Arcade game emulators for Linux

esuhl

Well... I tried Lakka, which sounded promising. But after the boot screen appears, the screen goes black.

http://www.lakka.tv/

I might come back to it -- maybe I can manually install a video driver or change something. I'm still sceptical that my PC will be fast enough, anyway.

So the next plan is to download MAME 0.37b5 from the year 2000. I'm pretty hopeful that will work well. But old versions of MAME aren't available from any Arch repositories, so I'll have to build a package and compile from source. Fingers crossed...

esuhl

Just in case it helps anyone else, I finally tried RetroArch, which is what the OS Lakka uses.

http://www.retroarch.com/
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/RetroArch

You can add various "cores" (which are emulators -- like the MAME 0.37b5 one, or... any other from a huge list), and then use RetroArch as a GUI to play them.

The GUI is a bit ugly and confusing, but it works!

So, I might have to have another look at Lakka to see if I can get it working. :-)

that

eshul, many many years ago ran mame on our work PCs (after hours). They were Pentium 2 233/266Mhz, think 64MB? on windows nt4. They worked really well too. Many of those arcade games had 1 or 2 MHz cpu, and no maths co-processor

System

that wrote: »

eshul, many many years ago ran mame on our work PCs (after hours). They were Pentium 2 233/266Mhz, think 64MB? on windows nt4. They worked really well too. Many of those arcade games had 1 or 2 MHz cpu, and no maths co-processor

I worked as a bench engineer at a company that made video games in the 80s. CPUs were either 6502 or Z80s, even on games with moving cabinets like Afterburner.

forgotmyname

I use RetroPie on the Raspberry Pi.

Openelec or OSM

esuhl

that wrote: »

eshul, many many years ago ran mame on our work PCs (after hours). They were Pentium 2 233/266Mhz, think 64MB? on windows nt4. They worked really well too. Many of those arcade games had 1 or 2 MHz cpu, and no maths co-processor

I can totally believe it. It's not like I'm trying to emulate games that require high-spec hardware!

That's why I'm using Linux -- there's great driver support for old machines, and you can start a single program in X without needing to run a full GUI Desktop Environment. And updates are so much easier -- one command updates everything, and there's no system-wide registry to get corrupted.

But it's incredible that modern emulators should struggle to reproduce systems that had 0.1% of the CPU power and RAM that even my ancient PC has!

I installed libretro-blastem - the Sega Megadrive core in RetroArch, but the games ran about 30% slower than they should. (Judging by the timer in Sonic the Hedgehog 2!)

I then discovered gens, which runs Sonic2 at full speed!

https://www.archlinux.org/packages/multilib/x86_64/gens/

Tarambor wrote: »

I worked as a bench engineer at a company that made video games in the 80s. CPUs were either 6502 or Z80s, even on games with moving cabinets like Afterburner.

I remember watching in envy as my rich friend played Afterburner in one of those cabinets that could turn you upside down! But seriously... £1 a game?! Wow! I could buy five chocolate bars with that! :rotfl:

And I absolutely loved by Amstrad CPC 6128 -- along with its Z80 processor. The best thing Amstrad ever made!

kennethhall250

I also use MAME, and it works fine.