Home Page Forums Archives MacMAME [slightly OT] SDLMAME

I noticed RBelmont mention on his blog that SDLMAME (A MAME variant using SDL) was now compiling and running well on Intel Macs. I hope to get my new Intel Mac within a week. No offence intended to the current MacMame, but would anyone else like a (I hope!) simple command-line version of MAME. As I work on Linux, Windows and (soon) Mac, I like the idea of using the same MAME code base on all 3 OSes (assuming of course, SDL is that well behaved..)

Try to keep things in polite, I'm hoping that a bit of polite enthusiasm might help SDLMAME get into the hands of us normal mortals

I'm not quite sure what you mean, but I've been putting precompiled versions of MAME for SDL and X11 for Mac OS X on my site for years (PPC versions, but I could upload intel binaries as well).

Have a look at the following adress: http://www.ltc.lu/enseignants/carlo.noben/

Sadly, the OpenStep (Mac native) graphics version doesn't compile since sometimes in the 0.80 beta cycle.

It does work on Linux and (Intel) OSX, I need to massage it a bit for Win32. Note that I expect Brad's real Intel MacMAME will be a decent bit faster (he oughta get full speed in KI on the Mini where I don't quite, for instance), but I normally prefer commandline MAME so I only have to learn it once :-)

We'll probably release SDLMAME, along with a preliminary GTK+ implementation of the new multiwindow debugger, sometime in May. It depends to some extent on how badly Aaron breaks everything in the coming weeks ;-)

Carbon: SDLMAME is a completely new port where we took the original commandline Windows MAME and directly replaced DirectX with SDL (and GTK+ for the debugger). As a result it's 100% compatible with frontends for the Windows version (and it more quickly tracks changes in the core Windows version than all-out ports like MacMAME can) but it compiles and works on all Intel machines (Linux, MacOSX, and Win32 are official, FreeBSD oughta work without a lot of effort).

Thanks for the update

I also like being able to just learn one set of apps, thats why I love Firefox, vlc and gaim. I can just pop from OS to OS without having to re-remember which app to use (except of course, when I go to mac os x I have to remember all the short-cut keys have jumped from ctrl to the apple button).

I was under the impression that xmame still builds and runs on the Mac, if you're looking for a current solution.

As I stated in my post above, xmame in fact still builds on the Mac, but only the X11 and SDL based ones (you can build both PPC and Intel versions, although the Intel SDL version aborts at launch with an error).

Native Openstep builds on the other hand abort at compilation time.

Is it already "sometime in May"?

True, which means it could be released soon. On the other hand, it will still be "sometime in May" for quite a long time yet. Also, we should remember it will be "sometime in May" about 12 months from now as well

There's a couple of things going on in baseline that I need to settle out before we can start releasing SDLMAME.

And how does it perform in comparison with xmame under linux?