Home Page Forums MAME MAME BletchMAME 2.0

(Raises hand from back corner)

I'd be quite interested in taking a look at this... Is there a pre-compiled Mac binary available, or barring that, a set of instructions that even I might be able to follow to compile this for the Mac?

(Retreats to back corner)

Let me pull the 2.0 release branch and reconstruct how I compiled it from scratch so I have instructions. You will need Homebrew installed (along with Xcode naturally). The good news is it's using CMake so it generates a project file you just load into the Xcode GUI and build.

This sounds rad.. Guess its time to finally install Xcode on the new Mac mini!

Mac build instructions. These work on Catalina and Big Sur developer beta 5. They should be OK on Mojave at least as well.

Prereqs: install Xcode from the Mac App Store, and Homebrew following the instructions on https://brew.sh/

Open a Terminal window and install the necessary brew modules:
% brew install cmake
% brew install expat
% brew install zlib
% brew install qt

Get BletchMAME:
% git clone https://github.com/npwoods/bletchmame.git

This gets the BletchMAME source into a newly created folder called "bletchmame".

Currently (August 26, 2020) there's a minor edit you need to do to the source to make Clang happy. Use TextEdit or BBEdit or whatever to open the file lib/quazip/minizip_crypt.h and delete the word "register" on line 57, then save the file.

Setup for cmake:
% cd bletchmame
% mkdir build
% cd build

Run cmake (I recommend copy/pasting this command):
% cmake .. -DEXPAT_INCLUDE_DIR=/usr/local/opt/expat/include/ -DEXPAT_LIBRARY=/usr/local/opt/expat/lib/libexpat.a -DZLIB_ROOT=/usr/local/opt/zlib -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=/usr/local/opt/qt5/

Once this completes, build:
% make -j5 (for a 4-core Mac; use -j3 for a 2-core or -j9 for an 8-core).

And run:
% ./BletchMAME

I haven't gotten BletchMAME to successfully launch MAME yet on the Mac, but it's interesting to play around with.

I followed all the steps and they completed without errors. But during compilation, I get this error:

If you're getting that error, then no, you didn't follow all the steps.

I followed all the instructions, and successfully compiled BletchMAME 2.0.

As indicated, I was unable to launch MAME, but still, I appreciate the instructions, and eagerly await a time when we can have BletchMAME working on the Mac.

On Windows, BletchMAME relies on a command line option "-attach_window" to instruct MAME to "borrow" an existing Window instead of creating its own.

-attach_window is currently Windows-only. I don't see BletchMAME on non-Windows platforms being usable without equivalent functionality on those platforms.

I was able to build BletchMAME on Linux with

$ cmake .. -DEXPAT_INCLUDE_DIR=/usr/include/ -DEXPAT_LIBRARY=/usr/lib64/libexpat.so.1 -DZLIB_LIBRARY=/usr/lib64/libz.so

but clicking on a driver gives me a sigabrt, after a window for the emulation briefly popped up.

Does BletchMAME make use of the Lua interface? I've already been thinking about a fully detachable UI, text or graphics, using a remote Lua connection. (Would mean to make the Lua console accessible by socket first.)

Yes, there is a LUA plugin ("worker_ui") distributed with BletchMAME that essentially provides what is sort of a hybrid between a command console and an RPC-like mechanism. Its not using sockets, but rather standard IO - meaning that you can execute MAME with that plugin and control MAME using the same facilities BletchMAME is using.