About Mame

Mame is an open source emulator built to recreate the hardware of old arcade games on your modern computer. The main focus is on documenting the old hardware and the heritage of old arcade games in order to avoid the will be forgotten. To get further informations on the project, you can check ​here the documentation.

Macports

On macports the availabe port to install MAME is mame. Generally we try to stay in track with the last release upstream.

Compiling MAME

The installation of the port requires you to compile it. That takes VERY long time, so when you install it take a hot tea, a bag of cookies and wait for it to finish.

sudo port install mame 

Configuring MAME

Once the port successfully installed, what you're going to have is an executable called mame64. Now, to be able to run the ROMs, we need to build the right filesystem tree in a directory. What I generally do is to create a directory in the root of my home, called, very originally, mame.

mkdir ~/mame

Now if you go inside that directory

cd ~/mame

and you run the mame64 executable inside of it. MAME will run full screen and it will create a folder inside of ~/mame called cfg. That is the folder where MAME stores the configuration files. In the MAME initial dashboard