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 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.

The fastest way to run a machine with desired configuration is command prompt (most of the feature available from UI, but that's take more time). 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.

Keys

Keys are emulated in two modes (toggled with ScrLk): with internal UI or completely dedicated to emulated system.

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

Next

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

Report any issues on the bugtracker.