ARCADE - the better MAME for most of us (R0ni build link included)

Update May 2020: R0ni now provides official Mac builds for MAME Arcade in the directory of his site listed below.

There is a subproject of MAME, fully on par with the official project, but which can be easily overlooked. If you are willing to compile and build your own romset, this is the best MAME for most of us.

Website: https://arcade.mameworld.info
GitHub repo: https://github.com/Robbbert/store1

Official binaries: sorry, there are no longer official builds available, and it was not R0ni's decision 😑. So I will look into that once again and may build unofficial Arcade builds - but please look into the easy build instructions below.

The Arcade internal MAMEUI has a customized colour palette, which I much prefer over the standard palette. Otherwise standard MAME functions, which is good.

What is it?

- Working Arcade games only (so skeleton drivers or games booting into a black screen)
- No mechanical games (pinball games etc)
- No casino or gambling games
- No computers, consoles, terminals, etc.
- No games that display a black screen



This means that you have a MAME binary with just the core of working arcade games. Any other games, software lists are not compiled into the binary. My guess is that most of us are exactly looking for this: Working Arcade games. No longer red screens "THIS GAME DOESN'T Work", and no endless browsing through casino games I will never touch.

What about MESS, i.e. Software Lists?
If you are into MESS stuff, then you must stay with official MAME. I had several looks into MESS, for example in this entry, but there are way better alternatives out there in the emulation zone to play consoles and also PC games. In my own experience, all these software lists are just building up in my harddrive, while I never use them.

What are the benefits? 

Let's compare the sizes of binaries and romsets in current version 0.220

	MAME official	MAME official target=Arcade	ARCADE
Binary	315.7 MB	237.4 MB	184.7 MB
Files Romset (split)	≈ 36.900 files	n/a*	≈ 11.000 files
Size Romset (split)	≈ 68 GB	n/a*	≈ 41 GB

  * numbers lie somewhere in between, I obviously do not rebuild this romset just for the sake of this blog entry

This is significant. A slimmer binary is never a bad thing, but the saved space in the romset really makes the difference.

In my own tests, there is no performance increase, and this is to be expected: You are just not compiling the non-arcade machines into the binary. Otherwise you get a regular MAME in every respect.

Hint: If you are unsure, take the binary, rename it to mamearcade64 and place it to the regular mame binary. You will see that everything works as expected.

The only disadvantage is more work:

Build your own binary

You have to compile this by yourself by downloading the github repo listed above (unzipped 2 GB with 37.000 items). From within the directory called store1 (funny name :-), the compilation is very easy:

make PTR64=1 SUBTARGET=arcade

But again, R0ni is so kind to build these binaries as well, see the link above!

Rebuild your romset

That's the biggest hazzle right now because CLRMAME Pro, at least for me, does not work in Wine for MacOS currently. That's where I switch to Windows via Bootcamp, and for transferring the rebuilt romset from Windows to MacOS, you even do not need a third party driver. Still the process of rebuilding the romset takes very long - on my Mac, rebuilding the 0.220 romset took some 6 hours, still it is a fascinating process, and the roms are working flawlessly so far.

So all in all, it's the MAME I've been looking for. Feedback welcome as always!