PC MAME Arcade Emulation

[Fool's Requiem]

I recently purchased a Lenovo ThinkCentre with a Ryzen Processor with the sole purpose of emulating arcade games (and maybe some unobtainable systems). There are a LOT of arcade games that never got a decent port even in an emulated state to modern systems, so I figured I'd take a small form factor PC and turn it into an emulation box.

I installed Batocera, which is a Linux based OS that acts like a video game console OS where you control almost everything via whatever controller you're using.

Everything is going well so far... but MAME is a monster and a half, and there is too much information regarding it and lots of it is multiple years old and finding recent roms/romsets that actually work has become a total pain.

Does anyone have experience using MAME?

 

[Smacktard]

I have 0 experience whatsoever with MAME. I don't even know what arcade-exclusive games are worth playing, but I'd like to know.

The only two I know are the Spider-Man Arcade game, and The Simpsons game.

 

[Fool's Requiem]

It's not necessarily that they were never ported, it's more that some games never got decent ports or were ported to systems that are unrealistic to obtain.

The House of the Dead, for example has only some weak ports to moible, MS DOS and the Saturn. Was never re-released outside of the poorly received remake.

Also, both Star Wars arcade games are stuck with poor ports or on old computer systems. The Sega one has a lack-luster 32x port, but that was it. The Atari one with the vector graphics has a solid (IMO) Atari ST port that I can play on my Jaguar, but I want to try out the arcade version.

There are also a bunch of racing games that never got perfect ports for any number of reasons, and also a surprising number of sprite scaling games. I've been getting fed a whole host of arcade games to try out courtesy of RetroCore, YouTuber who compares ports of games with each other.

 

[Crystal]

MAME is a goal of mine, but not something I've gotten to in my time just yet. You're not wrong about the complexity!! It's a a beast and a half, which is why a lot of people started using shells like RetroPi instead, just easier to manage, but MAME is still king for the arcades, afaik.

Good luck!