Welcome back to Part Three of my guide on getting MAME to run on Mac OS X Lion. In the first part I covered the basic MAME installation, and in second part I covered how to configure it. Finally, I’m going to go over the basics of configuring a GUI frontend for the command line based MAME.
This portion of the guide is completely optional. In its current state, you can use MAME to its fullest. However, most people do not like the basic MAME UI, which is very poor at managing large numbers of games. On the Windows side, the excellent MAME32UI solves this problem for us with very little configuration. Unfortunately, we as Mac users do not have the option to use this piece of software.
Thankfully, there exists a comparable frontend called M+GUI, which is cross platform. M+GUI is almost as good, and is thankfully also kept up to date on the Mac. You can download the latest version as of this blog’s posting here. Use Google to find the latest version if you’re reading this post a few months from now.
After the .zip file is download, extract it and browse to the resulting folder. Inside of it you’ll see the mamepgui application and a readme. Move the application to your Applications folder, and trash the readme. Upon your first launch, you should see something similar to:
This screen is asking for the executable of our MAME install. Just browse to the folder you stored it in, and point it at mame64.
Once you hit Open, M+GUI will begin to index the games in your /roms folder. If you do not use the /roms folder, you’ll have to set the rom directory manually in the settings. From here, everything is fairly self explanatory. I may come back and update this guide with a few preferences that I personally use, but my life has gotten unexpectedly busy, so I’m unfortunately cutting this guide a little short. Hope it helped someone out there. Feel free to leave a comment if it did!
Man, that was beautiful step-by-step explanations – Loved it!!!
Followed your instructions and much to my surprise I’ve succeeded in getting MAME working on OS X Lion.
However many of the games which are contained in discrete zip archive, which I know worked previously using OS X Snow Leopard (and earlier) are longer working or to more precise, SDL Mame is stating the ROMS are incomplete.
I’ll soldier on but thanks again for getting me this far, much appreciated.
This is a stupid question, but are they games you actually have? By default, M+GUI shows numerous clones of each game, as well as nonworking/unavailable games. If you go to View -> Custom Filters -> Hide Unavailable, M+GUI will hide any game that SDLMame doesn’t see the files for.
I’m not sure if this is exactly the issue you’re having, but it might be a good place to start troubleshooting.
Thanks for the reply. Yes I do have games which are contained in the ‘roms’ folder though each game is a self-contained archive zip file. SO I’m uncertain whether SDL Mame is capable of unpacking a game on the fly or do I have unpack each game manually.
When attempt is made to run a game say Amidar for example, SDL Mame via M+GUI complain of numerous ROMs missing.
For completeness I shall attempt to run the same game using SDL Mame to determine whether the fault is with SDL Mame or possibly a configuration issue with M+GUI.
I’ll let you know how I get on if you’re interested.
Did you get this working? I’m having the same problem right now.
This guide was incredibly helpful, though! Thank you!
I’ve tried everything but can’t get Mess to recognize my ROMs folder (OSX Lion). I created a link, then a folder, copied zip files into it, configured the .ini, nothing works. Even Mamepgui didn’t help. Can someone tell me what I might be doing wrong?