OS X Dying to play old school manic shooters on Mac. Is MAME worth the hassle?

[TJ82]

Anyone got any experience playing shooters like Cave's or any others like those?

Really have the bug right now but it looks like a mess trying to get this stuff up and running. Played the Zenizizenzic shooter beta on Mac which was really sweet, but I miss the charm of the JP style sprites an sounds.

 

[Renzatic]

Damn straight, MAME's worth the hassle! It's so awesome, I'm planning on building on of these things...

...using a Raspberry Pi and MAME.

It's actually not that hard to use. You download your (totally legit and legally obtained) romsets in a zip, pop those zips into your ROM folder, do an audit in MAME, then play your games. The only thing that's kind of confusing is how these romsets are set up. Instead of having the Japanese version, the US version, and so on separate, you have to grab the base, then grab the other version romfiles you want alongside it, then pop both in your ROM folder. It'll show up as the Japanese AND English version inside of MAME.

Once you do it once or twice, it's pretty easy.

 

[garnerx]

Just download the complete set. Contains all the Cave shooters, plus probably every other game you've ever heard of, and Mame has a bunch of built-in playlists to help you navigate thousands of titles. Very easy to set up.

 

[TJ82]

Damn straight, MAME's worth the hassle! It's so awesome, I'm planning on building on of these things...

Image

...using a Raspberry Pi and MAME.

It's actually not that hard to use. You download your (totally legit and legally obtained) romsets in a zip, pop those zips into your ROM folder, do an audit in MAME, then play your games. The only thing that's kind of confusing is how these romsets are set up. Instead of having the Japanese version, the US version, and so on separate, you have to grab the base, then grab the other version romfiles you want alongside it, then pop both in your ROM folder. It'll show up as the Japanese AND English version inside of MAME.

Once you do it once or twice, it's pretty easy.

I'd love a setup like that

Just download the complete set. Contains all the Cave shooters, plus probably every other game you've ever heard of, and Mame has a bunch of built-in playlists to help you navigate thousands of titles. Very easy to set up.

Checkin' it out at the moment. Shame there's no frontend app out there, like there is for other Mac emulators.

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

If you are willing to put some money into it, don't forget options like these: http://shop.xgaming.com/collections/arcade-machines

 

[Renzatic]

Checkin' it out at the moment. Shame there's no frontend app out there, like there is for other Mac emulators.

There are a few out there. Thing is, they seem to be for built who want to catalog a poop ton of roms. If you've only got about 5-10 or so, it'd probably be easier using MAMEs built in menu.

 

[garnerx]

Checkin' it out at the moment. Shame there's no frontend app out there, like there is for other Mac emulators.

I looked for Top 10 lists on the internet, then created a few playlists of interesting things like vertical shooters, horizontal shooters, etc. Once you've done that, it's reasonably friendly to use.

Mame is full of stuff you'd never even want to look at - quiz machines and ancient mechanical games that are completely unplayable. So you just need some way to filter it all.