Home Page Forums MAME Non-Windows MAME Support MAME's linux folder structure

Hi all. I could use some help understanding the MAME linux (Ubuntu-based) folder structure better. In Windows, everything goes in the MAME folder, e.g. C:\MAME\. In contrast, in Linux Mint, I find the following:

• /usr/games [MAME binary location]
• ~/.mame ["Core Output"/settings folders, i.e. cfg, diff, nvram, sta, ui, and the files ui.ini and mame.ini]
• /etc/mame [config files, including another mame.ini]
• /usr/share/games/mame AND some are also in /usr/local/share/games/mame [support file folders, e.g. artwork, cheat, samples, etc.]

A couple questions:

• Why are there two mame.ini files? Which one should I edit when I need to make changes?
• The ui.ini file references support file folders that don't exist, but that I'd like to create, e.g. "marquees_directory [TAB] marquees". In Windows, that means the "marquees" folder goes in MAME's 'root' folder, i.e. C:\MAME\marquees\. There's no such MAME root folder for linux, so where is ui.ini looking for these folders?

The mame.ini and ui.ini files seem to read like they're operating in a Windows environment, and I could really use help understanding how to interpret them for linux.

I'm guessing that's a distro packaged MAME rather than a self-compile, because that's definitely not how MAME is set up by default.

Regardless of that, everything comes from mame.ini, so you can edit mame.ini to point to whatever you'd like (on my system, the rom folders point to an NFS network drive, for example).

/etc/mame/mame.ini is the system-wide default copy of the settings file. ~/.mame/mame.ini is your personal version of the file, which will overrule the system-wide version.

If you don't give the full path name, mame will default to $HOME/marquees

I don't know about you, but I'm using the C.Falco PPA in Ubuntu and the way they set up the defaults is a little bit confusing because you don't always have write permissions to the directories outside of your /home/. To avoid all these problems my /etc/mame/mame.ini file only has one line in it:



That way it always points to the .mame directory in my home.

Another trick I've learned is don't mess with the defaults for hashpath, fontpath, plugins, or languagepath. The files in those directories are version dependent and everything gets screwed up if you have those directories pointing to something that doesn't get updated with each release. Copy over those paths over from the /etc/mame/mame.ini file.

One final trick since I've started using the default UI more these days; rename the /etc/mame/ui.ini file to something else, and then create a new ui.ini file under your /home/xxx/.mame/ directory and use that file to define all of your UI search path options.

.deb packages are intended to be sytem-wide, i.e. they must take into account that multiple users could take advantage of them, even games or emulators. So

• /usr/share/games/mame/roms is there in case some free rom will be bundled with Mame in the future
• /usr/local/share/games/mame/roms is the best place to put your roms if you have two daughters playing Mame with their own user and you don't like to waste hd space making different copies of your full rom set
• $HOME/.mame/roms is what hard-retrogamers are looking for

Please have a look at /usr/share/doc/mame/README.Debian, some other good infos there.


There's no need to tamper with /etc/mame/mame.ini for this. That's exactly what it does by default.

If you remove the trailing /etc/mame your only achievement is to loose the path to presets ini files for some systems bundled with Mame. You may not need them, but other users may do.


Again, you don't need to change anything in the /etc/mame tree. Mame scans your $HOME/.mame/ directory first and goes on if nothing is found there only.

The multiple-semicolon-separated-path is a basic MAME configuration feature, and it's not confusing at all once you grasp it.