If, like me, you played the classic arcade machines of the 80s-90s, surely you know the MAME emulator. Those are the acronyms of Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator and the emulator allows us to play those titles that we liked so much on practically any device. How could it be otherwise, it is also available for Ubuntu and its installation is as easy as typing some commands and doing some checks. Of course, I recommend patience because we can always leave something to do and we can find ourselves with the unpleasant surprise that we do not see the image that heads this article. Below we explain the steps to follow in order to play MAME games on your PC with Ubuntu.
How to install MAME on Ubuntu
The most important part of the process is to have some games or Roma that we know they work. Having one that works is enough, but there can always be incompatibilities with the BIOS and if we trust a game and it turns out that it does not work, we will go crazy trying to solve the problem. Therefore, it is best to put several games on the route that you will see later. Here are the steps to follow to install and run MAME on Ubuntu:
- As always in these cases, especially if we want to receive future updates to the package, we will install the SDLMAME repository (Get more info) by opening a terminal and typing:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:c.falco/mame
- Next, we update the repositories with the command:
sudo apt-get update
- Now we install the emulator:
sudo apt-get install mame
You can also install the mame-tools package, but I don't have it installed and I have no problem.
- Now we have to run the emulator (it will give an error) and check that the «mame» folder has been created in our personal folder. If this is not the case, we create it with the command:
mkdir -p ~/mame/roms
- Inside that folder we have to put the games, so we add the ROMs.
- Finally, we open MAME and check that it works.
Some games may not work, so I always recommend doing an internet search for "all mame bios", which will allow us to find a package that has many of the BIOSes necessary for most games to work. The downloaded package has to be decompressed and inside there will be many compressed files that we will have to put, without decompressing, in the same folder «roms» where we put the games.
Have you tried it? Don't hesitate to leave a comment if you have done it and how it went. Be careful with the computer keys though 