should a newer rom set work with an older version of mame? I found a set for .138 but I am still getting errors regarding missing files in SDLMAME .136.

Nope. ROM sets are intended by and large for one version of MAME. Why are you still running 0.136?

isnt that the most recent version of sdlmame.

http://rbelmont.mameworld.info/?page_id=163

Mainline MAME now includes the SDL components, you just download the source zip from mamedev.org now.

downloaded, extracted and currently compiling. One of the reasons I switched from sdlmame from the archaic xmame was that sdlmame supports my wireless sixaxis where xmame seemingly did not. I hope that mame 0.138 supports my sixaxis.

update: It complied for about 2 hours then my computer ran out of space.

/usr/bin/ld: final link failed: No space left on device
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make: *** [mame] Error 1


Is there a way to ensure all that data from this two hour long failed process has been removed and is there a place where I can find a pre-compiled deb for 0.138? Thanks again.

"make clean". As far as the .deb, it'll appear on wallyweek.org eventually.

Getting back to the subject title: I am also having poor performance with SDLMAME, versions & OS specified in my signature.

The really annoying bit is that it is inconsistently poor performance. I have a thread about it going in the Ubuntu forums: SDLMAME video problems thread @ Ubuntu forums

I've tried running SDLMAME with both "Software" and "OpenGL" modes in GMAMEUI. It doesn't make a difference which one I choose. Some games are particularly affected:

-Vs. Excitebike (either US or Japan)
-Vs. Dr. Mario
-Any Pacman variant

The problem ranges from a jerky "slideshow" effect, to the player character "teleporting" as if a whole bunch of frames were simply skipped. Audio does not distort or skip, so I guess it's not a PulseAudio problem (for once!).

I haven't messed with any settings in GMAMEUI beyond switching between software & OpenGL render modes. FWIW, I am using recent Nvidia proprietary Linux drivers (version 195.36.24). It probably doesn't matter, but also note I am using the 64-bit version of Ubuntu 9.10.

Anyone else having this problem? Let me know if you need more info about my hardware.

Try running with -window -nomaximize so it's in an unscaled window the size of the actual game. If performance is fine there, then the issue is simply that your Nvidia OpenGL isn't working (in which case please paste the results of running -video opengl -verbose). If it's not, it's either your CPU or PulseAudio.

FWIW, I was there just now, looking for a .deb for Ubuntu 9.10, and they have the sdlmame 0.138 .deb up for Ubuntu 10.04 as well (both 32- and 64-bit).

However, I can't get the 64-bit .deb for Karmic to install. The packager gives this error message:


Any idea how to fix that? I tried looking for "mame-common" in Synaptic Package Manager, but it offered the only option as removing sdlmame & replacing it with something called "xmame-sdl." Not sure that's the right thing to do.