The following text assumes that you use Raspberry Pi OS, not the older Raspbian OS. Since MAME 0.254, building on Raspbian OS is not possible anymore due to outdated libraries.
We will use Debian version 11 (bullseye) and the Raspberry Pi OS with desktop installation. You need to use the apt(-get) command or check the software repository tools.
Required libraries
The following descriptions apply to MAME release 0.256 and higher.
You need
- gcc / gcc-c++ version 10 or higher
- git
- make
- Development package of alsa
- Development package of gconf2
- Development package of gtk2
- Development package of the SDL2 library
- Development package of the SDL2_ttf library
- Development package of the Qt5Core library
- Development package of Pulseaudio (since 0.230)
git, make, g++ should already be installed.
The following packages are required:
sudo apt install qtbase5-dev
sudo apt install libsdl2-ttf-dev
sudo apt install libfontconfig-dev
or with a single line:
sudo apt install qtbase5-dev libsdl2-ttf-dev libfontconfig-dev
Getting the sources
Use git to clone the repository to your local drive:
git clone https://github.com/mamedev/mame.git
This will create a mame directory containing a ready-to-use makefile.
When you want to get a current version, use the git pull command.
git pull
If you want to build a specific release or based on a particular commit, use git checkout.
git checkout b41370db026
This will set your repository to the state when the 0.256 release was published. Alternatively, you can use the tag mame0256:
git checkout mame0256
Compiling
A makefile is included with the MAME distribution so you can easily start the build process with make.
Cleaning the build environment is optional, but if you experience problems when compiling, try to clean first.
make clean
If you only want the TI systems to be included, you may specify them in the command line:
make SOURCES=ti/ti99_4x.cpp,ti/ti99_4p.cpp,ti/ti99_8.cpp,ti/geneve.cpp,ti/ti99_2.cpp REGENIE=1 TOOLS=1
REGENIE should be specified, since the GENie project generator tool is used for building. TOOLS will generate the additional helpers imgtool, chdman, and others. You probably don't need them if you use TIImageTool.
Although the Raspberry Pi 4 is much faster than all previous models, it will run into heavy thrashing during the build process, which means it seems to make no more progress after some time. Do not stop it. It may take some hours until the process is complete, but it will eventually reach its goal.
One particular slow point during compilation occurs when compiling the files src/emu/emumem_*.
One thing you can do is to tell your Raspberry to avoid swapping as long as possible. The parameter for this is called swappiness, and it is set to 60 by default. Maybe try 25 or lower. You can make this change permanent. Add the following line to the /etc/sysctl.conf file:
vm.swappiness=25
Many sources recommend not to increase the swap space on the Raspberry Pi, as this swap space is located on the SD card, and this will lower the lifetime of the flash memory on the card. However, I noticed that during building, all of the 4 GiB of main memory was used up, and the small swap space (100 MiB) was also gone, and from here, the system dropped into thrashing hell. So I increased the swap size to 1 GiB, and the atop tool showed me that the build process drew another 600 MiB from the swap file. But then, it continued.
Also, while you should make use of the -j parameter for Linux on PCs, you may get better results on a Raspberry Pi with fewer processes. If your Raspberry Pi gets stuck in thrashing, try building with a single job (just leave away the -j option). Also, once the emumem files have been built, you may interrupt the process and restart it with more parallel processes.