MAME:Installing

MAME (formerly an acronym of Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) is a free and open-source emulator designed to emulate the hardware of arcade games, later expanded to include video game consoles, old computers and other systems in software on modern personal computers and other platforms.

MAME supports The ZX Spectrum Next since version 0.267. Existing implementation is based on v3.02.01 core and implements most of the features.

Get

Latest version for Windows is available here. For the MAME platform as a whole, check your package manager or build from sources.

Linux users can install the latest stable version of MAME from the flatpak repositories by running:

sudo flatpak install org.mamedev.MAME

Use

In order to run the Next (and any others) you need to acquire rom dumps for the system. In the case of the Next download tbblue.zip and put it into your MAME roms folder. Under Linux you can copy your MAME roms into ~/mame/roms. This file can be also be obtained on the Spectrum Next Discord server. You also need an SD card image of NextZXOS (see here for the latest. The SD card image is within the zip file called something like sn-emulator-WX.YZ.zip.

The fastest way to run a machine with a desired configuration is from the command prompt. Most of the features are also available from MAME's UI, but that takes more time to configure. Let's discover some useful options:

1. Use window and no mouse more till you get familiar with UI keys:

   > mame tbblue -window -mouse_device none -hard /path/to/next-distribution.img

   To launch the Linux flatpak version using the same options:

   > flatpak run org.mamedev.MAME tbblue -window -mouse_device none -hard /path/to/next-distribution.img

2. Activate UI keys on startup:

   > ... -ui_active

3. Don't show info popup on startup:

   > ...-skip_gameinfo

4. Run with debugger. If not requested on startup, you won't have access to it:

   > ... -debug

Check official docs for more advanced usage.

Also, this combination of parameters enables the "crisp" pixels:

mame -ui_active  -nounevenstretch -aspect 2:1 -video bgfx  -bgfx_screen_chains unfiltered -window -skip_gameinfo  -mouse_device none  tbblue -hard1 /path/to/next-distribution.img

And if you don't need to use a joystick attached to the PC there's a chance that a little faster startup will be when -joystickprovider none is added to the command line.

Keys

Keys are emulated in two modes: to control MAME or completely dedicated to the emulated system. You can toggle between these two keyboard modes with ScrLk or Fn+delete under macOS.

Some UI keys:

• F3 - soft reset
• Shift+F3 - hard reset
• F4 - sprites/tiles/font viewer (Enter, ], [)
• F6 - save state
• F7 - load state
• Tab - emulator settings
• ~ - menu
• PgDwn (Linux) or Insert (Win) -- max speed (only while it's pressed; can be used e.g. to speed up boot)
• Esc - exit
• F12 - MF NMI
• F11 - DivMMC NMI

Mounting SD card images under Linux

Under Linux you can use losetup to mount SD card images as loop devices which enables you to copy files to and from the image and perform other file management tasks as you would using any other filesystem.

Run the following commands as the root user to mount an image called sn-emulator-22.10a.img under the /mnt directory:

losetup --partscan --show --find sn-emulator-22.10a.img
mount /dev/loop0p1 /mnt/

After you have finished modifying the SD card image, cd out of /mnt then unmount and detach the loopback device:

umount /mnt/
losetup -D

Next

Check sources and find the way to contribute if you aware of missing pieces.

Report any issues on the bugtracker.