Tips

Arcade

Nowadays there are many ways to play the old-style, coin-operated video arcade games:

• You can buy the actual old game cabinets from eBay and other places.
• You can set up MAME on your desktop, using game ROMs you legitimately own.
• You can set up a small form-factor PC with GroovyArcade as a dedicated arcade machine, again using ROMs you own.

The rest of these tips are general notes on setting up either or the last two.

MAME

MAME originally stood for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, but nowadays it means much more than that. Now it is a project to preserve the code that ran on those old machines. My all time personal favorites video arcade games are: Williams Stargate Defender, Mrs. Pacman, Galaga, and 1942. More information on these games ROMs can be found at https://edgeemu.net/browse-mame-num.htm.

To set up MAME, do the following:

• Install the latest MAME binary using your OS package installer. On macOS you can just do brew install mame.
• Copy the ROM zip files into the ~/.mame/roms/ directory and cd to it.
• Run any specific game from the CLI with mame stargate

MAME References:

• https://docs.mamedev.org/index.html

GroovyArcade

GroovyArcade is an all-in-one OS based on Arch Linux aiming perfect MAME emulation on CRT screens. It can be installed from the LiveCD onto the hard drive, or booted from a USB flash drive. To set up GroovyArcade do the following:

• Download and create the GroovyArcade USB installer
• Check for latest release at https://github.com/substring/os/releases.
• Download above ISO using curl -LO (see below).
• You will need an empty USB drive of 8GB or more in size.
• Create the USB using below instructions, which are for macOS, and therefor require the ISO be converted to DMG format:

curl -LO https://github.com/substring/os/releases/download/2023.11/groovyarcade-2023.11-x86_64.iso.xz
xz -d groovyarcade-2023.11-x86_64.iso.xz
hdiutil convert groovyarcade-2023.11-x86_64.iso -format UDRW -o groovyarcade-2023.11-x86_64
diskutil list 
diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk4
sudo dd status=progress bs=1m if=groovyarcade-2023.11-x86_64.dmg of=/dev/rdisk4
diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk4

• Now remove USB from your Mac, and follow the installation instructions.

In short, you’ll need to:

• Ensure that the target system allows booting off of a USB drive.
• Insert USB into target system and follow wiki instructions above.
• Once Groovy Arcade is up and running, the primary frontend display is always available via virtual console 1 (CTRL+ALT+1)
• And CTRL+ALT+7 will always shows current system logs.
• You can also switch to console mode display via CTRL+ALT+2, and login with username arcade and the password arcade.
• You can then copy your ROM files to the /home/roms/MAME/roms/ directory, and do other types of configurations.

GroovyArcade allows the use of multiple different frontends to manage MAME. I prefer to use the Attract-Mode frontend. It seems easier to follow visually, and allows simple configuration via the TAB key.

To have AttractMode re-read the ROMs directory after you update the list of games, do the following:

• See https://gitlab.com/groovyarcade/support/-/wikis/3-Post-Installation-and-Maintenance/3.3-Adding-MAME-ROMs
• Pressing TAB from Attract-Mode default screen
• Select “Emulators”
• Then “Generate Collection/Rom List” to have Attract-Mode create the new index of ROM games.
• To setup EXIT button; using keyboard hit TAB within MAME, then general configuration, then press ENTER and hold on “UI Cancel” option

To update GroovyArcade, including OS, MAME, etc., via CLI shell, do:

sudo pacman -Syu

# If you get signature errors do ...
pacman-key --init
pacman-key --populate archlinux

To configure GroovyArcade for a vertical monitor, press ESCAPE from Attrach-Mode then exit into the GroovyArcade UI. There you will find configuration options to do that.

To configure MAME with a specific USB controller, you’ll need configure within MAME itself, by selecting the game from the Attract-Mode menu, then pressing TAB, then configuring the buttons. There’s more info on page https://docs.mamedev.org/index.html.

GroovyArcade References:

• https://gitlab.com/groovyarcade/support/-/wikis/home