Compile MAME 0.171 on a Raspberry Pi 2

Successfully compiled the full and complete version of MAME 0.171+ on a Raspberry Pi 2.

Why would I want to compile the full version of MAME?  Because it’s the latest version and is continually being updated with more accurate emulation of old hardware.  A lot of the emulation I want is from the early 1980’s and it successfully emulates games and computers of this era at 100%.   Plus it has some really powerful imgtools to work with emulated disks and cassette/cartridge files for computer emulations.  Version 0.171 now incorporates BGFX the unified GPU backend which speeds up emulation.

I’m an old programmer who came from programming my CoCo (TRS-80 Color Computer) in BASIC then I learned 6809 Assembly language.  I have given learning ‘C’ many tries over the years but I always have problems compiling my code once my programs start getting big.  I waste more time fighting with compiling than I do writing my programs in these structured languages, so please don’t think I’m a guru at compiling ‘C’ source code.

With the help of Steve Boswell and his site located here and some good compiling info for the Raspberry Pi here and more specifically SDL2 on a Raspberry Pi here.

The MAME source code compiles on the Raspberry Pi 2 without any modification to the source code. But you have to tweak a line in the MAME makefile, which I describe below (thanks to Steve Boswell).  You just have to make sure you have the proper libraries installed on the Pi and you give it enough RAM to compile and you are good to go.  It does take a long time to compile, the first “tiny” test build takes 31 minutes.  The main MAME compile afterwards took 5 hours and 32 minutes using the make -j4 option which uses all four of the Pi 2 cores.  This is on my Pi 2 overclocked @ 1000 Mhz.  I did a brand new install of the latest Raspbian build called “Jessie” to a Class 10 – 16 GB microSD card. This version of Raspbian comes with GCC 4.9.

As always update apt:

 sudo apt-get update
 sudo apt-get upgrade

Install the required libraries:

sudo apt-get install libjpeg-dev libtiff-dev libgl1-mesa-dev qt5-default libxinerama-dev
sudo apt-get install build-essential libfreeimage-dev libopenal-dev libpango1.0-dev libsndfile-dev libudev-dev libasound-dev libwebp-dev automake

You might already have this, if not it should be added (Doesn’t hurt to add it)

sudo apt-get install libx11-dev Install mercurial hg command (hg seems to be similar to git) and the latest SDL 2.0.4+ under SDL Mercurial.  The make -j4 takes about 4 minutes and 37 seconds:

sudo apt-get install mercurial 
cd
hg clone http://hg.libsdl.org/SDL
cd SDL
./autogen.sh
./configure --disable-pulseaudio --disable-esd --disable-video-mir --disable-video-wayland --host=armv7l-raspberry-linux-gnueabihf
make -j4
sudo make install

Install the latest True Type Font handling of SDL, you can find it on the SDL website:

https://www.libsdl.org/projects/SDL_ttf/

Look for the file SDL2_ttf-2.x.xx.tar.gz at the time of this writing it was

SDL2_ttf-2.0.14.tar.gz so that is what is used in the next section substitute the version you found on the line below

cd
 wget http://www.libsdl.org/projects/SDL_ttf/release/SDL2_ttf-2.0.14.tar.gz
 tar zxvf SDL2_ttf-2.0.14.tar.gz
 cd SDL2_ttf-2.0.14
 ./autogen.sh  (don't worry about any warning: autoconf input should be named 'configure.ac', not 'configure.in' that's normal)
 ./configure
 make -j4
 sudo make install

Now the main event – get version 0.171 version of MAME

cd
wget https://github.com/mamedev/mame/releases/download/mame0171/mame0171s.zip
mkdir mame0171
unzip mame0171s.zip -d mame0171
cd mame0171
unzip mame.zip

use nano and edit the makefile, change the one line with # ARCHOPTS to

ARCHOPTS = -mcpu=cortex-a7 -mfpu=neon-vfpv4 -mfloat-abi=hard

Make sure to remove the # at the start of the line.  (Lines that start with # are ignored in the makefile)

nano makefile
# ARCHOPTS

to

ARCHOPTS = -mcpu=cortex-a7 -mfpu=neon-vfpv4 -mfloat-abi=hard

CTRL-X   Y   Return

Let’s get ready to compile the complete MAME version, as of version 0.162 it also includes the MESS emulator so when you are done you can also use MAME to emulate your favourite old computer. You don’t need a separate MESS command anymore. MAME has MESS built in. First let’s give the Pi all the RAM we can:

sudo raspi-config

Go to Advanced Options then select Memory Split and hit Return and change this value to 16, then OK and Finish, No don’t reboot yet.

sudo nano /etc/dphys-swapfile

Change CONF_SWAPSIZE=100 to CONF_SWAPSIZE=2048, then hit CTRL-X, Y and hit Enter

It is not good for your SD cards lifespan to keep it this way so don’t forget to change it back after you are done.  I do show you how to set it back to normal below.

sudo reboot

Once your Pi reboots it’s time to compile the complete version of MAME this includes building the tools to help if we are using the Emulator with disk and files for specific old computers this took 4 hours and 9 minutes:

 cd ~/mame
 make -j4 TARGET=mame

To build the tools for using cassette and floppy images with MAME’s computer emulation do the following (seems like the makefile is broken it should work with make -j4 TOOLS=1):

 nano makefile

remove the # symbol on the line

# TOOLS = 1

so it looks like

TOOLS = 1

Ctrl-X, Y , Return

make -j4

After MAME is compiled you must allocate more RAM to the GPU before you can use it otherwise SDL will give an error when you try to run MAME.  We set the GPU back to normal in the steps below.

Once the compiling is all done lets switch our memory usage back to normal:

sudo raspi-config

Go to Advanced Options then select Memory Split and hit Return and change this value to 256, then OK and Finish, No don’t reboot yet.

Now lets put the swap space back to normal to extend our SD cards lifespan

sudo nano /etc/dphys-swapfile

Change CONF_SWAPSIZE=2048 to CONF_SWAPSIZE=100, then hit CTRL-X, Y and hit Enter

Now we reboot to take our new changes:

sudo reboot

Once the Pi 2 reboots, there is one last step, for MAME to run the SDL Library has to be configured differently once it is used to compile MAME. Follow this step to get MAME working…

cd SDL
./autogen.sh
./configure --disable-pulseaudio --disable-esd --disable-video-mir --disable-video-wayland --disable-video-x11 --disable-video-opengl --host=armv7l-raspberry-linux-gnueabihf
make -j4
sudo make install

We are now ready to use the full version of MAME.  You will have to look elsewhere on the internet to find ROMs – I can’t help you with that other than the free ones from the mamedev.org website under downloads | ROMs.  You will have to make a directory called roms in the MAME directory

cd
cd mame0171
mkdir roms

Put your .zip or .7z (either will work fine) versions of your ROMs of old games and computers in the ~/mame0171/roms folder and play them with the command:

cd ~/mame0171
./mame galaxy

I’ll do some speed comparison tests later today with my previous post of version 0.167 and I’ll update this section with the results.  Hopefully the BGFX features of 0.171 make a difference…

 Game           Speed Percentage
           mame0.167     mame0.171
           RPI2 @900Mhz  RPI2 @1000Mhz
 1942      73.72         80
 arkanoid  100           100
 armora    47.78         100
 asteroid  78.38         99.91
 berzerk   100           100
 ckong     100           100
 defender  99.98         100
 galaga    100           need new roms :(
 joust     100           100
 invaders  100           100
 mooncrst  90.99         99.79
 mpatrol   100           100
 phoenix   98.35         99.84
 puckman   100           100
 robotron  100           100
 scramble  69.63         82.04
 spacduel  59.08         82.03
 starcas   91.43         100

So 1942, Scramble & Space Duel still aren’t 100%.  I guess there were new Galaga ROMs found and are used for 0.171.

I found a cool little trick on Stack overflow that makes it easy to time how long some process takes.  Useful for timing compiling times and such.

SECONDS=0
# do some work (like compiling some code)
duration=$SECONDS
echo "$(($duration / 3600)) hours, $((($duration / 60) % 60)) minutes and $(($duration % 60)) seconds elapsed."

So in one line this would be:

SECONDS=0 ; make -j4 ; duration=$SECONDS ; echo "$(($duration / 3600)) hours, $((($duration / 60) % 60)) minutes and $(($duration % 60)) seconds elapsed."

Cheers, Glen