Raspberry Pi 4 configured as a MAME 0.221 appliance

Raspberry Pi 4B as an optimized and dedicated MAME Appliance (JeOS principle) for arcade games emulation.

I worked on a personal project for the last 2 months.

The objective was to use a Raspberry Pi 4B and make it as a dedicated MAME Appliance. The system is minimal (following the JeOS principle) and boot straight into MAME 0.221, the latest version as of today. No clutter, no waste of resources and most of all, no useless GUI (X11).

The performances are really good, as most of the '80s and '90s arcade games run at full speed. Many 2000s games run at full speed as well.

Features and functionalities:
Based on Raspbian Lite (minimal Linux version based on Debian, without graphical interface);
At startup, display of a custom splash screen (for example, the MAME logo);
The MAME emulator starts automatically and displays the ROM selection screen;
When you exit MAME, the system initiates a shutdown;
During the shutdown, display of a personalized splash screen (for example, the MAME logo);
When the stop operations are completed, the system powers off;
To preserve the life of the SD card, the root filesystem is kept in read-only mode;
A maintenance mode is proposed (it's called the Service Mode) to allow system updates and the management of ROMs and Snapshots (via a Samba file share).

I made a How-To Guide and hosted it on GitHub, but as I am French-speaking, it is written in French. Feel free to translate it to English with Google Translate.

Here is the link to the Step-by-Step How-to Guide:

https://gist.github.com/sonicprod/f5a...

Google Translate to English : https://translate.google.ca/translate...


PRE-BUILT image available at: http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index...