MAME is an amazing program that emulate pretty much every arcade system that ever existed. The only issue is that it can be a bit complicated to setup and a lot of the helpers softwares gravitating around it are imperfect or incomplete. Many friends always ask me to set it up for them and I got tired to maintain these installations. Git version control seemed to be a good way for me to distribute the setup and have my friend update it easily.
After installing Scoop.
scoop install git mame
git clone https://github.com/douglaslassance/mame-setup.git %%USERPROFILE\.mameAfter installing Homebrew.
brew install mame
git clone https://github.com/douglaslassance/mame-setup.git ~/.mamecd %USERPROFILE%\.mame && mame --rompath <path_to_roms> <rom_name>
scoop bucket add emulators https://github.com/borger/scoop-emulators.git
cd ~/.mame && mame --rompath <path_to_roms> <rom_name>Note
It's recommanded to turn these commands into a terminal alias on macOS and PATH accessible batch file on Windows. That way you'll be able to simply type mame <rom_name> to start playing.
You're expected to pass a location for the roms since for copyright reason I cannot provide them as part of this setup. You'll have to collect these gems yourself.
A few game developer have been kind enough to declare there game non-commercial and therefore these roms can be downloaded in a totally official manner.
Zipped arcade roms should live at the root of your roms folder, while console ones should live in a system sub-folder (ie. nes, megadriv, snes, etc.).
Note
MAME will conveniently propose rom name corrections if you type something slightly wrong. It's a actually a convenient a way to find the actual rom name.
You can play with the keyboard. Keys for the first player are 1 for start, 5 to insert coin, W A S D for movement and G H J B N M for buttons. The other players are only mapped to joysticks.
The emulator is also already configured to work with four 8BitDo Arcade Sticks in X mode for arcade games and with four 8BitDo Pro 2 in X mode for consoles.
Note
Other controller profiles like RetroPort ones are provided and can be found in the ctrl folder. You can override which profile is used by adding --ctrlr <profile_name> at the end of your mame command.
A pretty solid CRT filter is provided but de-activated by default. You can activate it by uncommenting the glsl_shader_mame1 line in mame.ini.