Retro Gaming Hacks

Make a Self-Booting MAME Disc

Play MAME on any computer you discover in your travels.

Playing your favorite arcade games using MAME at home is a lot of fun, but what happens when you’re forced to leave the house? (Hey, it happens.) If your friends and relatives are tired of you reconfiguring their computers and installing MAME every time you visit, or your boss has your workstation locked down so you can’t install any new software, what you need is a bootable MAME CD.

Bootable MAME CDs allow you to boot computers from a CD directly into MAME. An operating system (usually a flavor of Linux), MAME, and all your game ROMs are contained directly on the disc, so the computer’s hard drive is never even accessed.

AdvanceCD

The best and most complete solution is a package called AdvanceCD, named so because it also includes the emulator, AdvanceMAME, and the frontend AdvanceMENU. Getting AdvanceCD to work could not be simpler. First, users need to download the installation files from the official AdvanceCD web site (http://advancemame.sourceforge.net).

Once the files have been downloaded and unzipped, users can copy their MAME ROMs [Hack #26] of choice to the proper directory. The custom Linux kernel used in AdvanceCD takes up around 20 MB of space, so that will leave you approximately 680 MB of room for your games on a standard 80 minute CD-R. If that’s not enough space for you, AdvanceCD also supports DVD-Rs and USB devices!

Once you’ve copied over the ROMs you wish to include on your image, ...