How to Install SDLMAME and SDLMESS onto Ubuntu

In all likelihood you’re reading this because, like me, you’ve been driven to smashing your head against every brick wall around you by the source code for both sdlmame and sdlmess. Yes, like me, I expect you’ve found nothing but disaster every time you’ve tried to compile them.

I gave up on them several times. I resorted to the ZXMameCD – a mame and mess live disc – to get my retro gaming fix; and as that didn’t do everything I needed I created a virtual machine  so I could install them onto a virtual OS that would share my host system’s files (ZXMameCD didn’t). But I never gave up fully and all the tinkering and googling has finally paid off: yes, I have them both installed. And I will bring you back from the brink of insanity by showing how I did it.

I cheated a little with installing sdlmame. I found two repositories that provide sdlmame and sdlmess packages. One of them provides the up-to-date version of sdlmame and the other provides a not-so-up-to-date version of sdlmess and sdlmame. So we can install the up-to-date sdlmame from a repository but we still need to compile sdlmess from source code if we want the latest version of it.

The Up-to-Date SDLMAME Repository

That repository’s home page is here.

The instructions for adding this repository to versions of *ubuntu other than 9.10 are available here.

The Terminal commands for adding the Karmic Koala specific repository are:

wget http://sdlmame4ubuntu.org/repoc/957AC3A6.gpg -O- |  sudo apt-key add -
sudo wget http://sdlmame4ubuntu.org/repoc/karmic.major.list -O  /etc/apt/sources.list.d /sdlmame4ubuntu.major.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sdlmame

Nice, easy and quick.

The Not-So-Up-to-Date SDLMAME and SDLMESS Repository

This repository is aimed at all Debian based distros. At the time of writing this it provides access to an older version of sdlmame than the repository listed above here. Although the writing at the site states that it provides access to an sdlmess package I wasn’t able  install it through any of my package managers (that includes running apt-get from Terminal). You might have better luck than I did. The instructions listed here are for Debian Lenny and should be good for *buntu 8.04 to 9.10 (I think).

The repository’s home page is here. You can add it to your system by typing, or copying and pasting, the following instructions into Terminal:

sudo su
echo deb http://apt.ludomatic.fr lenny non-free >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ludomatic.list
echo deb-src http://apt.ludomatic.fr lenny non-free  >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ludomatic.list
wget http://apt.ludomatic.fr/ludomatic.key.asc -O - | apt-key add -
apt-get update
apt-get install sdlmame sdlmess
exit

Compiling SDLMAME and SDLMESS from Source Code

In case you want to compile sdlmame and sdlmess for yourself the official home and download page for them is here and the instructions for compiling them are here. Don’t worry that they both say they are for sdlmam because the build instructions are the same for both products.

The installation instructions found at those two pages were not very helpful for me. In fact, they drove me to near insanity because no matter how many times I tried them they never resulted in successful installations. The steps I took to get them to install on my Kubuntu system were:

1. Install the necessary development, header and dependency files using these Terminal commands:

sudo apt-get install build-essential libsdl1.2-dev libgconf2-dev libexpat1-dev zlib1g-dev libxinerama-dev libgtk2.0-dev gcc-4.2
sudo apt-get build-dep sdlmame

2. Download the SDLMESS zip file from here, unzip it and move it to /usr/share/games (see note below)

3. Open  Terminal in the folder that contains the source code (/usr/share/games/sdlmess-xxx)

4. Compile SDLMESS using the appropriate one of these Terminal commands:

64 bit systems

makeCC=@gcc-4.2 LD=@gcc-4.2 PTR64=1

64 bit systems with duel core processors

makeCC=@gcc-4.2 LD=@gcc-4.2 PTR64=1 -j3

32 bit systems

make -f makefile.sdl CC=@gcc-4.2 LD=@gcc-4.2

32 bit systems with duel core processors

make -f makefile.sdl CC=@gcc-4.2 LD=@gcc-4.2 -j3

Guidance for accessing /usr/share/games

You will need to open Terminal and type kdesudo dolphin (or, if you’re using gnome, gksu nautilus) to load your filemanager in super user mode which means you will be able to move files to, edit files in and delete files from areas that are usually access restricted.

Additional SDMAME and SDLMESS Resource

QMC2 is a graphical front end for both sdlmame and sdlmess. It has to be compiled twice: once for sdlmess and once for sdlmame. The home page is here, the download page is here and the installation instructions are here. The QMC2 site offers lots of other mame and mess related downloads too.

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