Arcade game emulators for Linux

esuhl

I have an old PC running GNU/Linux that I want to set up as a games machine.


I want to play arcade games like Donkey Kong, Pacman, Arkanoid, Space Invaders, Sonic the Hedgehog, Super Mario, and all the other classic games I've forgotten from the arcades and 8- and 16-bit consoles!


Has anyone else done this? What are the best console emulators to use?

System

Take a look at MAME.

teleaddict

another vote for MAME. I have it installed & it plays great

S0litaire

here's a "step by step" for getting an arcade system up and running with few classic games...

https://www.linux.org/threads/linux-arcade-system.4470/

esuhl

Thanks all.

The system requirements for the latest version of MAME are quite beefy:

• Intel Core series CPU or equivalent, at least 2.0 GHz
• 4 GB RAM

My system isn't up to that. I have:

• AMD64 3700+ CPU
• 2 GB RAM

I got Donkey Kong running, but it's so slow that it's completely unplayable.

The most modern console I want to emulate is probably the Sega Megadrive... which had a 7.61 MHz CPU and 64KB RAM! What does MAME do with all the extra processing power and memory?!

Is my machine just too old, are there more lightweight emulators, or is it worth trying to get an older version of MAME working...? :-/

Someone suggested trying MAME v0.106 (released 12 years ago) or earlier... but also warned that the new ROM images won't work with earlier versions of MAME... :-/

esuhl

I've just come across AdvanceMAME, which is based on MAME v0.106.

https://www.advancemame.it/

I'll give that a go when I get a chance... :-)

that

I never got the impression that linux was good at high speed graphics and great graphic hardware support, but I could be extremely wrong too. What is the chance that it is using cpu cycles rather than gpu to make it work?

esuhl

Well, AdvanceMAME runs faster, but still not fast enough.

It's infuriating. A friend bought one of those two-player cocktail table arcade machines. It plays Pac-Man, 1943, and a dozen other games. Inside is a Compaq Deskpro 400MHz PIII!

The hard drive died, but I'd love to know what kind of OS it was running.

that wrote: »

I never got the impression that linux was good at high speed graphics and great graphic hardware support, but I could be extremely wrong too. What is the chance that it is using cpu cycles rather than gpu to make it work?

I've always used nVidia cards, which have been well-supported in GNU/Linux. You can use either the proprietary nVidia driver or the open-source nouveau one.

There's no reason GNU/Linux should use any more CPU cycles than Windows to drive graphics output.

forgotmyname

You can run emulators on a Raspberry Pi, so a desktop should not have issues.

I remember running MAME on sub 1Ghz machines.

Use an all in one Emulator/OS ?

System

Wow the minimum requirements for MAME have really shot up. Like forgotmyname, I remember running it donkeys years ago on sub 1GHz CPUs. It was released in 1997 so 1GHz CPUs didn't exist and systems with even 1GB of RAM were almost unheard of. God knows what they've done to it because the ROMs you play haven't changed.

forgotmyname

Must be some ancient versions of mame out there, all packed up with the required roms etc.