John's Arcade Forum - Classic Arcade and Pinball Collecting and Restoring Discussion Forum - RETRO MAME - Nintendo Vs Forum

Hi guys,
I was thinking that maybe I should code my own arcade game to work in MAME. Any suggestions of what you would like to play? I want to see if i can get it to work with Assembly or some sort of programming language. Thanks!

The real question is,, what hasn't been done already?

Cannibal Garbage Men vs. Rat Zombies From Outer Space!

I'm telling you, THAT would make a cool game!!

Exactly... That's why I asking for Suggestions. XD

I have some limited experience in this so maybe I can assist. you need to pick a platform to program against. Galaxian, Pacman, Williams (joust). something like that.

You can program in C or C++ pretty easily but of course best results are in assembly. All of the goofing around I have done is with C. you have to get your programming environment set up right with the memory map and stuff.

Once you have your setup correct, make some test programs to write exisiting sprite images to a static screen and just get familiar with the sometimes strange drawing pattern. Also remember that not all platforms are able to write to the frame at any time. There are timing requirements that can be a pain to figure out sometimes.

D2K Jr: Mario's Revenge.  Wishful thinking at another forum:

I want Jeff at Romhacks to make D2K JR
http://donkeykongforum.com/index.php?topic=939.0

You should do a Breaking Bad parody

Thanks for the advice Ian. I think I wil try to fiddle with it in C or C++ for a while untill I can learn Assembly. I'm thinking of doing a Twin stick shooter like Robotron or Smash TV. Still trying to think of a theme though :P

What I don't know how to do is to get it all working in MAME. Since Mame has a set list of what games can be played and what roms the .zip files should have in them, I'm not sure how to do that without modding Mame.


Yea, That would make a cool game! XD


That would be a good game to! Maybe I can Modify DK Jr to make it like a board expansion like Punch Out to Super Punch out, featuring new levels and new elements of gameplay! Thanks for the suggestion!


Idk About that XD

Thanks for all the Suggestions! I's still open to any more that you guys might have.

you have to get your environment set up first with the cross compiler. Once you have that setup you can just compile images to binary format. it must be in binary format and not intel hex. Once it is in binary format you need to just name the file to whatever rom file it would take up. I know that isn't the best description but here's an example.
Pacman starts at address 0x0000 (as does all programs) which works out to be rom 6e. So to work in mame you need to name your binary file pacman.6e and put it in a zip folder named pacman.zip (same as the target platform)

to run it in mame you are going to want to run mame in debug mode. If you don't the game won't run because the checksum will be bad. open a command prompt and run 'mame.exe -window -debug pacman'
this will allow you to step through your code just like a regular debugger in any IDE you may be familiar with.

Alright. Thanks for the tip!
Seems pretty complicated though. Maybe a good start would be just to heavily modify Smash TV or some other game and learn how the code functions, then maybe I can think about actually coding an arcade game from scratch :P