Ubuntu – What MAME UI frontends are available for Ubuntu 12.10

12.10gamesgui

I have installed Mame via SDLmame but have so far failed to successfully install any decent GUI that enables categorisation of games, favouriting, or preview screenshots. I have many hundreds of ROMs.

  • Gnome Video Arcade will not read my ROMs from an external hard drive,
    even when they have been configured correctly in ~/.mame/mame.ini

  • Lightning looks interesting but crashes when trying to build a
    database of my ROMS

  • QMC2 fails to install due to missing
    dependencies
  • GMameUI also fails to install on Ubuntu 12.10

Any guidance appreciated! Thanks

Best Answer

I've tried Gnome Video Arcade, and it also didn't list any ROMs. After investigating, it turned out that one of my ROMs was corrupted, and that prevented GVA from showing any ROMs at all!

So, care to do a little test?

  • Backup your current MAME config/rom folder:

    mv ~/.mame ~/.mame.bak

  • Recreate it with default settings:

    mame
mkdir ~/.mame/roms

  • Copy a single game to the default roms folder, and test it with no launcher:

    cp /path/to/roms/for/example/rastan.zip ~/.mame/roms
mame rastan

If that works, great!

Now delete (or backup) the GVA database so it is re-created from scratch, and test it:

    rm -rf ~/.local/share/gnome-video-arcade
    gnome-video-arcade

I did this, and it worked nice. Then it was a matter of finding and deleting th offending ROMs and rebuild my MAME settings.

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