Hit roadblock on trying to get MAME ROM to work.

Tarkon

Hi! I've been working on a project and have hit a roadblock on it. Some back story - my father-in-law has cancer, they retired to Las Vegas and love to go out, but because of his treatment they can't anymore. They've always wanted a video p0ker machine (I have to spell it that way because apparently this forum software was written by Mennonites), so I decided to try to build them one. I downloaded a PC MAME emulator from mamedev.org, some ROMs of the aforementioned type, and they worked fine. I got excited and ordered the cabinet, the buttons and lights, a touch monitor, the decorations for it, volume control, etc. - in my ignorance and naivete I just sort of assumed that if a ROM worked on one MAME system, it'd work on them all. (As you've probably guessed, this is my first time in the MAME world.)

Well, all the ROMs don't work. I've tried using them in AdvMAME and MAME4ALL - and while they show up by name, I get "Game '[gamename]' not supported". I've tried Googling this problem and looking on the forums, but it seems I might be out of luck on the path I was going down.

Is there anything I can do? Is it something to do with the version of the ROMs I'm trying to use? Do you have any suggestions?

If it turns out that PiPlay just won't work - I'd definitely appreciate some advice or guidance on how to best proceed because I've spent a lot of money on hardware so far, but I'm very ignorant on what to do. The options I've come up with are:

1) Run the MAME program that I know works via some sort of PC emulator like WINE
2) Run something like Masque in a PC emulator like WINE
3) Buy a different PC that can run DOS/Windows and use one of the above
4) Write my own custom software and hope that it's good.

Obviously #3 and #4 are my least favorite options, but I'd very much appreciate any guidance as I'm a moron.

Thank you in advance!

gamerdad09

The easiest solution for everything you've already invested in, is to probably just get a cheap Windows 7/8 pc. Windows will allow you to run a more current emulator that can play the roms you have. An ITX motherboard or Micro PC are going to be some of your smallest options that might fit inside a bartop cabinet, if that is what you purchased. Before you jump and buy one check the processor against whatever the emulator recommends, a lot of the micro pcs out there come with a slower Celeron processor which may or may not be good enough.

If you want to use the Pi, you need to be realistic. The software for all the Mame emulators are ported from older versions. That means a lot of roms that are out there might not even have been available at the time said version of the ported software was written. The next thing is the Rom you are using must be a specific rom set version for each emulator.

The touchscreen monitor might work, but I wouldn't know where to begin. The thing is the small 3-4" touch screens you can get for the Pi use a custom kernel and in some cases a custom OS image. All the one's I've seen also use GPIO pins. You're talking about a large touch screen however.

I'm not so sure you can even get WINE running currently. WINE requires a x64/x86 processor I believe and the Pi / Pi 2 is ARM. I read something about QEMU possibly working in some form or another to get Windows 95/NT 4.0 working, but then you're likely going to have issues finding a proper working emulator for your roms again.

Tarkon

I understand, thank you very much for your input.

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