MAME - it’s what your mother warned you about

A while back someone mentioned MAME to me and the possibility of running old arcade games on your PC.

I checked it out but for whatever reason I had difficulty getting it to work. I tried it again just the other night and cool, it worked! I started downloading ROM’s (err, only the ones I was legally entitled to play of course) and it wasn’t long before I had written a web-based shell to manage the downloading, screenshots and launch functionality.

The coolest part is being able to launch the ROM’s from my browser. I send a .phpw script (a php script, but named .phpw so that it doesn’t get evaluated by the webserver [apache on localhost]) and associated .phpw files with the PHP CLI interpreter. The script changes directory to where MAME is installed and does a system() call to fire up MAME itself.

I was able to launch MAME from within a PHP script running on the webserver, but MAME was showing on the webserver’s console instead, i.e., out of my view and taking up 95%+ of the CPU (as you would expect).

But, even cooler - much to the detriment of my other projects I want to get on the go - is that I found “Snow Bros”, a game I spent - nay wasted - many many hours on when I was at polytech. One project I want to do is to build (or acquire) a stand-up arcade machine running MAME. Brett has one at his place and it’s g33k t0 teh m4x!