Friday, December 30, 2005

The Palm converted into a portable arcade machine

In a previous post we had seen that using Little John PalmOS (LJP), could play games from the Nintendo NES and SuperNES, and GameGear Sega Master System, Atari 2600 consoles and some more in our Palm. Well if you are keen on classic games (and unmatched), you can also try PalmMame, an amusement machine emulator for PalmOS.

PalmMAME is a port of MAME, acronym for Multi Arcade Machine Emulator, for PalmOS. For those who do not know MAME is a project that tries to emulate all the amusement machines, slot machines that they razed during the 80s and 90s, and that we can find in the arcade room or in some cafeterias. The goal is for these games, that so many people have fun, not desaprarezcan without trace when they crashed into the machines running. The version of MAME that I have on my computer running 5848 games, so you can imagine the magnitude of this project.


Welcome screen PalmMAME

PalmMAME is based on version 0.36 of MAME. Although it is a somewhat old version, has enough games to did not boring. It should be borne in mind that, due to much lower power of a Palm connection to the PC, the simplest games are the ones to operate at an acceptable speed. But they include all the classics like Pacman, Galaga, Frogger, BubbleBobble, Phoenix, Space Invaders, Amidar, Pengo, and a long etcetera.


The list of games emulated by MAME is endless

Being an emulator for so many games, the program itself is very large, so the developer PalmMAME has decided to "cut" in files 3Mb, called modules. Each module emulates a few hundred games, so we can decide which copy to our Palm and which do not. Every time you play a game, you only need to load into memory module in question. Still, because these 3Mb program, the emulator takes a few seconds to load. Palm needs a high-resolution (320x200 minimum) and runs Palm OS 5, but certainly not demand too much processor for emulation. To give a reference, it runs smoothly on my Tungsten E2.

The installation is similar to that of LJP:

  • The first step is to copy the modules in our SD card, a process that already explained, making sure to do it on the path "/ PALM / PROGRAMS / palmMAME." All of them have about 35MB. If we do not have much space, we can just copy those of us interested. If the version of PalmMAME is 0.15 (or later), also copy on this route, the directory "StatBar."
  • Normal sincronizamos Then the file to the memory PalmMameLoader.prc prince of the Palm. This will be the program you run to play.
  • Finally, copy the roms of our games. As in the case of LJP, may be compressed in ZIP format (every game in a separate file). We create a directory called "Roma" in that we had copied the modules, ie "/ PALM / PROGRAMS / palmMAME / roms", and hence the copy.


Menu of games PalmMAME

We already have installed everything, so we ran the PalmMAME (and should appear on our list of programs), and since this is the first time you execute it, we're going to the menu and choose Options-> Find ROM Modules. " Take quite a while to do it, but there is no problem. Finally, we will configure the keys, an action by assigning each key to our Palm. For those who have never used MAME, there are two keys you should know: Coin is the one that simulates introduce a currency, and serves Start to begin playing after we got some.

And you're all ready! We will have a list of all the games that you can run PalmMAME (with the modules you've copied), and dark blue indicate those who are not available, whereas in light blue will be those that do. The list is the name that you must give the ZIP file to recognize it, so if a game does not come out in light blue, we will have to revise the name you've given.

That's all you need to know to play our favorite classic games. I have based a great tutorial written by Palmerouy in forums PDAExpertos. If you want to know PalmMAME with more depth, this is a good place to start.


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