perfect. Once installed, I fed the wires underneath the bezel and placed the Mac mini on the base of the cabinet. The back end has a space for the power outlet. I already had custom made bezels and marquees built for the cabinet for a personal flare. Set up for gaming Once the system is up and running, you'll need to configure the various aspects of the system for gaming. You'll need to change the controller mapping for your M.A.M.E. Software through OpenEmu.

And you'll need add your legally owned games to the emulator. I'll be following up with a subsequent article about the specifics needed to get you started on configuration, key mapping and game setup. Final thoughts There is definitely nostalgia involved in enjoying some of the older games that can be run on your M.A.M.E. Being able to have a more complete experience running that software on a genuine arcade cabinet makes that experience just that much better.

However, the jewel of this M.A.M.E. System is the Mac mini. Its small form factor makes with it's ability to tie into my Apple ecosystem makes it the perfect choice for my needs since I also run on the Mac mini as well so it serves as my VPN server, caching server and file sharing server. My LED Cinema Display was sitting in a closet for a number of years ever since I got my 5K iMac.

Pairing it the the Mac mini was a no-brainer as it simply just works. So before you decommission your older hardware, get in touch with your nostalgic side and give M.A.M.E. That older hardware will run it beautifully. Have you used M.A.M.E. Let us know how you fared!

So I want to set up MAME for the first time in a bunch of years. I've got a new iMac running Lion. Looking into it, all my options appear to suck.

As I see it, I can: A) Run MAME OS X, which is easy to set up, appears to run okay, but which has been permanently orphaned at version 0.135. Since I've got to go back and go through the hassle of acquiring ROMs again, I'm worried about ending up with mismatched ROMs, which is by far the most annoying thing about MAME. B) Run SDLMAME, which is supposedly kept updated. But then you have to either deal with the inconvenience and learning curve of launching it from a Unix shell, or use a front-end, and if there's a user-friendly OS X front-end for SDLMAME which doesn't suck out loud, I can't find it. I'm by no means scared of Terminal.app, but that just sounds like a lot more hassle than I'm willing to go through so my son and I can play Centipede and Space Invaders.

C) Punt and run MAME in Parallels, if the performance is up to snuff. (I haven't checked yet.) Any other options I haven't listed? What do you guys do? Click to expand.MacMAME is the old PPC version; that's definitely not an option on Lion. MAME OS X still works fine under Lion. My only concern is that since it's permanently stuck several versions back of the current MAME, it might be a constant hassle to deal with mismatched versions of ROMs. Since I'm basically starting out from scratch, I'd much prefer to go with a MAME port that's currently maintained.

On OS X, that apparently currently means SDLMAME - but if there's well written how-to to get that set up, I can't find it. Tried MAMEUI (the current mainstream MAME Windows port) out under Parallels today, and it seemed to run okay. It's unsatisfying but that's what I may go with if I can't come up with anything else.

Click to expand.I found MAMETunes to be absolutely impenetrable. I couldn't even get it to scan my directory of old ROMs to see what I had at all. I found, which looked potentially useful, but I still couldn't make any headway at all. And the app itself was so unintuitive, so annoyingly poorly translated into English, etc., that after 20 minutes or so of failure I just threw my hands up in the air and said, it's not worth it. I downloaded another frontend, but it looked like garbage too. I don't doubt that SDLMAME is the way to go, theoretically, but I don't think there's a frontend that doesn't suck, and I am just too lazy and time-constrained to get into launching games in the terminal with command switches and everything.

Really a bummer that MAME OS X has been orphaned. Because it was pretty close to perfect. Click to expand.Finally had a chance to try QMC2 out. It works, I'll give it that.

It is not hard to set up. But man, it's a Linux application.

It's unintuitive. It is to MAME OS X as browsing the web on a Palm Treo is to using an iPad.

After looking at all the options, I guess what I'm going to do is A) keep using MAME OS X as my primary emulator, and B) maintain an SDLMAME/QMC2 setup on the side so I'll be ready for the inevitable day when something breaks MAME OS X for good - an OS X update, mismatched ROMs, whatever. There are no really good options for MAME on a Mac these days, unfortunately.

I ran into the exact same problems facing OP, here's what I found so far. Mame OSX is very out dated and a lot of the roms dont work. (I can confirm 1 rom tht works, and that is 1 more than all other options I tried.) Tried SDLMAME with all the gui frontend i can find, M+ installs and looks fine but cant find any rom or bios files on hd.

QMC2 has a nasty installation process, leaves redundant files in (both) the application support folder(s) when I tried to deleted it. Other GUIs dont even cut it. I guess I would have to bootcamp it in the future, mame on mac is pretty dead right now. Wanted to revisit this thread with some of my experiences a couple months down the road. An SDLMAME update came out; I installed it; I changed the path to the executable in the fronted I was using (QMC2). Should have been a no-brainer. But for whatever reason, changing that path absolutely froze up the frontend - locked up as soon as it opened.

I looked around and discovered that there was an 'updated' version of QMC2. Got it, downloaded it - and wow, is it awful. Much worse than it even was before. So, for anyone who comes across this thread looking for a MAME solution, here's the bottom line as of now: 1. The only remotely 'Mac-like' way to use MAME on a Mac is MAME OS X, which was orphaned several years ago. It'll still work fine, as long as you can find versions of the ROMS for the games you want to play that are compatible with it. But ultimately this is a dead end.

SDLMAME is frequently updated and works great. But all of the front ends that claim to run on a Mac are absolute garbage. Don't waste your time or soil your machine with any of them. Kaioshade a couple of posts above is right; it only took a few minutes to figure out how to set up a config file and launch SDLMAME from the terminal, and once you get that set up, it really isn't much more difficult than launching a frontend. Believe me, the only thing the available frontends add to the process is the ability to click a mouse. They actually increase complexity rather than reducing it.

It really is a shame. A few things. 1) SDLMAME is now part of MAME.

It's the same thing that you get when you download the source code from mamedev.org, if that wasn't already apparent. Whenever MAME is updated, SDLMAME is updated too because they're the same thing. 'SDLMAME' is really just the SDL backend for MAME that they use on non-Windows platforms (Windows builds of MAME use their own Direct X based backend instead). So don't get confused when you can't find SDLMAME as a separate product- for all intensive purposes, SDLMAME.is. MAME now. 2) MAME OS X was abandoned a long time ago.

Someone on Github recently (read: within a year) hacked up the MAME OS X source to compile with a more recent version of MAME (after the MAME guys switched to C. The old versions of MAME were C only, and when MAME OS X was abandoned it was right around the time they transitioned from C to C). You can find that version here: It is not really that stable, but it kinda works.

You'll have to compile it yourself. God help you if you want to make any sense of the XCode project though, it's a complete mess.

3) If you can wait for a while, the OpenEmu project is coming along quite nicely. OpenEmu is a flexible multi-engine emulator GUI for OS X (native Cocoa), which you can get the source code for on Github: Their primary webpage is: And they have a twitter account over at: They don't support MAME right now, but a MAME core is planned for the near future since a lot of people have been demanding it (and there's already partial support in OpenEmu for arcade related things). More then likely, once the MAME core is done and working under OpenEmu- this will represent the cleanest and easiest to use solution for playing MAME under OS X. 4) MAME works fine under Parallels and VMware Fusion (tested personally). If you do this, then you can use MAME's Direct X backend (instead of SDL) which gives you their snazzy HLSL CRT emulator to make your stuff look all retro. The only problem I've found with running it inside a VM is that it does introduce a very, very tiny amount of lag.

Most people won't notice, but if you're a hardcore shmups freak who froths at the mouth when anyone mentions a CAVE game, then you probably will notice so virtual machines should be avoided. There are of course other GUIs for SDLMAME (which are simply launchers that pass SDLMAME the appropriate command line arguments) like QMC2 and M+.

I am trying to install the Diablo 3 PTR, which is 16GB, but I am unable to free up space by deleting old files, old applications, etc. Because these items are moved to purgeable space NOT free space. I currently have 15GB of 'free space' and 35GB of 'purgeable space' on my hard drive. Not enough disk space to install game : steam for mac. With the addition of Purgeable space on the new Sierra operating system, I am unable to install games due to 'Insufficient disk space'. The Mac forums and support files state that purgeable space will be automatically deleted when free space is needed.

YMMV though, most of these have whacked dependencies on libraries like GTK or QT which is a total pain in the butt to deal with under OS X. Honestly, if you don't want to wait for OpenEmu to support MAME, and you don't want to run a VM, your best bet is to just compile MAME yourself from the mamedev.org sources (which gets you a copy of SDLMAME).

Yeah, you'll have to run it through Terminal.app but who cares. Sorry to bump an old thread but I was looking for a bit of help on SDLMAME. I've managed to boot it using Terminal and the./mame64 command prompt and have downloaded a few roms and put them in the rom folder.

Here is the problem. Each game comes up with a box saying 'selected game is missing one or more CHD or Rom images' I take it this means the roms are out of date with this latest version, I presume this means that I have to update them using something like clrmame (which doesn't work on the mac??) Does anyone have any help/ideas? Would be great if so.