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iPhone MAME... Getting There

Friday August 17, 2007 6:51 pm PDT by Arnold Kim
Work is being done on a MAME port for the iPhone. MAME is the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator that allows you to run old arcade games (provided you have the proper ROM)



The project appears to remain very much a work-in-progress:

Project to port SDL MAME to the iPhone. The main cool feature I want to add is configurable layouts for touchscreen controls and crazy gesture based inputs. Whether MAME will actually be playable from a performance and control perspective remains to be seen.


Unfortunately, at this time, while it appears to have been built, controls don't work yet.
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crees!
Posted: 62 months ago
This is truly a sign from heaven. Galaga is my favorite arcade game of all time. 4 years ago, before I bought my Powerbook, I had MAME on my PC and played it all the time.

Rock on.

Now I just need an iPhone.
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needthephone
Posted: 62 months ago
Imagine playing Robotron or Defender (THE best games ever conceived) on an iphone, I can see a touch screen being great for Robotron especially !
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mkrishnan
Posted: 62 months ago
Very impressive.

I was trying to get some perspective from Geekbench... the iPhone Geekbench scores generally place the iPhone around the 80-100 range. For reference, a P4/1.5GHz is about 500 and the iBook G4/800 is about 430. The oldest G3 Macs listed performs at 177 (400MHz G3).

I know MAME was able to play 80s arcade games on my Pentium 150MHz notebook circa 1997. I would guess that its Geekbench, were it available, would also put it around the high double digits.

The iPhone might just be able to play one or two games.
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aristobrat
Posted: 62 months ago

This is truly a sign from heaven. Galaga is my favorite arcade game of all time. 4 years ago, before I bought my Powerbook, I had MAME on my PC and played it all the time.

Same here. I LOVE GALAGA! :) It's about the only video game I can play. :)
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DoFoT9
Posted: 62 months ago
this is truely amazing!!!!

bring on metal slug!!!
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HiRez
Posted: 62 months ago
This is awesome news, I can't wait for Donkey Kong Jr.! Anyway, what's up with the performance issues? Does SDL not use OpenGL? Seing Cover Flow in action on the iPhone I find it hard to believe it would have a problem with a few sprites on these old games (most of which could be done in < 24-bit color). Or is it the CPU running code that's the bottleneck?
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invalidname
Posted: 62 months ago
What about MAME for the Mac? MacMame.org shows no updates since early 2006.
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rickbdotcom
Posted: 62 months ago

This is awesome news, I can't wait for Donkey Kong Jr.! Anyway, what's up with the performance issues? Does SDL not use OpenGL? Seing Cover Flow in action on the iPhone I find it hard to believe it would have a problem with a few sprites on these old games (most of which could be done in < 24-bit color). Or is it the CPU running code that's the bottleneck?


http://www.mamedev.org/devwiki/index.php?title=FAQ:Performance
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starwa314
Posted: 62 months ago

What about MAME for the Mac? MacMame.org shows no updates since early 2006.


Check out MAME OS X.
Also check out Emuscene for the latest in Mac emulation.
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yoman
Posted: 62 months ago
This looks promising. Hopefully, we'll see more optimization to make it more feasable.
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