KnoppiXMAME 1.0 Released

Ant writes "KnoppixMAME is a bootable arcade machine emulator with hardware detection and autoconfiguration. It works automatically on all modern and not-so-modern hardware, including gameports and joysticks. It is powered by Knoppix Debian GNU/Linux, X-MAME, and gxmame." Update: 06/19 23:18 GMT by S : Although there are earlier versions in the release directory, looks like V1.0 hasn't made it onto the FTP just yet. Meanwhile, Jim points out the AdvanceCD image, which is "..also a bootable ISO image of a minimal Linux distribution containing MAME, but weighing in at 16 MB rather than 200 MB so there is more room for ROMs."

Comments

Look to the past, the future holds nothing

[ObviousGuy]

Except for a very few gems, the current crop of games has been pretty lackluster.

It's like all the ideas for games has dried up and all that's left to do is rehash old tried and true ones.

Played Out.

Re:Look to the past, the future holds nothing

[heli0]

All the more reason to stop wasting $50 a pop for new games and instead building a stand alone mame machine to play those old tried and true ones.

Re:Look to the past, the future holds nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

+5 insightful?

For this luddite postulation?

Suddenly kharma feels dirty :(

Re:Look to the past, the future holds nothing

[VividU]

X-Box Live is the current vanguard of gaming. There is nothing like it.

Take MechAssault. A very fun, simple, deep arcade style Mech game. Playing online, from your sofa, against players around the world.

Since the release of MechAssault, we've freely downloaded four new Mechs, six new game types and about 5 new maps.

In short, its great and there is nothing on the console scene like it.

Re:Look to the past, the future holds nothing

[Erik Hensema]

Except for a very few gems, the past crop of games has been pretty lackluster too. However, we have forgotten about them.

Same goes with music. The eighties brought us a whole load of crappy music, but I can remember only the good songs.

It only means one thing: we're getting old.

Re:Look to the past, the future holds nothing

[Hanno]

Check out some of those ancient Mame Roms. Back then, there were lots and lots and lots of pretty lackluster arcade games. We all just remember the good ones, but there were countless 1:1 space invader and pac man clones out there.

Re:Look to the past, the future holds nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

quit staring at the psx aisle and buy yourself a gamecube. i guarantee you'll change your mind...

Re:Look to the past, the future holds nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

and there is nothing on the console scene like it.

and there is likely to not be again. to fully appreciate the game you need the ridiculously expensive controller which is 1) hard to find and 2) isn't good for much more than MA... enjoy your xbox while it lasts, but i suspect it will disappear into the same pit that the ultimatetv fell in...

Re:Look to the past, the future holds nothing

[VividU]

Sorry Dude,

Your thinking of another game. I forget what its called...Steel Battalion maybe. The game your thinking of is more of a sim with its full blown $200 controller & game.

MechAssault is also a mech game but its more arcade style. And let me tell you something: Its damn fun!

Re:first post 1.0 released

[Anonymous Coward]

Pity. Outdated already.

always wondered how to suck the roms off....

[Kaitiff]

Not being nasty, I just always wondered how to pull the roms off the old nintendo and sega cartridges. God only knows I have a buttload of them laying around. What about Sega CDs too? I assume since I 'own' the cartridges it's legal for me to 'make copies' if I don't distribute them, correct?

Re:always wondered how to suck the roms off....

[bedouin]

Save yourself the time and download them like everyone else does. Most of the Genesis games were what, 512kb? Hit up a ROM channel on IRC.

Re:always wondered how to suck the roms off....

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd need to desolder the ROMs from the cartridge and read them with an EPROM reader. The pinouts are often different from EPROMs, so that's another thing that needs to be dealt with. (with some wires and an IC socket or 2)

Sega CDs are just CDs. Really easy to copy these days, and I've heard the Sega CD console has no protection (so it can actually run games on CD-R).

Re:always wondered how to suck the roms off....

[clowe]

I picked up a shovel-ware collection of ROMS at one of the local knuckle-dragging computer shows...

Re:always wondered how to suck the roms off....

[selfabuse]

Back in the day.. in GamePro and the like, I kept seeing ads for a device for a genesis or SNES, that you would plug into the cartridge slot of your console, stick a floppy in to, and stick a cartridge into, and it would copy the cartridge to the floppy, and you could play it on the console, with the copier. IIRC (which I may not) several games spanned a couple floppies.. don't remember how you knew when to change, but I knew it worked. One of my friends came back from Japan with one for his SNES and it rocked.. so I grabbed my copy of gamepro, flipped through to the ad for the device, and saw the price tag.... nearly $300, which was a fortune for me at the age of 12 (and still is now, at the age of 21) Anyway, the floppies that these things wrote could be read in a PC. I recall that on some boards that had upload/download ratios, we always used to toss a couple SNES roms up for credits. Not sure if anyone else had the hardware to play them back, but it was fantastic.... until my friend took the gizmo back.

Re:always wondered how to suck the roms off....

[jesse.k]

Indeed, the Sega CD has no protection at all. I've played burned Sega CD games several times, the only problem is that there's next to no good games for the system, other than Lunar Silver Star Story.

The reason why it has no copy protection is that when the Sega CD was released, CD-RW drives were so prohibitevly expensives and the media cost $40+ a disc that Sega assumed no one would bother.

Re:always wondered how to suck the roms off....

[HungWeiLo]

I had one of these when I was young.

It's actually not a shady machine that pirates Nintendo gamez. Nintendo actually made a machine that runs 3.5" floppies (they're not exactly 3.5" computer floppies, but close), and also licensed them to be manufactured by other companies (or at least I think it was a proper license). Anyway, these machines were only sold in Asia, AFAIK.

To answer your earlier question, somehow, the OS will tell you to flip the disk to the other side (or insert a 2nd disk) when it gets to the point in the code where it ends abruptly (or maybe the copying program would be smart enough to insert some disk-swapping notify bit to do that). Anyway, I ended up selling mine (around the time SNES/Genesis was big) with 150 "questionable" games for $50 to a mom-n-pop's video game store (before there were Software Etc's and Babbage's)

Re:always wondered how to suck the roms off....

[Joe Tie.]

IRC (which I may not) several games spanned a couple floppies.. don't remember how you knew when to change

I have one of these copiers for the snes, called the wildcardDX2. For it at least you'd simply load all the floppies into memory before the game started. While expensive, I found the device quite worth the money I paid for it. Having imported a number of rpgs from Japan, there was just something very cool about being able to dump, apply a translation patch, and then play it on a real snes. Especially back in the days when snes emulation was still rather primitive.

Re:always wondered how to suck the roms off....

[lightcycle]

I remember reading schematics for a nes copier. Basically, you would rip apart a nes console, solder a bit to make a parallell port connection, and use a program to store the roms in nes format. Tragically I can't find the page now, sorry.

Re:always wondered how to suck the roms off....

[Anonymous Coward]

Easier to just go here, legal download if you still own the original

Re:always wondered how to suck the roms off....

[Zenki]

All of the pins on the cartridge have a purpose. Some are for addressing and some are for data. There's probably a grounding pin and a power pin. Anyhow, go to a website like www.gamesx.com or google.com :P and look for the pinouts online.

You'd need the know how to write a program to use a parallel port to drive the important pins (basically start addressing from the base address of the cartridge and save the data that comes back over the data bus. Keep going until it fails.) and you can build yourself a dumper. At least that's how the smarter people used to do it in the day before companies would just sell you the stuff.

Of course, you're going into problems with carts that do funky tricks like memory mapping and such, but the info above is about all that i understand on the subject.

As for Sega CD's, if they are just standard ISO9660 cds, you can dump them using any decent cd writing software.

Re:always wondered how to suck the roms off....

[drinkypoo]

I have one of these called a Multi Game Hunter. Amazingly enough, it works on both Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis. It has a 2.0MO (2 megabyte unformatted capacity - what we call 1.44MB in PC-land) floppy drive in it, which I actually had to replace, unfortunately breaking the little tabs that hold the floppy module together in the process. The floppy module unplugs from the unit itself, so I guess they were planning either to be able to replace them when they broke, or to be able to upgrade to some other form of storage.

The multi-platform capability is provided by the use of two different cardedge sockets on the base of the unit, and two different adaptors; One fits into any version of sega genesis (US, UK, JAP) and the other fits into any version of super nintendo. I don't know if the units change their language based on the language of what you plug them into.

The top of the unit has two slots, one for super famicom games and one for any type of genesis games. It also comes with an adapter to allow you to plug super nintendo games in. The whole thing runs off an original sega genesis/mega-drive power supply, not the later-model one which also powers the game gear and nomad.

The machine will read MS-DOS formatted 720k and 1.44MB floppies, as well as writing its own format which is somewhat higher-capacity, I seem to recall the high density format being around 1.7 or 1.8MB. If a game will not fit on one disk it will break it up into two equal-size parts. There are assorted utilities around the 'net which I have downloaded which will convert between the most popular emulation formats and the MGH format, and split the files if necessary.

While mine is somewhat damaged (the floppy drive case is, as I said, broken) I would be willing to sell it... for about $300. :) I also have a shitload of game floppies, which it is illegal for me to provide you with, but you can always download illicit rom images and convert them. I can, at least, provide you with the conversion utilities. In any case you can use it (when coupled with the appropriate system) to copy games onto floppies, and then transfer them to your PC; it also makes dandy backup copies of your games. The machine also emulates various forms of SRAM, allowing you to save games to floppy on games which normally have battery-backed memory to save them.

Re:always wondered how to suck the roms off....

[\\]

i'm pretty sure what you are describing is nintendo's fds, which is different than the 'console' that allowed you to pirate snes games to real 3.5" floppy disks. the fds was released in japan only, but many gamers and collectors have them in the usa today.

the snes copier is obviously much more illegal.

Re:always wondered how to suck the roms off....

[happyhangone]

EPROM?!?! damn... there are more easy ways to accomplish that... using the rom backup units or floppy adapters for each console you can dump the rom image on a floppy o hdd... more info!? read http://www.robwebb.clara.co.uk/backup/index.html

Re:always wondered how to suck the roms off....

[Afrosheen]

Illegal depending on what you were using it for.

Backing up your own cartridges for your own personal use? Fair use.

Backing up rentals/your friends games? Piracy.

It's a fine line and hardware/software manufacturers have walked it for decades. Especially those designing stuff that lets you copy what you otherwise couldn't.

Re:always wondered how to suck the roms off....

[Anonymous Coward]

What is this? Ebay? Mod this guy down.

Re:always wondered how to suck the roms off....

[drunk_as_in_beer]

Not being nasty, I just always wondered how to pull the roms off the old nintendo and sega cartridges.

There are/were console backup devices that lets you do this. There was a variety of different methods these backup devices used. For example, one of them would plug directly into the cartridge slot, and also have a cartridge slot for you to put a cart in. You could save a backup of a cartridge onto a floppy disc or memory. Then you could play the games off of either floppy or memory (on the console itself). There was even one that would allow you play ROMS off of a CD.

I assume these are the devices that were used for making copies of the ROMS. Though in some cases there may have been homebrew methods, like what we have seen with the Dreamcast.

Re:always wondered how to suck the roms off....

[Anonymous Coward]

and you can't forget ultimate laser baigobo champions 2: jester's quest. that game kicked fuckin' ass! too bad they've not released the next chapter in the story. i'd kill for it.

Where's the source code?

[Matt Ownby]

Maybe I am missing something but I don't see source code for this available to be downloaded. I'd be interested in using what he has done for another certain emulator. A bootable linux CD that has support for most modern hardware is something I've longed for but haven't bothered putting together.

Re:Where's the source code?

[fireboy1919]

Source code would be nice. Knoppix seems to be doing a good job in hardware autoconfiguration, and like most other good projects, Gentoo is stealing it (in fact, there are three different hardware detection libraries available in Gentoo right now). :)

Seriously, when one project manages to get something Right, shouldn't everybody benefit from it? I'm quite sure that any improvements they've made in either MAME or hardware detection can benefit the entire OS community - or at least the part of it that has a flexible enough distribution to absorb it.

With every new Linux innovation I'm always thinking, "GREAT! Gimmie source! I want that it my distro!"

Re:Where's the source code?

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't even have the program available yet, check back tomorrow.

Re:Where's the source code?

[Mortice]

Erm, well according to the freshmeat page, it's licenced under the GPL. So presumably the source code is available somewhere.

Perhaps they haven't modified the source code for any of the software they're using, in which case the source code can be found in the appropriate place for each piece of software.

Re:Where's the source code?

[user32.ExitWindowsEx]

Knoppix's home page does have a link to source somewhere...I saw it once.

Re:Where's the source code?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://developer.linuxtag.net/knoppix/sources/

Re:Where's the source code?

[drfreak]

The source code is my modifications to Klaus Knopper's shell scripts. Most notably knoppix-autoconfig and xsession. I also did some configuration hacks to let the user choose between Xv and DGA on the boot command-line. You can uncompress the CD and extract all the scripts from within a running KnoppiXMAME. shoot me an email if you have any questions.

Re:Where's the source code?

[GammaTau]

Erm, well according to the freshmeat page, it's licenced under the GPL. So presumably the source code is available somewhere.

As far as Knoppix is concerned, this issue was recently discussed on debian-legal list. See the answer from Klaus Knopper. I don't know the details of this modified version, though.

Re:Where's the source code?

[jonathan_ingram]

Wow -- reading that thread gave me a serious headache. The poor guy is making his source code available, and doing far more than 99% of people would ever do (by offering to send it to people on CD if they don't want to download it), and the Debian weenies are *still* bitching at him.

Not quite yet.

[mcgroarty]

To save people some frustrated hunting, it's not available just quite yet, but will be soon.

Be patient, unlike certain slash editors, who should have made sure the file was actually in the directory they were pointing to. :-)

Re:Not quite yet.

[Gherald]

Oh well, at least they can dupe the story when its actually released.

Re:Not quite yet.

[zonker]

can? will!

Anti-whore Article Text in case of slashdotting:

[Anonymous Coward]

About: KnoppixMAME is a bootable arcade machine emulator with hardware detection and autoconfiguration. It works automatically on all modern and not-so-modern hardware, including gameports, CowboyNeal and joysticks. It is powered by Knoppix Debian GNU/Linux, X-MAME, and gxmame.

Changes: ROMs can now be put on the CD ISO without having to remaster/recompress Knoppix. /ramdisk/home can also be copied to the root of the ISO to make configuration changes persistent. Networking support is now enabled and supported with xmame and gxmame. XMAME has been updated to 0.69 and gxmame to 0.33. Xv is now the default display mode; it can be changed by using the "dga" option on the boot commandline. The ISO is now 100MB smaller, at 200MB.

Re:But does it...

[Aliencow]

The install it on your computer and be done with it? I don't see any reasons to use the CD other than the convenience of popping it into any machine..

Re:But does it...

[Cthefuture]

I don't know if this particular thingy runs in VMware, but I run regular Knoppix in VMware all the time.

License?

[Anonymous Coward]

I suppose those running ROMs that they "shouldn't" have aren't overly picky about license details... but isn't this a violation of the MAME license -- distributing ROMs on the same medium as MAME?

Re:License?

[BJH]

They're not distributing the ROMs - you have to put them onto the disk yourself.

well

[freedommatters]

looking for the download was a great waste of 5 minutes of my life. can i have a refund please? john

Re:well

[alienhazard]

im sure you waste more than 5 minutes on slashdot on a regular basis, but i dont see you begging for that back.

nice, how about one for Apache?

[imag0]

I was thinking a while back how cool it would be for a bootable Apache on cd... Boot the target box up, loads and runs Apache.

You can change the /htdocs to an nfs mount elsewhere on the network or have it on a local drive (in case for dynamic sites, like using a Wiki, that need to write stuff to disk), configuration changes can be saved and loaded from a floppy as well.

Would make a nice secure apache install and easy to setup as well.

All I got. Run with it. Thanks Knoppix guys!

Re:nice, how about one for Apache?

[Anonymous Coward]

While we're at it, I'd like to see a linux distro (possibly based on Knoppix) that boots into Freevo automatically... (or whatever media player/jukebox, as long as I can hook my PC to a TV)

Freevix is almost there, but still no HOWTO on how to boot from a live CD.

Re:nice, how about one for Apache?

[Gherald]

Hmmmm, I could maybe use a copy for my coffeemaker... I always did want to http:// to it.

Re:nice, how about one for Apache?

[nemiak]

I've been looking for a bootable CD that will load a GUI with a recent (~1.4) JVM on x86 hardware fast, for demoing java software.

Could i use knoppix for this?

Does anyone know of anything else that fits the bill?

Re:nice, how about one for Apache?

[sexecutioner]

Have you looked at ADIOS??

These guys are doing some amazing stuff far and beyond what I was after, but their current release for a bootable Linux system is tops! I can walk up to the "secure" DELL WINNT machines at my university and do something useful with them (write and test PHP code on a local apache server).

Here

Re:nice, how about one for Apache?

[millette]

See the package list at ftp://ftp.uni-kl.de/pub/linux/knoppix/packages.txt which mentions java, but I'm not 100% sure it's what you want...

Re:nice, how about one for Apache?

[matt_wilts]

I had thought of using Knoppix as an "appliance" distribution - I hadn't considered Apache, I was thinking for things like Squid, NTOP, Nagios, etc. Config information could be held on a floppy or flash drive.

Matt

Re:nice, how about one for Apache?

[Ramses0]

Already on the knoppix CD's... but it's not enabled by default. All you have to do is "su - ; apachectl restart", and you're good to go. Play fun games with mount, and make sure you understand what you're doing so you don't get haxored.

--Robert

Re:nice, how about one for Apache?

[brakk]

Hmm, or setting up a quick FTP warez dump!

Re:Anti-whore Article Text in case of slashdotting

[mcgroarty]

I'd lurve to see it support DVD media so you can actually put a reasonable collection of ROMs on the disc. Does anyone know if this is doable with the current version?

"other activities"

[Anonymous Coward]

I always choke on the twenty-sided dice. How do you get around that?

Re:*Opens the envelope*

[Anonymous Coward]

I like my Trans-am browser better anyway.

Nah... I'll stick with gamebase

[acid_zebra]

While I'll probably get shot in the head for this, I don't like this overspecialization.
Why run just mame when with gamebase (http://www.gamebase64.com/gb64v2.htm) I have a frontend that will happily organize ALL my emu collections, including N64, SNES, atari c64 and god knows what else. (yes, arcade roms too).
It provides screenshots, categories, favorites, alternate configs and god knows what else. It runs on windows 98/2000 but it might run under wine or whatnot.
Now to finish building that arcade cabinet I started 3 years ago... *sigh*

Re:Nah... I'll stick with gamebase

[drfreak]

It was certainly thought over when I was deciding whether or not to make KnoppiXMAME, but i figure the sheer numbers of games it runs could easily fill a CD just for MAME. Anyone is welcome to fork my project and cater it to more generalized emulation.

Re:Nah... I'll stick with gamebase

[acid_zebra]

you have written KnoppiXMAME? Cool!
(And here I was thinking I was orating in front of a crowd of degenerate monkeys *grin* )

I am guessing the distro requires less processing power and memory by loading only the neccesary components, thus enabling games to play more complex MAME games, right?

And I've always liked the console games idea of just plugging in your games, turning it on and playing.

OTOH, I can't remember the last time I turned off one of my PC's, it would feel...wrong ;)
(and by now, they probably would never start up again)
My point is, most emufreaks I know have HUGE collections of roms and whatnot, and most would not be satisfied with only one CD of mame roms.
So I guess the core of my rant/question/reply would be, what is the intended audience?

Ps. I couldn't program myself out of a wet paper bag so any fork would have to be done elsewhere ;)

Re:Nah... I'll stick with gamebase

[drfreak]

Well if your emufreak friends aren't satisfied with ~200MB with 500MB to spare for ROMs, why not made a 4.5 gig DVD instead? ;)

Re:Nah... I'll stick with gamebase

[acid_zebra]

hehe that would be cool.
Lessee
C-64 files : 760 Mb
N-64 files : 1.6 Gb
Sega files : 1.2 Gb
Snes files : 2.3 Gb
mame files : 2.3 Gb

D'oh! I need bigger DVD's ;)

Re:Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

Ya for hobbiests and amatuers BSD is definatly the right choice!

Linux should be only used in enterprise computing environments.

Knoppix Wishlist

[fastdecade]

I can see the benefit of this over a full linux install. Especially for Windows users. But...

It'd be nice if you could easily install Knoppix on your hard drive via Windows or Linux, so that it automatically adds option onto your boot manager.

This will become important as more of these specialised distros come out. No-one wants to look for CDs when their hard drive holds 100GB.

Re:Knoppix Wishlist

[rkz]

there is a Win32 MAME available anyway, windows users don't need to put shitty linux on their pc just to play arcade games.

Re:Knoppix Wishlist

[rkz]

Windows version

KnoppixRTCW??? ET is free ya know...

[Anonymous Coward]

Since Enemy Territory is free is there any reason a knoppix build wouldn't work?

Anyone done this already?

Just curious.

Re:KnoppixRTCW??? ET is free ya know...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.gentoogames.com/

Re:KnoppixRTCW??? ET is free ya know...

[caouchouc]

No knoppix build that I know of, but gentoogames does have a bootable RTCW:ET disc. Download instructions for it are right on their main page.

Re:KnoppixRTCW??? ET is free ya know...

[AlXtreme]

gentoogames has indeed done this before, am thinking about releasing the next morphix GameISO release with RTCW:ET instead of ut2003 or q3a. Then again, i'm in no mood to fight up against GentooGames, although i do believe that morphing is a better way than completely rebuilding, so we'll assimilate all in the end :]

Blame the editors!

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't check the links, the y don't edit the text, they don't fix the grammar. In fact all they do is click a few buttons like monkeys!

Re:Anti-whore Article Text in case of slashdotting

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow... a CowboyNeal compatible emulator. I happen to have a couple of those laying around.

I know exactly how you feel.

[Anonymous Coward]

Scott Lockwood killed my hamster.

Re:I know exactly how you feel.

[Anonymous Coward]

scot lockwood killed my hampster

1: post funny anagram to get the smart mass' attention..
2: ???
3: Profit!

sco is peddle talkworthy lommock!

W00T! provided from the very bottom of the GMP homepage.

Re:CD drive?

[yerricde]

I've read that a Pump It Up machine is essentially a Windows PC.

Linux MAME vs DOS Mame vs Windows MAME

[AtariDatacenter]

Is there anyone who publishes a good general speed comparison between these? There are some games that I'd like to play, but they're just too slow to be bearable with my hardware. I'm wondering if the Linux version is, generally, any faster?

Re:Linux MAME vs DOS Mame vs Windows MAME

[drivers]

Not that I know of (I haven't looked). Why not try it yourself... it's free after all.

Re:Linux MAME vs DOS Mame vs Windows MAME

[angle_mark]

Well, on my laptop dos/windows mame is a lot faster than the linux version. Its a celeron 433 and I can play neo-geo games at full speed under dos or windows but can only manage 15fps using the xview video driver under linux. Of course its probably just the unoptimised trident cyberblade xfree drivers holding performance back. Haven't had time to other methods. Also I have a nice big powerful (at least in comparison!) Athlon desktop system with Radeon 9000 pro. Linux mame rocks in that :-)

Re:Linux MAME vs DOS Mame vs Windows MAME

[AtariDatacenter]

My time isn't. :(

Re:Linux MAME vs DOS Mame vs Windows MAME

[jasonditz]

A lot of it has to do with how well your video card is supported, of course, but in general so long as you have plenty of RAM they should all perform approximately the same.

The processor emulators in MAME are pretty much the only bottleneck if you're not swapping to disk, and they are OS independant.

if you're really lacking in RAM, you'll probably have the best luck with the DOS version... but then, if you're lacking in RAM Knoppix is the LAST thing you should be looking at.

Re:Linux MAME vs DOS Mame vs Windows MAME

[phulshof]

I'm running mame through DGA, using proper modelines, and it actually runs faster (but not much) than on windows.

Re:Linux MAME vs DOS Mame vs Windows MAME

[angle_mark]

Cool, I'll have to make an effort and give that a go. Also I want to try advance mame using the svgalib driver, all this is a perfect excuse to put off a little bit more work ;-)

Re:Linux MAME vs DOS Mame vs Windows MAME

[Anonymous Coward]

So, you can waste how many hours a week on slashdot asking inanities but cant waste 5 minutes to download mame and try the problem games?

If time is that precious when will you ever get to play the games anyway?

Re:Linux MAME vs DOS Mame vs Windows MAME

[phulshof]

Good luck! :) Just send me an email (phulshof@xs4all.nl) if you run into any trouble.

Re:Linux MAME vs DOS Mame vs Windows MAME

[MyHair]

My time isn't. :(

Well, if you download this KnoppixMAME iso you can simply boot it up and play the ROM images right off your hard drive. You don't have to install Linux or configure it. It will auto-configure to your system.

Your only two possible time-takers would be if you're not familiar with Linux:

1: and have more than one HDD partition you might have to click on more than one desktop icon ("is it hda1 or hda5?")

2: It may take you a little bit to figure out how to launch XMAME. I didn't RTFA so I don't know if they have a nice GUI frontend or if you need to find it and load or ROM or if you need to run MAME from a command prompt. But you will have to find the ROMs on your HDD from your desktop first, becaus your HDDs aren't mounted until you browse them.

Re:Linux MAME vs DOS Mame vs Windows MAME

[drfreak]

Right. The autoconfiguration scripts will make the proper place in /mnt for you to mount the drive, but you have to do it yourself. This is for the simple fact that everything runs as root for performance reasons. If you are Linux savvy, this is not a problem. Also, there are no shells in the console. You have to do it in an xterm. Just minimize the frontend and then click the middle mouse-button -or both if you only have two- to get a window manager menu for spawning an xterm/shell. If this annoys you too much on every reboot, just copy /ramdisk/home to your hard drive, copy it to the root of your .iso (i.e. /home), and all your window manager/gxmame preferences will be read from the CD, instead of the defaults I set.

Re:Linux MAME vs DOS Mame vs Windows MAME

[MyHair]

Heh, I was about to post and correct you on a couple of things, but reread a few times and realized it was my misunderstanding and you're the KnoppixMAME dude and probably know what you're talking about more than me. :-)

Thanks for responding and informing.

Mounting should be as easy as clicking the hda1 icon (for example) on the desktop, though, unless you modified the startup scripts a lot. From your post I thought you're saying you have to use an xterm to mount the drives.

And thanks for packaging KnoppixMAME. I haven't tried it yet, but it's a fantastic idea. (I have tried XMAME and a Windows MAME, of course.)

Re:Anti-whore Article Text in case of slashdotting

[lmfr]

I have a Knoppix DVD disc, along with other live-cds. (And a RH 9 + Mandrake 9.1 install DVD, if anyone is interested.)

As far as Knoppix is concerned (or any other program), there is no difference in media but the size. The filesystem is, as in a CD, ISO9960 with rock-ridge extensions. (Normal video DVDs also have an UDF filesystem, but it isn't required nor does it conflicts with the ISO9660 one.)

Re:But does it...

[interiot]

What about Plex86?

Re:But does it...

[selfabuse]

I can't say that this version does (Haven't DLed the whole thing yet) But I've never had a problem running standard issue Knoppix in VMWare ..download the ISO, tell VMWare to boot off it, and away you go

Re:Anti-whore Article Text in case of slashdotting

[poptones]

What? MAME uses old arcade ROMS - even HUGE sets are far less than a MB. I have dozens of MAME ROMs and they still take up a tiny space on the CD.

ROMs

[byrd77]

16 vs 200 Mb ISOs? Room for ROMs? It would seem you could fit most ever ROM ever issued into (700 - 16) || (700 - 200).

What are you dl'ing?

Re:ROMs

[Anonymous Coward]

uh... the last full "release" of roms was 8 CD's... there's a LOT out there (sure most of them are probably crap but... still).

Re:ROMs

[jesse.k]

uh, the complete mame romset is around 14GB.

Re:ROMs

[Ryan Amos]

Actually some of the neo-geo roms are huge.. 64 and 128 megs each. MAME also supports a lot of newer games, which are significantly larger than Ms. Pac-Man. MAME also supports some 5000 or so games, so even if they were all less than 256k, that's still much larger than the size of a CD.

Re:ROMs

[Peale]

The last full release was 13 CDs. I'm a Lazarus burner. It's killer!

What used to be Tombstones is now http://www.lazarus.org.uk.

Re:ROMs

[drfreak]

I had one user email me saying he successfully remastered KnoppiXMAME 0.5 on a 3.5 gig DVD. Even *I* don't have a collection that big!

Re:ROMs

[drinkypoo]

I have a tiny slice of the ROMs supported by MAME; I don't have any cabinet images (that I'm aware of) or very many sound packs. My collection, with the files zipped as is recommended, takes up three CDROMs.

Re:ROMs

[westyvw]

Mames current supported rom catalog if you collected it is over 5 gigs, last I looked and that was a while ago.

Can I buy ROMs?

[akvalentine]

Is there any one out there that sells ROM collections? I would be interested in buying some, but I can't find any.

If nobody does sell them, why do the copyright holders care if they are traded, since they aren't losing any revenue?

Re:Can I buy ROMs?

[ikkonoishi]

Because if you get them for free there is no chance that you would buy them.
Thus the money that they could have gotten is no longer available to them.
Strangely it seems that even if they aren't selling the games anymore still you are stealing money from them
I think that their thought processes work like this.

1. Come up with a game idea
2. Develop game
3. Sell game
4. Profit!
5. Rehash game idea and release a crappy clone/sequel
6. Profit!!
7. Repeat former two until no longer profitable
8. Release compilation of all previous releases
9. Profit!!
10. Stop selling game
11. Sue anyone who attempts to make copies of the games that you no longer sell
12. ????
13. Profit!!

Re:Can I buy ROMs?

[cliffy2000]

Because they rerelease the games later. Look at Sega Smash Pack for Dreamcast (and PC, if memory serves me correct) -- a bunch of Genesis games emulated. Or the various Namco Arcade Packs. Just because it isn't sold NOW, it doesn't mean that it's theirs.

Re:Can I buy ROMs?

[Joe Tie.]

Look at Sega Smash Pack for Dreamcast

You forgot to put the word badly after that. That thing was such a disapointment, especially given what a big fan of the mega drive I was back in the day. Finally, a console company seemed to really get it, and realise that their old games still had value. Instead anyone who bought it was tortured by the single worst sound emulation ever seen on a comercial emulator.

Re:Can I buy ROMs?

[Cyph]

If you have USENET access, you'll be able to find quite a few people willing to burn you an entire set of ROMs for a nominal fee to cover the materials and the postage. Look around alt.games.mame, and check for threads beginning with "[BURN]".

Re:Can I buy ROMs?

[AntiBasic]

http://eggmansworld.com/

Re:Can I buy ROMs?

[ikkonoishi]

I see by your pathetic attempts at insulting me why you are relegated to posting as Anonymous Coward. You dead monkey flea!

Re:Can I buy ROMs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. Emu on CD.

Re:Can I buy ROMs?

[Anonymous Coward]

You suck.

Re:Can I buy ROMs?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.freemameroms.com/

You mail a blank cd/dvd, they mail you back a full cd/dvd. Fo free.

Re:Can I buy ROMs?

[tmasman]

Mame Rom Burners
But you didn't hear that from me...

~ tmasman

Re:Can I buy ROMs?

[Eil]

Do NOT, I repeat, do NOT buy any rom collections. Almost without exception, anyone that you might find selling emulator roms is doing so illegally. Especially the dimwits on eBay. Full and complete MAME romsets are available on the net if you look hard enough. There are several highly active newsgroups where complete romsets are posted regularly for almost every system imaginable. I know of at least one IRC channel where a few weeks' worth of downloading can get you just about every game released for every console, computer, and arcade game that existed. (Even a few newer ones like PSX, Dreamcast, and PS2.)

If spending all of your free time downloading isn't your style, then you might look for someone who will burn you a copy of their collection. This is especially prevalient within the online MAME community.

Happy hunting!

Re:Can I buy ROMs?

[SheepHead]

i remembered that a joystick came with some licensed Capcom ROMs, so i went searching.

it's the HotRod Joystick which you can see on that page. Hanaho owns the rights to the following Capcom ROMs and you get a copy of "Capcom Arcade Classics" if you buy their joystick. i have heard good things about the joystick but have not used one myself.

the games included are: 1941 - Block Block - Commando - Exed Exes - Ghouls'n Ghosts - Magic Sword - Mercs - Sections Z - Side Arms - Son Son - Street Fighter (Hyper Fighting) - Strider - U. N. Squadron - Varth

i don't know if they will sell the Arcade Classics separately, but you could always ask. if you really wanted to get into this as a hobby you would probably want a joystick like the HotRod anyway, but the cost is out of "impulse purchase" range. i did search google and froogle for "Capcom Arcade Classics" and could not find anyone selling it, although the google search turned up this forum page announcing a review of the games released for PocketPC, and you also get the desktop versions included. the actual review link, however, is broken.

so, i think this exists somewhere, but other than with a HotRod joystick I haven't been able to find out where you can get it. the only other thing i could find were CD-based console rereleases, for PS2/PS/Dreamcast, etc. Namco makes one (perhaps a few), for example.

ah, OK, even further searching turned up this page on capcom's site where you can buy individual arcade games for PocketPC (which I think based on the forum linked above should also work on PCs) ... but each game is $15, so it's not a great deal. but, the link is here.

HTH.

Re:Can I buy ROMs?

[tetra103]

Is there any one out there that sells ROM collections? I would be interested in buying some, but I can't find any.

I will give my experience with collecting ROMs: Drop the crazy notion of trying to have a complete collection! As many have pointed out, a complete collection is HUGE, and in all cases, just isn't worth it. If you waste your time collecting as many ROMs as possible, you will then have to waste your time again weeding through the worthless ones.

A while back I created my own AdvancedCD ISO with a whole collection of ROMs. Mostly the older ones as those are the ones I like. The problem with my ISO was that there were so many games, but only a handfull were worth playing. Instead of creating a MAME engine, as I like to call it, with thousands of ROMs, you would be far better off only collecting the ones you like (think top 50).

In regards to searching for the stuff on the net, I recommend sticking with the mame.dk site. There are alot of places out there, but mame.dk is pretty much the standard source. You won't find any place where you can download a tar ball or zip wad of games. I've looked extensively. I did find one place, but then it quickly went away. Besides, once I did get the 10 or so zip wads, I had to weed out all the crap. In the end, I deleted the whole mess and just went back to mame.dk to grab just the ones I liked.

I do, however, wish there was a site that had an easy zip wad to download for all the great classics. Things like PacMan, Dig Dug, Tempest, and the like. Not a zip wad of 1000s of crap ROMs with the bootleg burns. Just a top 50 from the 70s and 80s and only the main version of each. Since that "top 50" is subjective, I again recommend just going to mame.dk and getting only what you want. It's just not worth trying to get a complete collection as it's a moving target. And by all means, I'd pass on all those wankers that want you to pay them to burn CDs for you. The mentality behind that whole sceme is alittle warped. But if you're extreamly lazy, maybe they could help. You're better off with snagging from a friend.

The second best resource for snagging ROMs would be the Yahoo Groups and MSN Communities. There you can get some small collections of ROMs and converse with others.

Good Luck. And by the way, I'd pass you what I have, but really, you'd be better off getting your own (one at a time) from mame.dk. The other thing with ROM collections is that they do change! If you went out and bought a CD collection for MAME back at version .36, you'ld need to repurchase many of those ROMs/CDs for version .70. Sometimes a new MAME verion requires a slightly different change to the a particular ROM. You'll find that you'll have to update some ROMs as you update MAME. This is not 100% accurate, but some ROMs do break with newer MAME version. So again, keep a small collection of just the stuff you like, then upkeep and maintainence will be far easier. My goal is to only keep my collection at 50-100. I'm still weeding out crap, and I'll probably chuck the whole lot and start anew with MAME .70.

Re:Can I buy ROMs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, mame.dk had to stop ROM downloads quite a while ago because they got a cease and desist letter. They're still there, but no ROMs. And there's something just not right about the phrase "zip wad."

Re:Can I buy ROMs?

[Anonymous Coward]

And as already stated these are cheating scumbags. MAMEburners do it for free.

Re:Anti-whore Article Text in case of slashdotting

[jesse.k]

Mame currently supports games like King of Fighters 2001 (60mb), Area 51 (which has a 300mb HDD image file) and several other more modern games.

It's true Pac-Man is only a few KB, but if you want to play some of the more current games, you'll appreciate DVD media.

Re:Anti-whore Article Text in case of slashdotting

[stefanlasiewski]

According to the FM article, the ISO is around 200MB. This leaves plenty of room for ROMS (I have around 600 roms[1] and they take up 80MB of space).

[1] They are all for educational use.

Windows users.

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone have instructions on how to set up either of these (KnoppiXMAME and AdvanceCD) with Windows?

How do you add ROMS, how do you burn (what settings, etc) to make it bootable.

Re:Windows users.

[Whyrph]

Run Knoppix and set it up with that. ;)

Re:Windows users.

[drfreak]

use ISOedit or nero or whatever to add roms to the roms folder on the iso. use KNOPPIX/boot.img as the image to make the CD bootable when you re-burn it

Re:Windows users.

[leuk_he]

RTFM of knoppix. Basically:

-Burn ISO to cd (do not use winrar, nero does fine.)
-Boot from CD

Re:Windows users.

[tetra103]

RTFM. Seriously, AdvaceCD gives a complete step by step at their web site.

Yeah

[Anonymous Coward]

I sure hope you have the original games for all those ROMs you play.

Oh, and this purple shit hurts my eyes.

Re:Yeah

[jesse.k]

or you could download Mame32 and be playing that in windows and actually be on topic.

Seriously though, the Knoppix boot cd isn't too hard to configure.

Re:Anti-whore Article Text in case of slashdotting

[DeeKayWon]

even HUGE sets are far less than a MB.

Uh, no. In my roms folder I count 997 games that are over 1MB in size. 187 of those are over 10MB. A complete collection of MAME games will take about 9GB.

MAME even plays a few games that were hard drive-based. The biggest game MAME supports is Maximum Force, whose compressed hard drive image file (.CHD) is about 1.1GB, obviously too big for a CD.

Re:Yeah

[s88]

Or you could read the summary and know that you can put a CD in your tray and restart. Or is it easier to go to the store and buy one game?

Re:Anti-whore Article Text in case of slashdotting

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

Not in the case of NeoGeo roms or other more current ones. MAME runs arcade ROMs. Not necessarilly just OLD ones. Some are quite large.

Re:CD drive?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought it was somewhere near here

Re:This reminds me how I was at burger king

[Anonymous Coward]

were they leather?

Re:Anti-whore Article Text in case of slashdotting

[Monkelectric]

I have the complete mame split-set and it is well over 8 GB. about 3GB of this is CHD files

Oh yeah

[Anonymous Coward]

so was his wallet

Re:Anti-whore Article Text in case of slashdotting

[Anonymous Coward]

A complete collection of MAME games will take about 9GB.

A complete collection can be purchased on some 20+ CD-ROMS.

Jubei

[rmohr02]

Nice, but not quite as cool as your own Jubei.

Where to get teh ROMs from?

[Mensa Babe]

This is really great! Once again, Knoppix deserves a medal. I'll download it as soon as I get some ROMs. Where can I get the ROMs of the best classical games from? Thanks a lot!

Re:Where to get teh ROMs from?

[maxume]

I'm going to assume that this won't mean anything to you, but I suggest you check out usenet. just look under mame. It works great.

Re:Where to get teh ROMs from?

[Anonymous Coward]

I purchased every single MAME ROM on CD-ROM from this company. It's called "Emu-On-CD".

Re:Where to get teh ROMs from?

[Anonymous Coward]

www.mame.dk

Register & sign in before trying to get the ROMs.

Re:Where to get teh ROMs from?

[Mitchell Mebane]

Where can I get the ROMs of the best classical games from?

FreeMameRoms Project

FreeMameRoms is a group of people who burn MAME ROMs for others. Basically, you send them blank CDs/DVDs, or money to buy them, and they will burn and send you a set.

In particular, if you live in the US, Ryland is a nice guy. He has both the actual ROM set/CHD collection AND the extras, such as icons and artwork.

That's a great idea!

[Mensa Babe]

Don't forget to announce it on Slashdot as soon as you have a first working alpha version. If you need any security-related help, I might be able to contribute my expertise to your project, provided it will be based entirely on free software. I wish you good luck.

Okay, for use Windows users....

[sllim]

I see the words 'bootable CD' and the words 'linux distro'....

I know nothing about Linux.

Is running this thing as simple as booting the CD?

Re:Okay, for use Windows users....

[agrippa_cash]

Yes, it is that simple. And if you want to install it on your HD, it is quite easy. Especially compared to getting MAME to work on my Linux box (ARGH). The only downside to Knoppix is that you don't know any more once you are using Linux than before you started. Then again, that could be a plus.

Seek no more. MoviX is what you are looking for.

[Mensa Babe]

While we're at it, I'd like to see a linux distro (possibly based on Knoppix) that boots into Freevo automatically... (or whatever media player/jukebox, as long as I can hook my PC to a TV)

'The MoviX project is a series of three different tiny Linux CD distributions containing all the software to boot from a CD and play multimedia files through the MPlayer, the best multimedia player in the Unix world:

• eMoviX: a micro Linux distro meant to be embedded in a CD together with all video/audio files you want, so that the CD will be able to boot and automagically play all files;
• MoviX: a mini CD Linux distro able to boot directly from CD and load in RAM a console interface to MPlayer. From the interface you can easily play DVDs, VCDs, audio/video files Audio CD, internet radios, TV, you name it!
• MoviX2: same as MoviX, but it makes use of X and makes use of the nice MPlayer GUI.

Supported formats are all formats supported by MPlayer, most noticeably DivX but more in general any AVI, MPG, QuickTime, MP3, OGG/VORBIS and a few others'.

Re:Yeah

[muddy_mudskipper]

>Oh, and this purple shit hurts my eyes.

hmmm...

you sound like you had RK...

RKSA

the only thing i hate more than black-on-purple is red-on-black...

blech...

Thank you.

[Mensa Babe]

Thank you, I will. By the way, are they expensive? I'd like to build a huge collection, so the prices will add very quickly. I'd like to know in advance how much money do I need.

Re:Thank you.

[maxume]

In the event that you isp doesn't have a free server, you can pay like $10 a month to some place like supernews or whatever...beyond that they are as free as your conscience.

Yes, pop it in and it boots and runs also..

[Bruha]

Gentoo games also makes games that boot from a CD..

http://www.gentoogames.com

They're usually a 600meg download but the upside is that they require virtually no hard drive space.

Re:Anti-whore Article Text in case of slashdotting

[Anonymous Coward]

Currently, on my RAID spool, I have every single MAME ROM for the .70 release...

Slightly over 8Gigs. It needs 2 DVDs for a backup. If I had all the CHD files for the shooters out there (Area51, etc), it would be 3 DVDs.

Re:Anti-whore Article Text in case of slashdotting

[poptones]

Cool.

Now, in light of this info I'm wondering how my post got modded "informative." <insert smily here>

Knoppix Lite?

[nurb432]

With all these projects being based off Knoppix, is there any thing that would be considered a knoppix lite? ( aside from dealing with the trouble of 'remastering'... )

Re:Knoppix Lite?

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, look at Morphix-Combined-LightGUI at morphix.sourceforge.net

Re:Knoppix Lite?

[Anonymous Coward]

You might want to check out Damn Small Linux.

Re:But does it...

[bakes]

Most likely it does, but VMWare doesn't support the game port. At least, I haven't been able to get it to find the gameport. Any help gratefully accepted.

are you taking requests for ftp access?

[SonicBurst]

If so, I'd like the login sonicburst, password.... :) hey, gotta try, right?

Re:But does it...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would anyone want to use this? It makes about as much sense as a web-browser on a bootable CD.

Just intall MAME on the OS you normally use.

Re:Yeah

[Kashif Shaikh]

I could just go buy Battlefield 1942 and be playing it within 10 minutes on Windows

[rolls eyes]
Yeah, but BF1942 is full fucking 12-year olds who just want to grab every vehicle and ram into each other.

If you think I'm making this up, think again. My little bro and his dipstick friends do this all the time.

Kashif

Re:Yeah

[PsibrII]

Hehe. The really scary MAME freaks do have legit collections. It's like a technician version of a redneck joke. If you have A copy of MAME that runs on a BeBox, and 14 stadups that don't run in their orginial box, you might be a nolife geek technician. I have a friend like that. Has chickens living on his old standups out in the barn. He was pretty bad shape to start, until I passed on a 6 CD set of roms that I uh, found somewhere. yeah thats the ticket. If someone every crowbars him away from trying every game rom in history, he probably could fire up the ROM burner, swat the chickens off one of the standups with a broom, yank out one of the boards, and pop in a new set of ROMs and be ready to go.

Re:Anti-whore Article Text in case of slashdotting

[VoiceOfRaisin]

"Mame currently supports games like King of Fighters 2001 (60mb), Area 51 (which has a 300mb HDD image file) and several other more modern games."

very true but your numbers are a little off. kof2001 is 75 megs, and interestingly, the older kof2000 is 78 megs and kof99 is 100 megs!

also the area51 disk image is 534 megs. but theres now an area51mx hd img thats 1.66GB!!

so ya it takes up a lot of space. my roms folder which is zipped using every possible zip program i could find to get every last byte out of the compression is 9.64GB

How to get KnoppiXMAME 1.0

[drfreak]

Hi everyone, I'm the author of KnoppiXMAME. The file wasn't available yet on ibiblio when I updated the project status on freshmeat. I didn't think it would generate an announcement on the main page, and I certainly didn't think it would be slashdotted!

I've mailed the ibiblio maintainers and am waiting for a response on the status of the ISO file I uploaded about three days ago. In the meantime you can grab the ISO directly from me by opening an ftp session to yummy.dyndns.org. It's only 128K up, so whoever gets it first please put some mirrors up!

- Daniel R. Tarsky

Re:How to get KnoppiXMAME 1.0

[drinkypoo]

Perhaps it would be a good idea to set up a bittorrent link next time :)

Re:How to get KnoppiXMAME 1.0

[Ziviyr]

Theres a current normal Knoppix torrent at http://f.scarywater.net/ by the way.

Re:Anti-whore Article Text in case of slashdotting

[eadz]

Yes. It will be released at LinuxTag. see this post for more infomation.

Re:Anti-whore Article Text in case of slashdotting

[drfreak]

You can make a DVD. Just be sure to use ISO9660.

please please read YOU STUPID FUCKING MODERATOR

[Anonymous Coward]

HOW CAN my post be REDUNDANT, when I asked it BEFORE the other windows QUESTION.. FUCKERS!!!

SORT NEWEST FIRST

you dumb fuck, his post is redundant, not mine!

ARGH!!

Re:Anti-whore Article Text in case of slashdotting

[VivianC]

I have a Knoppix DVD disc, along with other live-cds. (And a RH 9 + Mandrake 9.1 install DVD, if anyone is interested.)

If by 'interested', you mean 'interested in a copy' or 'interested in how to make a bootable install DVD' than I'm interested. Drop me a line...

Some people seem to overlook the fact...

[FauxReal]

The fact that in order to legally play these ROMs you also have to

• own

the physical ROM itself. How many people in here own actual arcade pc boards, or better yet whole machines? Although MAME does also emulate NEO GEO hardware which was nearly identical in function in the home and arcade versions... I'm sure there are more owners of NEO GEO systems than say, a "King of Fighters 2001" arcade machine. Really though... the somewhat recent crackdown on ROM sites should at least make people a little wary of openly talking about where to get ROMs on the net here.

Re:Some people seem to overlook the fact...

[johannesg]

While you are certainly

• right

that you have to own the ROMs before you are allowed to play them in this manner, the sad fact is that most people just don't

• care

about this issue and just play the ROMs. Just goes to show that there is a difference between law and morality...

Re:But does it...

[FauxReal]

Quote: Why would anyone want to use this? It makes about as much sense as a web-browser on a bootable CD. Well, how about building a standalone MAME box that takes advantage of the low overheard of a Knoppix system to juice that hardware for all its worth... and if it crashes? Press the reset button.

Almost free roms: www.freemameroms.com

[Anonymous Coward]

This site www.freemameroms.com lists people willing to burn copies of roms for the cost of shipping + media.

I don't see him now, but a few months ago I saw a guy who offered 30+ DVD-Rs for ~$240 with 109GB of ROMs. That's a lot of roms.

Yeah, I thought a disk drive would be cheaper too.

Don't feed the scammers

[dq5 studios]

There are many many sites out there charging US$100 or more for MAME sets. It is in direct response to their actions that the Tombstone Group was formed. Due to some provider problems they were shutdown for a time. To keep the scammers from taking over during their absence, Lazarus and FreeMAMERoms took over.
There maybe other burning groups, these are just the ones I am aware of.
If you want to know what I mean by scammers do a Google for "Emu on CD" for a Brazillian site. (Please don't give them any money)

easy products to rip roms with

[mushroom blue]

for cartridge games, you can find a rom dumper do do that. no need to desolder chips or anything. every cartridge system has a dumper made for it. a company named BUNG tends to make a lot of them. I have one of their N64 dumpers, and it works almost flawlessly.. except for needing a few bios flashes due to new protection schemes. note: rom dumpers are apparently semi-legal, but being I was only using it for my personal collection, i'd love to see someone bust me. :)

for CD-based systems (TG-CD, Sega CD, Playstation), you can simply dump iso images of the files using your PC CD-ROM.

fair use is a fun thing. it'll probably be harder to find a rom dumper due to the DMCA, but I'm sure a quick scour of the alt.binaries.emulators newsgroups will pop up a few people selling them.

Writing games with knoppix

[dew-genen-ny]

I've been thinking recently, that a really good way to get people into linux would be to have a couple of really decent games for the platform.

The trouble being that we're in a chicken-egg senario right now (the chicken did btw...) - no killer linux only games exist, and because mostly only geeks are using linux at home right now, no (killer) games are written for linux.

So how about using knoppix as the answer - basically, if you want to play our game, you have to put the disk in and reboot.... a knoppix like distro could boot, and then the game could automatically load on top of that. No doubt performance would be better since you're now not likely using 500megs of ram on all the quickstart agents that inevitably seem to load up on boot...

You could also include a way of just booting up into a normal kde system by hitting the right key on loadup - the kids would absolutely love the new/coolness factor of it, and voila! 10 years from now we'll have kids remeniscing how the first time they touched linux was when it came distributed with XYZ linux.

Plus linux can get some great press because it's suddenly a gaming platform as well!

Re:Writing games with knoppix

[joss]

> (the chicken did btw...)

Why do you reckon that, it was the egg. It was laid by some bird that wasnt quite a chicken.

Knoppix, the "show me" CD.

[Anonymous Coward]

Knoppix is great for a lot of things, and since CDs are cheap. I can send my clients complete web sites i.e. shopping, etc to peruse. They also make great porfolio resumes for the unemployed geek. Doing a presentation? No problem. Portable development environments complete with docs and everything[1]. IDS, Mail, News, etc, etc on a CD. Changing your corporate setup almost on a whim. Today this, tomorrow that. Sniff, sniff, do I smell a niche market waiting to be filled?

[1] Don't forget Linux makes a nice emulation environment as well. Get some life out of your old mainstays. Portable emulation.

I did this ages ago

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not new. I did it a few years back and posted on /. but the story was bounced

here

Re:Anti-whore Article Text in case of slashdotting

[lmfr]

The how-to will have to wait, as I currently don't have the time.

1. rh+dvd-isolinux.tar.bz2, the isolinux directory, 9.3Mb.
2. make sure full Mandrake 9.1 is in /mandrake91 and full RedHat 9 in /redhat9
3. change redhat9/.discinfo, line 3, to 1,2,3
4. for Mandrake, execute gendistrib --noclean --distrib path_to_/mandrake91 (gendistrib is in rpmtools-4.5-9mdk
5. burn: growisofs -Z /dev/recorder -b isolinux/isolinux.bin -c isolinux/boot.cat -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table -J -pad -r -T -V "Mix" -v -f full_dir/

Neat, but...

[Lispy]

...why do I have to reboot? My uptime! My precious uptime! ;-)

But does it support VIA Prosavage DDR graphics

[chefbimbo]

as the one in Shuttle SK41G?

Re:Seek no more. MoviX is what you are looking for

[Anonymous Coward]

Wicked, that _is_ exactly what I was looking for!

VMWare?

[tommck]

Maybe you can install VMWare and boot the VMWare session off of the CD... Would that work?

T

Would make a diffenence with a mini cd.

[McQuaid]

They hold roughly 200 megs. So the 16 meg version would be ideal for this. Take mame with you everywhere. :)

My pleasure.

[Mensa Babe]

Wicked, that _is_ exactly what I was looking for!

I'm glad I could be helpful.

ok, im dumb

[SubtleNuance]

"..also a bootable ISO image of a minimal Linux distribution containing MAME, but weighing in at 16 MB rather than 200 MB so there is more room for ROMs."

if the file is an ISO, which is a CDimage, how do you add files to it? I use EasyCDCreator on Windows (no cdrw in gnu/linux box..) - how can I open the iso to be burnt, then *add* files to it?

Re:ok, im dumb

[greyfeld]

I had been trying to get AdvanceCD to work on my old PC for a couple of weeks without success. I can tell you however, that you need to use Linux cdrecord and mkisofs to add roms to the ISO image. If you do it in Windows, you lose all the file permissions. There are good instructions on how to add them here http://advancemame.sourceforge.net/doc-advcd.html in sections 6 and 7. I finally gave up on using AdvanceCD with my televsion and old TNT2 Ultra card. I went with Mame32 and turned the TV on it's side and tell MAME32 to rotate some of the games clockwise and they look great on my 27" TV. Just ask my co-workers that I took how over lunch to play a little Donkey Kong, Galaga, Scramble, etc. I think the term they used was "Sweet". Good luck.

Re:ok, im dumb

[drfreak]

If you are without the software tools or know-how to edit or add files to a .ISO, you can always just put all your roms on a second CD-ROM in a second drive. Just be sure to put them in a /roms directory. same goes for /samples

Re:ok, im dumb

[frovingslosh]

If you are without the software tools or know-how to edit or add files to a .ISO, you can always just put all your roms on a second CD-ROM in a second drive.

I too would like to be able to edit the ISO. The second CD drive isn't much of a solution, as I want to do it on a system with only 1 CD that is only ever going to have 1 CD drive - a notebook. And I would much rather make one or more mame CDRs than fill the little remaining hard disk space the notebook has. Obviously the author believes this can be done and apparently has done it, would it be too much trouble to at least give us who are not linux experts a simple paragraph to get us started, like telling us what tools we have to track down to do this, if they are not already on the CD (where they should be). Why make everyone reinvent the wheel? I'm not saying he has to provide hand holding, but a point in the right direction wouldn't be unreasonable.

Correction & FTP & SSH

[MyHair]

All you have to do is "su - ; apachectl restart", and you're good to go.

Assuming you're at the $ prompt in X you'll need to do this:

sudo su -

And since it's Debian-based you can use Debian's:

/etc/init.d/apache start


from the # prompt. Or you shortcut it with:


sudo /etc/init.d/apache start


FTP

While we're on the subject, ftp is a bit trickier. This is one way:


knoppix$ sudo su -
knoppix# rm /etc/hosts.allow
knoppix# rm /etc/hosts.deny
knoppix# passwd knoppix
knoppix# /etc/init.d/inetd restart


You'll have to confirm the removals, and you'll assign a password to user knoppix so you can log in as that user. You could also create a new user to log into FTP from.

hosts.allow and hosts.deny are symlinked to the read-only image, so if you want to roll your own you'll still have to delete the links and then create new ones from scratch or with cp.

SSH


knoppix$ sudo /etc/init.d/ssh start
knoppix$ sudo passwd knoppix


The start command will create new keys in KNOPPPIX, too. You have to assign knoppix (or root or a new user) a password to be able to log in, of course.

Re:How to get KnoppiXMAME 1.0 (New Official Site)

[drfreak]

A kind soul at PlanetMirror is now hosting KnoppiXMAME 1.0. I'll be updating the freshmeat page today.

Here's where you can grab the files:

http://planetmirror.com/pub/knoppixmame/
ftp:// planetmirror.com/pub/knoppixmame/

Share and Enjoy!

- Daniel

Re:But does it...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've spent the last two days trying to think of a good reason to do this, and still haven't come up with anything.

.torrent available

[Peale]

I don't know if anyone will see this now that it's off the main screeen, but I've got a .torrent for 1.0 available here:

http://torrentreactor.com/download.php?file=Knoppi XMAME-1.0.iso.torrent

do you have any idea what you are talking about?

[frovingslosh]

no killer linux only games exist,

sheesh, what moron moderated this as insightful?

To set things straight, this has nothing to do with Linux games. This is about running MAME under Linux from a completely bootable CD, and just happens to run under Linux (you can't run Windows right from CD, or so Microsoft wants you to believe, and even if you know you can, you cannot freely distribute the Microsoft code to do so). MAME is an arcahe game emulation project. Running MAME (regardless of the OS choice) lets you pop in a CD and run any number of clasic arcade games, pretty much exactly as you saw or see them in the arcade (not limited brain dead home computer versions of arcade games, the actual code of the actual arcade game running on your PC). The down side is simply that that copyrighted game ROM code can't be distributed with MAME, so you either have to own one of the games already and make a copy of the ROM you own, or do something illegal to get a copy of the ROM (I believe there were some exceptions where the code was actually released, but since none of that code is on the MAME CD ISO I could very well be wrong). The problem of getting the extra ROM code onto the MAME ISO and thus the MAME CD is apparently also left to the user, which makes this all of somewhat limited use. But the observation about Linux games (which I disagree with, there are some nice Linux games that I've never seen available on the PC) is far from insightful, it shows that the poster has no idea what he is posting about!