Turn Your PC Into an Arcade Machine - How to Install MAME

video arcades are where the whole gaming industry started and now thanks to emulation you can bring all those classic games right to your very own pc so let's find out how it's done [Music] [Music] hi and welcome to bytes and bits the massive gaming industry that we have today was born in the late 1970s with computer arcade machines it all started with what we would consider incredibly simple games such as pong which was basically a ball bouncing around the screen and things like space war which involved two spaceships and basically firing bullets at each other but at the time these were considered as technological breakthroughs and these were the first time that the general public had a chance to play computer games in the early 1980s we saw a massive boom in computer gaming as arcade cabinet technology got better and better along with the release of some of the most iconic games ever produced space invaders started this golden age of arcade gaming followed by pac-man donkey kong galaga asteroids and many many more with the top games earning billions yes that's billions of dollars in sales and coins so every company wanted to release games to get their part of this action now this boom continued through the 1980s until home computers and home game consoles caught up with the quality of these arcade machines and people started to move to home-based computer gaming rather than going to the computer arcades where they had to pay to play each of the games the 1990s then saw a sharp decline in the number of video game arcades until they all virtually disappeared or turned into these fruit machine arcades that we see today so if you do want to play these classic arcade games i do first of all highly recommend that you visit a computing museum where you'll actually find a range of original arcade cabinets or as we're going to see in this video we can take advantage of emulation and run the rail code from the real arcade cabinets directly on our home computers so let's turn your computer into a classic arcade cabinet and play every game ever written well at least almost every game to start with we need an emulator emulating arcade cabinets is a bit different to emulating something like a games console each arcade cabinet was built for a single game and some cabinets were then modified to play other games but this still means that there are literally hundreds of different computer systems that need to be emulated to play all the arcade games the multi-arcade machine emulator or meme software does just that so if you visit memedev.org you'll get the official meme development website where you can download the software now there are a range of options for installing and running meme if you're using a front end for your retro gaming such as retropie or launchbox you can usually enable main emulation through one of the cores and set up the software that way all you need to do then is to get hold of some rom sets and you're good to go now i'll be covering retropie setup in a separate video as in this one i want to show you how to download the latest meme version and then set it up as both a standalone application and as part of a launch box setup if you go to the main website and scroll down the home page you will find links to the downloads for windows mac os and linux clicking on any of these will take you to the latest release download page now for mac ox and linux systems you will find some pre-compiled versions but if you want the very latest version you're going to have to compile and build that yourself now there are full instructions on how to do this so please have a look at those instructions as i'm not going to be covering that in this tutorial for this video i'll be installing the windows version which can be downloaded as a single executable file so on the windows download page you'll also find a driver information database download now this is a file that contains details of how every single arcade machine the software emulates is set up you don't need this for your download and you don't need it to play your games the windows download file is actually a self extracting archive so when you open it it will ask you where you want to install your software now if you're going to be running maim as a standalone application just simply create a folder for it somewhere on your computer and extract the files there now i'm eventually going to be connecting my main installation with my launchbox gaming front end so i'm going to install the files in a main folder inside the emulation folder inside my launchbox folder and this simply keeps my launch box set up as a self-contained unit inside a single folder now once the files are extracted maim is installed if you browse to your folder and double-click the main application file which will either be mem.exe mem64.exe or mem32.exe depending on which version you've downloaded you'll find the emulator will start if you look at the filter lists on the left you can get a list of all the games by clicking on the unfiltered link now that is a list of all the games that meme understands if you then want to have a look at what games you've installed just click on the available but at the moment of course we don't have any games so let's go and get some if you've used other retro game emulators for consoles and computers you'll know that we need to download game files which contain the actual game code the emulator pretends to be the computer system and the game software run then runs on it as if you had the real console sitting in front of you because meme has to emulate so many different systems each with their own sets of circuit boards and microprocessor systems memroms work in a slightly different way now i've made a video which fully explains the different types of rom sets available for me so please do have a look at that if you want to fully understand how everything fits together and i'll put a link up in the corner there so you can get that easily now but for this video i'm simply going to get hold of everything we need to get all of our games up and running in one go so to do that we need to get what's known as a reference rom set now reference rom sets are built for specific versions of meme and if possible you need to download the reference set that matches the version of meme that you just installed now sometimes if you've downloaded a brand new version of the software it can be hard to find an exact match and in this case we just simply use the reference set for the latest version that you can find so on each new version of meme changes are made to the way it works along with updates to some of the wrong files but most games you'll find are compatible across different versions but you might find a few games that don't work even if you have downloaded the correct reference set so of course we need to work out where is the best place to get hold of these rom sets and i find the best place is actually the internet archive so if you go to archive.org you'll find that we can simply in the search box if we search for maim followed by the version number that we want we should then get a list of downloads now we now need to work through these to make sure that we're getting the right files in an easy to download format now some of the downloads will be for the meme software itself and you can check this by going to the download page and then having a look at what files are available and you do that by clicking on the show all link now if this contains the software installation files or the source code files then this this isn't the right file for us and an important note here please do not use installation files that you download from anywhere other than the official main project website you can never be sure if those files haven't been tampered with now most of the rom downloads will be labeled as rom downloads or they may say something like a merge set or a reference set or a split set or something and once you go to these download pages and click on the show wall link you should see a long list of rom files once you're happy that you're actually downloading the rom sets we need to get hold of them in the easiest and fastest way now there are usually a range of download options displayed on each archive page now sometimes the archive author um uploads all of the game roms as as separate files and when you go into the show all page you'll see them all listed out and you can download each of those individually but since there's going to be a few thousand games to download this option is really only of lit of use if there are specific rom sets that you need now usually the archive author will put all the wrong files into a single zip file or some single archive file and that means you can download everything in one go you'll also find that there will be a few options on how you can download this file so often there is a zip download option which lets you download all the files in a single archive and this option uses the normal html download link as the files we want to download will be upwards of 50 gigabytes to get all of the main games in one go this method of downloading is going to take a very long time and i mean it's going to take days rather than hours so i find that the fastest way to get hold of your files is to use the torrent download option again if there is one so torrent or or bittorrent is a way of using the community to make downloading and sharing files faster so basically people who have already downloaded the files that you want allow their computers to deliver the files to other people who want to download the same files and this is called peer-to-peer sharing now you need to install a bittorrent client on your computer and then download the torrent file for the roms download that you want and you'll get that from the archive.org torrent link now this torrent file it doesn't contain any of the actual software it just tells your bittorrent client what files that you want and where it can ask them or where it can get hold of them on the community it also then contains information to make our our downloads safe so um it has security information embedded into this file which will cover things like checksums and so on and that ensures that when we do download our files if they check if they match our checksums then we know that they haven't been tampered with and nobody has put any sort of malware or anything in there and the problem of course is that that bittorrent can be prone to manware malware and viruses and abuse so as i said before never install or run program files that you're downloading in this way and only ever use the main installation files that you've just downloaded directly from the maimdev.org website now although the rom sets that we're going to be downloading will contain computer software that software cannot run on your computer it's code that can only run on the arcade machines that we're going to be emulating and that code of course will be running inside our main emulator so that it doesn't have any access to your pc so once you've downloaded the rom sets using bittorrent it's good practice to give back to the community now these files exist on your computer your computer can now also act as what's known as a seed to help other people download the same files so if you leave your bittorrent client software running for a while you'll start to see it delivering your files to other people and the basic idea is to be part of the community is that you give back the same amount of data that you downloaded so if we've downloaded 50 gigabytes of data we should really give back 50 gigabytes to the community and in this way we help others keep the download speeds up and and also make sure that there are enough seed computers as possible so that people can actually get hold of the files so first of all we'll look at installing our games into a standalone version of maim and to do this you simply need to copy the rom set files into the roms folder in the memes installation folder so once you start meme you should then see a list of games appearing in the central area now there are a number of menu options on the left to help you filter your list so unfiltered will list every game that meme understands available then will list all the games that are available on your computer at the moment now in all of these lists you'll find some games are shown greyed out now it doesn't mean that the game isn't working and that you don't have it it just means that that game is not a parent game now meme uses a series of parent and clone games to organize the rom files needed to emulate any system and again if you want to know more about this then please check out my video where i explain the whole system of meme roms now once you've got a list of games simply double click one and have some fun now if you don't already use a front end for your retro gaming i do highly recommend something like launchbox this provides you with a much nicer interface rather than just simply a list of games that you simply click and launch box also has a clever importing system which is dedicated to meme roms but to start with though we actually need to attach our main insulation as the arcade emulator system so in in your launch box menu we need to select the tools option and then click on the manage emulators link and this will bring up a list of emulators that we've installed into launchbox now we need to click the add button at the bottom and then use the drop-down list for the emulator name to select maim although you can type in your own name using the drop down list that will actually tell launchbox that this is actually the main emulator and it will automatically set up some options to drive this correctly so next you need to click the browse button and find the main executable file that we downloaded and installed onto our computer so simply browse to where you installed meme and then find the main.exe file and again that may also be labeled as mem64 or mem32 and that of course depends on whatever version of mem that you have um installed so you then need to go to the associated platforms tab and then you should find that launch box has already been attached it's really attached the meme emblator to our arcade platform and set that as the default on emulator so just simply click on the ok button and then you should find that meme is now in your list of emulators so launchbox is now ready to import your game roms before we start importing games though just be aware that this can take a few hours to complete one of the big advantages of using launchbox to play your games is that it automatically finds box art games details other images and even videos for each of the games so that we can create a really nice front end for you to play all your favorite games so we're going to be importing a few thousand games so getting hold of all of this information from the internet is going to take a long time and my advice is to start this in the evening make sure you change your computer's power settings so that it doesn't go to sleep and that will actually pause the whole process which defeats the object and then leave it running overnight so to start the arcade import wizard just simply go to the launch box menu the tools option import and then meme arcade full set and this will start the import wizard which is going to ask you a number of questions about how and where we want to import our rom sets so from this first screen just click on the next button on the second screen we need to name this section which is going to hold all of our arcade games and by default this is just simply arcade but if you want you can change that to anything you want to sometimes you might have multiple arcade emulators installed so this will help you identify each one but once you're happy with the name simply click on the next button we now need to tell launchbox where the roms are stored so click the browse button and find the folder where we extracted our main rom files to now again i've put mine in the roms folder inside my main folder which is inside the emulator folder inside my launchbox folder next we need to choose which emulator we want to run these roms with now if you've attached meme to launchbox you should see that as an option in the drop down list if you have other versions of mem installed you'll see these listed as well as i said one of the big advantages of using a front end for your gaming is that we can get lots of information so images even videos that help us find out more about the games and provide us with a colorful interface to our emulator rather than some of those simple text lists of game titles so make sure then that on this next screen we make we tick the metadata box um to download all of this information now that we specified we want this metadata launch box is going to ask us which support files we want to download and here the easiest way is to just simply check everything so that we get as much information about each game as possible as i said launchbox can also download little movie clips of our games but you do have to have an account with mu movies um to be able to get hold of those now this can take up a lot of space on your hard drive so i must admit i do tend to just skip this one we now get to the final screen which is the most useful part of the import wizard now launch box is going to import all of our arcade games but it understands how meme rom sets are organized with parent games and clone games and it also understands what genre each game belongs to now the first set of radio buttons you'll see on this screen specify how clone games are going to be handled so clone games are basically other versions of main parent games and the recommended option here is to simply import them as additional versions of the main game and this means that in your game list you'll only have one game listed but that may have a number of different versions attached to it which you can also play now for example the main version of pacman is actually a clone of the original japanese version which was called puckman so so using this import method you'll find puckman listed in your games list but you'll have to right click on it to get access to either the us or the uk or the or the main versions that you'd be familiar with as pac-man but the main reason for importing clones as additional versions is that if you import them as separate games you're going to end up with a truly massive list of games in launchbox which just simply makes it harder to browse through games and find the ones you want now as always this is a personal choice but i do always use this recommended option you can also specify which region version of each game you prefer to use now quite often the text inside a game gets customized to the country it's being shipped to i generally stick to north america to hopefully get an english text version there are a vast range of different types of games in the main catalogue now some of those aren't worth having as part of your game collection these skip check boxes tell tell lunchbox not to import certain types of games and mostly you'll want to skip all of the ones listed but do have a look through to see if there's any that you'd rather keep the last three check boxes gets launch box to create a whole range of very useful playlists these are are very very useful as they can help you browse your collection of games by manufacturer genre and other factors and i'd advise leaving all three check boxes ticked to give you the most playlist to browse through so once you've done all that just click on the next button and launch box will then scan your rom files and present you with a list of games that it's found now you can scroll down to have a look at this list and just to make sure it looks about right and once you're happy then you can click on the finish button and the actual importing will start now this importing is going to take a number of stages where launch box updates its database imports the wrong files and then downloads all of these media files and the whole process will take a few hours um so make sure your computer isn't going to go to sleep and then just leave it running once the process has got past the game import stage um and even while the computer is still downloading the media files you you can actually start playing the games it's just you'll obviously just have a list of games or you can even go on and use your computer for other tasks now once the whole importing process is finished you should end up with an arcade section in your left hand menu and if you expand this you'll see all the playlists that launch box has automatically created for you simply browse through and double click to play any of those games so whether you set meme as a standalone emulator or you've put it within your front end you should now have a few thousand classic games to keep you occupied over the coming months now i'm planning on a few gaming videos to show you some of my favorite games over the next few weeks so please do look out for those if you haven't subscribed to my channel already then please do click that subscribe button and make sure you also click that notification bell so that youtube can tell you when i've produced some new content so get your arcade joystick out boot up meme and have some fun hopefully i'll see you in another video soon and bye for now for more games programming electronics projects and retro gaming please make sure you like this video subscribe to my youtube channel and visit my website

Channel: Bytes N Bits

Views: 58,469

Keywords: retro gaming, arcade games, MAME

Id: KSKvQceg2Gc

Length: 24min 53sec (1493 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 27 2021