MAME cabinet, on Debian (Part 1)

Okay, so generally you know I’ve been up to no good (contracts) when I haevn’t posted in some time. It’s true, I’ve been working pretty hard lately.

So last night I sat while watching the olympics it made me think of Hyper Olympic, the name of the console that I got for my Mame Cabinet.

I decided to finally install an OS on the machine I’ve devoted to my arcade console. Since this is just first step, I don’t have pictures for you yet – but I will – rest assured.

So I started with a clean debian netinst cd for Debian 5.0 (Lenny).

I started by installing the “Advanced install“.  I want my stystem to be as slim as possible, so I want to control as many options as I can while installing.

After the usual language, keybaord layout and detection of the CDROM and installation media the fun started.

I set my hostname to “Hyperolympic”; the name of the game my cabnet came from.  Later on I hope that it will default to “hyper olympic” as a screensaver – but right now, it’s just the host name.

I also configured it to allow me to contiue working on it from SSH (which allowed me to watch the USA team whoop Canada’s Hocky team), from there I configured it to use the time.nrc.ca atomic clock for ntp, and start to parition the disks up.

The drive I have in it is an old 30Gb hard disk, the ROMS I’ll store on my NAS so It only really needs to hold temporary data and so the drive doesn’t need to be very large.  I used an old 2Gb USB Thumbdrive as a “swap” partition.  Very simple partition scheme, the 30GB drive is a the root (/) paritition, the entire USB Thumb Drive is swap.

Install the base system, and cheer on the Canadians.  I created a user called “interface” who will be the “interface” user, I disabled root here as well and do all interactive root sessions by using “sudo -i” from my interface user.  I’ve seen a few tutorials that start the mame arade as root, but I disagree with this practise. 

Finally it asked for some “task specific” kinds of installation options.  I chose “Standard System Only” (or similar), I have no need for apache, dns, or an xwindows desktop environment.

Install grub (not grub2) and ta-da.   A bootable debian.

Next, I logged in as interface, sudo -i to root, and edited my /etc/apt/sources.list.  I found this neat place (http://apt.ludomatic.fr/?hl=en#repo) who has mame sdl, precomplied for debain.  Following their instructions I added the following lines to my sources.list:

## LUDOMATIC REPOSITORY
deb http://apt.ludomatic.fr lenny non-free
deb-src http://apt.ludomatic.fr lenny non-free

Then using a quick command (they also show) I get their security keys:

wget http://apt.ludomatic.fr/ludomatic.key.asc -O - | apt-key add -

I run apt-get update to ensure there are no errors (there weren’t).

Now I have to enable the framebuffer.  There’s not a whole lot if info about this – but it turns out it’s pretty easy.  I added the “vga=791 video=nvidiafb” to my boot.1st file and rebooted.  Obviously this is for nvidia cards, if you don’t know your card you can use the “video=vesafb” instead, or you can use your own… there’s plenty and you can find them all in:

“/lib/modules/”uname -r`/kernel/drivers/video/”

You also should edit your /etc/modules to include your framebuffer drive too.  I also installed “splashy” which allows me to choose themes and “boot up screens”

apt-get install splashy splashy-themes

Once all of that is complete I now install GCC and build utilities so that I can build the “advanced menu” system.

apt-get install gcc g++ binutils make

Then in my /usr/local/src directory I download the advance menu sources:

wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/advancemame/advancemenu-2.5.0.tar.gz?download
tar -vxzf advancemenu*.tar.gz
cd advancemenu-2.5.0
./configure && make install

Now, SDL Mame.

apt-get install sdlmame

Next I edit my /boot/grub/menu.1st and change the “timeout   5” line to “timeout 3” to speed up boot, I also changed the /etc/init.d/rc script the line that reads “CONCURRENCY=none” to “CONCURRENCY=shell”

. . . and Reboot!

Ta-DA :)  A bootable system, not much is going on – you can start messing with the advance menu system, which I’ll cover next time :)

to be continued…