Home Page Forums MAME MAME Homebrew Hardware

I designed and am in the process of building a 68000-based single-board computer. I have a wire-wrapped prototype (a 68K and an MFP, basically) and an idealized second-system effect concept with everything I would like to add to it (FM synth, an ISA bus, ET4000 video, etc).

I wrote a driver for the current version I built and I’m using it to write the firmware. I know there are a few SBCs in MAME already. Are homebrew SBCs something that the project is interested in or is this an HBMAME thing?

We're interested as long as it's a public project (and probably even if it isn't, to be honest).

Cool. I’m not sure if MAME has been used as a development environment for new hardware before but the device system makes plugging in different subsystems pretty easy - I was able to get my current system config up and running in MAME and talking to the dumb RS-232 terminal with a minimum of fuss. And the debugger is great as always.

HBMAME homebrew is only meant for homebrew on arcade hardware. Homebrew computers all go to MAME if acceptable (it normally is).

Is it possible to run MAME headless if a system has no video output? The built-in terminal is, well, dumb and I want to bitbang my serial data to a loopback COM port and connect with a regular terminal emulator now that we have support for that rather than using the terminal device.

Yes, MAME supports headless drivers. You'll still get a video window it just won't have anything in it aside from MAME on-screen display stuff.

You can always make a small default layout for the particular driver which has no screen element and then it will disappear.

And when you are at it, why not add the looks of the home brew, even if just a bit scetchy? You can add buttons, LED:s and
BCDs too and it is quite simple once you get the hang of the LAY format, check it out under src/mame/layout/

EDIT Docs: http://wiki.mamedev.org/index.php/Layouts_and_Rendering_for_MAME_Artwork_System