Gaming Hacks

Autoboot into MAME Heaven

Create a self-booting CD to run your arcade games on any PC.

Thanks to enterprising hackers, you can now run MAME on your PC without even touching the contents of the hard drive. How? By using self-booting, Linux-based CDs created exclusively to run the arcade emulator. There are several advantages to this method; for example, you can give copies to less computer-savvy friends without worrying about complex installation and setup problems. The disc is also easily portable; if you want to play at a friend’s house, just take along your CD and pop it in her computer.

The Abundance of Self-Boot MAME Choices

There are several MAME-loving Linux CD kits around, so you actually have a choice. Each comes with its own advantages and disadvantages, which often include some practical problems you may run into trying to make them work. The following section details the most popular.

AdvanceCD

AdvanceCD is by far the most compact of the options; it packs a fully working autoboot MAME system into just 20 MB and leaves lots of room on the disc for ROMs. AdvanceCD uses the rather smart AdvanceMenu (http://advancemame.sourceforge.net/menu-readme.html) frontend ( [Hack #11] ), as well as the AdvanceMAME and AdvanceMESS emulators, which are particularly known for their custom code to produce the correct screen resolution. As the site explains:

The Advance versions are able to directly program the video board to always get a video mode with the correct size and frequency.

The ...