PiMAME quick fixes and information

Hey all,

I’ve been getting tons of feedback about PiMAME.  Thank you for all the comments and suggestions.  There have been a few issues/questions that have popped up, hopefully the tips below helps you out.

Here is a quick fix for the AdvanceMENU sound issue:

  1. ssh into your Raspberry Pi.
  2. exit out of AdvanceMENU by pressing Escape.
  3. at the console, type: nano +99 .advance/advmenu.rc
  4. edit the sound_background lines to look like below:
    1. sound_background_begin none
    2. sound_background_end none
    3. sound_background_loop none
    4. sound_background_loop_dir none
    5. sound_background_start none
    6. sound_background_stop none
  5. press control-x to exit, it will ask you to save, press “y” to confirm.
  6. Reboot your Pi and it should be good to go.

Adding games:

Your game files should go in the /home/pi/roms/ directory.  I cannot help you find games for MAME.

Stopping AdvanceMENU from starting at bootup:

If you want AdvanceMENU to not start at bootup edit /home/pi/.profile and remove advmenu from the bottom of the script.

Logging In:

The username and password are the default Raspbian ones.

  1. User: pi
  2. Password: raspberry

27 thoughts on “PiMAME quick fixes and information

  1. Hmmm great work but the audio fix didn’t work for me either. I’ve probably installed your latest build because when I checked the sound_background lines, they looked exactly like the ones you posted and still the audio is garbled.

  2. After installing an aplication in Raspbian, it no longer boots to mame even though ‘advmame’ is listed in the .profile file

  3. Yea, still no sound. The demo ROM does have semi-working sound (only when you lose a round), but other ROMs I’ve tried only make my speakers pop and crackle slightly. I’m running off the HDMI audio.

    • I found over clocking the rpi to 900 helps – also edit advmame.rc and reduce the sound_samplerate to 11025 from 44100.

      sudo nano .advance/advmame.rc

      I’ve read that the rpi does have issues when turning the sound channel on and off which causes clicks before the sound initialises (e.g. just before mame launches) and when it finishes.

      I’ve tested great number of roms and the more simple games run fine e.g. Frogger others need samples for the sound to work perfectly e.g. Zaxxon but others like phoenix play slowly with bad sound.

  4. Sound is working fine, however only on HDMI and when I’m trying to change sound output to headphones whit this command: ‘sudo amixer cset numid=1 ‘ I get following error message: ‘bash: syntax error near unexpected token `newline’
    I have also tried to change to I get this error message: ‘bash: syntax error near unexpected token `1’ so, no dice 🙁

  5. I have the strangest thing happening. When I try this on my Vizio at home through HDMI output, I can’t get any audio out through HDMI, for some reason it gets output through analog. However I tried the same setup at my parents house, different TV, same HDMI setup and I get perfect HDMI audio. I know the audio is working but it seems like I have to force it through HDMI instead of analog on my home TV. Any advice?

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  8. Hello,

    PiMAME 0.6 beta 3 on a 2GB Class4 SD card. Raspberry Pi connected to the TV set by means f an HDMI cable. And still, the no audio issue… 🙁 I’ve read the Sound Fixes Here article too but those settings are already disabled in beta 3 so I don’t really know what else to do in order to get the audio being played. Any tip is appreciated.

    BTW, could you get the rom folder samba-friendly so that roms could be copied onto it from non-Linux systems?

    Great mix!

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  10. First off, thanks for all the work and all the info. I’m running audio through HDMI out and have made all the recommended changes but I still get strange audio when running some of the roms, even older roms. The audio seems to lag and waver almost like a record player that is changing speeds. I’ve upped the cpu clock to 850MHz and the memory to 500 and it helped a little bit but I don’t want to overvolt and overclock too high if this is not going to solve the issue and just generate more heat and wear on the system. I did run into some PCM errors when running sound testing using Pianobar to stream audio and found this link helpful and thought I’d share:

    http://cagewebdev.com/index.php/raspberry-pi-getting-audio-working/

    more specifically I was receiving the Unknown PCM errors.

    Thanks again for all your work and looking forward to what is coming!

  11. I modified the /home/pi/.profile file so that the menu doesn’t start when i enter with ssh or go to another shell.

    tty=$(tty)
    if [[ “$TERM” == “linux” ]] && [[ “$tty” == “/dev/tty1” ]]; then
    python /home/pi/pimame_files/menu.py
    fi
    unset tty

  12. When I decided to uninstall this, I used to ./uninstall.sh but it didn’t uninstall properly so everytime ot boots up it gives an error message saying it can’t get into pimame. it doesn’t ruin my OS but it’s annoying as I have to press enter twice to get out of it and it also removes my username and password. is there a way to fix this?

    • Yes, this is fixable and I’m sorry about that. You need to edit your /etc/inittab and replace:

      1:2345:respawn:/bin/login -f rfid tty1 /dev/tty1 2>&1

      with

      1:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty –noclear 38400 tty1

      I;m not sure which error message you’re getting about PiMAME, but you can probably fix it by editing ~/.profile and removing the menu launcher.

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