Emulation Primer: Setting Up MAME (Patreon)

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Emulation. It's easy! Or is it?!?!!? Over the years I've spent a lot of hours setting up, configuring, and maintaining a current version of MAME on my local machine. Emulating arcade games is cool! But over the years a lot of the different MAME settings and processes have become a little esoteric and maybe even lost to time. So I figured I'd document my process in a way that hopefully makes you a little more comfortable when it comes to setting all this stuff up the way you want.

In this video I start with a fresh install of MAME and show you how to make sure you have the right ROMs in the right places using a tool called ClrMAME Pro. Learning this should provide you with a solid foundation for all types of ROM management, as CMPro can be configured to keep track of a lot of your different collections, ensuring that you have "good" files that are more likely to work well with your emulators of choice.

I also cover configuring controls in MAME itself, which can be a bit of a beast because MAME plays so many different things nowadays that the default control screens can look pretty daunting. But it's easy as long as you know where to look.

If anyone has any further questions on this topic, ask away! Next time around I'll be looking at Retroarch and talking you through that. Retroarch is... a mess of menus, but once you know what you can sort of safely ignore, it's actually fairly easy to get it up and running.