No no no, not that one. The number keys!

Yeah, those! Well see those little symbols over them? You probably use them every now and then without thinking about it too much. You’ve no doubt typed out currencies, percentages and made those overly enthusastic emoticons ^_^.

So what exactly is a ^ ? Is it a circumflex? A carrot? A fang? A chevron? Turns out, it’s all of those things, and more. You might be asking yourself, “So what? As long as I can type out my ^_^ face, I don’t care.” Well, these proper names might not be useful for the average person, but to a programmer, the myriad of symbols and characters that they use every day are incredibly important to them. You can’t go 10 minutes in programming without using ! { } [ ] ^ * # + = and the like. The various names of all the symbols can be difficult to keep track of, especially the more obscure ones. Thankfully, Jeff Atwood over at CodingHorror.com has come up with a nifty guide to keep all of the various names straight. If you’re a coder, or just a language geek, you owe it to yourself to check it out.

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!

In the previous section, we figured out how to properly install the latest, most up to date version of MAME on our Mac. However, there was just one problem:

Nothing’s configured! No worries, MAME is relatively easy to set up, so our first task is to get it to recognize our games. By default, MAME looks in the folder it is installed in for a folder called “roms”. If you create that folder and put your games there, you’re all set, there is no step two. There are two alternatives however.

If you start MAME with the -rompath flag, you can specify where it looks for your game files. However, this is just a one time fix, so you’ll need to type -rompath each and every time you launch MAME.

Instead of moving all of your games into the MAME install folder, you can create an alias to your game collection. This can be done using Finder (just right click on the folder you want to make an alias of), or you can use the terminal since you’re already there. The command “ln -s” creates an alias on your system, using the first argument as the original folder, and the second argument as the alias name. If you create it properly, you can launch MAME without the -rompath flag every time.

Speaking of launching MAME, do so now. If you’ve already forgotten how, type “./mame64″ into the terminal while in MAME’s install folder.

There you have it! Our glorious game list! From here, you can start typing in the name of the game you’d like to play, or you can configure the general inputs.

Since we can’t play anything until we’ve set up our controls, let’s configure the inputs now. The User Interface defaults are normally fine, so what we want to focus on right now is the Player 1 Controls.

You can configure the buttons however they make sense to you, or use a gamepad of some sort. Personally, I usually use this setup while on a keyboard:

MAME numerates it’s buttons from the top left, across a row, then down to the bottom left of the next row. Don’t forget to set a Player 1 button to start the game, along with a “Player 1 Coin”. You’re emulating arcade machines, and still have to put coins in. Finally, launch into a game. It will give you a brief warning screen, and then the game should start.

That’s all their is to it! Congratulations, you’ve got MAME up and running. If there are still some settings you’d like to tweak, press Tab while in game to open up MAME’s menu. From here you can set controls on a per-game basis, along with tweak some of the video settings.

At this point, you’ve got a fully functioning, fully up to date MAME install. It’s just as capable as it’s Windows counterpart at this point… but the UI is a bit lacking. In the final part of this series, we’ll set up a graphical frontend for MAME, so that those of you with large game collections can launch games more easily.

There’s a problem however. MAME was originally developed as a DOS application, and has been heavily Windows focused since its inception. Various ports of it exist for other platforms now (including mobile devices such as the iPhone), but the optimal platform for MAME is still Windows. Thankfully, you’re not out of luck if you’d like to run it on a Mac.

MAME is open source, so theoretically you can compile it for any platform you’d like. In practice however, meeting all the dependencies and configuring your complier is outside of the scope of the average user. Because of this, people have made precompiled binary packages.

If you’ve Googled around enough to find this article, you’ve probably heard of MacMAME and MAME OS X by now. Unfortunately, these programs are both woefully out of date. MacMAME hasn’t been updated since 2006, and MAME OS X hasn’t been updated since 2009. MAME OS X has a pretty nice interface, and still does a pretty dutiful job of emulating games, so if all you’re trying to do is play Pac-Man, go give it a try. If you start running into issues / slow downs however, you’ll need to use a more recent version of MAME.

The version of MAME you want to download is known as SDLMAME. SDL, or Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross platform framework which provides OpenGL with access to a system’s hardware, and is required for SDLMAME. Thankfully, it’s also free and open source, and can be downloaded from their website.

Once you download the Mac Runtime Library, mount the .dmg file. Open a Finder window and browse to /Library/Frameworks, then copy the SDL.framework folder into it. That’s all their is to it. You can unmount and delete the SDL .dmg file now.

Next, we need to download SDLMAME. Thankfully, someone’s been kind enough to keep precompiled versions of it up to date here. Download and extract the file.

Oh no! What’s this!? This isn’t a .dmg…! It’s… it’s a folder! Full of things that most certainly aren’t applications!

Relax! MAME and SDLMAME are a type of software known as “Command Line Applications”. Unlike your favorite web browser, text editor, or email client, MAME doesn’t have a graphical user interface. For now, put the folder some place you’ll remember, such as your User folder, or your Documents folder.

Now we need to open up the aforementioned command line. Go to your Applications folder, then the Utilities folder, and launch Terminal. How to use the terminal is outside of the scope of this application, but all you really need to know at this point is how to move between folders. type “cd foldername” to move into a folder, “cd ..” to move up a folder, and “ls” to list the files and folders in a folder.

Use your newfound Terminal skills to move to the SDLMAME folder you downloaded earlier. You’ll notice an filed called mame64. This is what we’ve been working towards this whole time. Type “./mame64″ to launch MAME.

If you see this screen… Congratulations! MAME is working! It just isn’t configured yet. Continue onto Part 2 of this guide for how to properly configure MAME.

“Harry Potter is all about confronting fears, finding inner strength, and doing what is right in the face of adversity. Twilight is about how important it is to have a boyfriend.”

-Stephen King