MARE — MAME32 Replica

Try MARE now

Downloads:

• Run MARE now using Java Web Start. If you have any version of Java that’s not more than ten years old, this will automatically install MARE.
• Single executable jar file: Just save this file somewhere and run it (by double‐clicking it, usually). It is up to you to make sure you have first installed Java 1.6.0 or later.

Description:

MARE is a MAME front‐end. It is intended to be highly similar to MAME32, a common front‐end program for MAME. The big difference is that MARE is written in Java, and is designed to run in any graphical operating system.

The reason I created MARE is that I like MAME32’s interface, for the most part, but of course I have to be running Windows to use it. Rebooting into Windows is a pain, since I usually have several applications open. Plus, I’ve found that Linux versions of MAME (specifically, xmame and SDLMAME) play significantly faster under Linux than MAME32 or any Windows version of MAME.

One front‐end that did a fairly good job of providing the same features as MAME32 is GXMame, but it suffers from a major problem: it hasn’t been updated since December 2003. And make no mistake, that is very much a problem, because MAME’s command options have changed. You cannot use GXMame with the most recent version of MAME or xmame, because GXMame will try to invoke them with options that are no longer supported.

Such things happen with free software. Frequently, an author finds that circumstances (usually known as “having a life”) leave him with no time to continue supporting the software.

It’s conceivable this may even happen with MARE, so I’ve designed MARE to be able to evolve, at least somewhat. Each and every option in the Properties dialog can be left “unspecified,” which means that MAME/xmame/SDLMAME will not be passed any option for an unspecified setting. If an option is dropped from a future version of MAME, you’ll at least have the ability to not specify it at all, so MAME can still be run from MARE.

This has the additional benefit of allowing custom configuration files like mame.ini, MAME32.ini or .xmamerc to work.

Features:

MARE does most of the things MAME32 does. It supports sorting, persistent game options, custom backgrounds, and display of screenshots, titles, flyers, marquees, titles, control panels, cabinets, and game history. It also supports game list “subsets” — data files that limit which games are shown in the list, which is useful considering MAME supports over 6,000 games. MARE supports these types of game subsets:

• MAME32 Folders
• MacMAME Category files
• CatVer (Category & Version data) files, both standard and Mac formats

Of course, it’s meant to work on every platform. I’ve kept platform‐specific assumptions to a minimum. If you find it doesn’t work on your platform, let me know at marf@frasurfwars.nft (change each ‘f’ to an ‘e’ in that address first).

Requirements:

MARE requires:

• The Java Runtime Environment, version 1.6.0 or later. The 1.6.0 JRE is a download of approximately 18 megabytes.
• An actual MAME executable. You can get one for Windows here; for Mac OS X, here; or for Linux, FreeBSD, or just about any Unix, here .
• ROM images. For legal reasons I won’t provide any links here, but a web search for “mame roms” should yield some useful sources of ROMs. (A few legally distributable ROMs are available here.)

You may also want to download auxiliary files such as artwork, samples, flyers, screenshots, and data files such as HISTORY.DAT. Those, unlike ROMs, are freely available from many different web sites, easily found by searching.

Sun’s Supported Configurations page doesn’t indicate minimum RAM or CPU speed, but I’ve successfully run it under Windows 98 Second Edition, on a 400MHz Pentium II with 256MB of RAM, without any problems. It’s platform‐neutral, and should work on any system with Java 1.6 installed.

Screen shots: