Raspberry Pi with MAME and emulators?

[naborneo]

This is kinda an open ended question and I'm am going into it with no knowledge or just googling it...

But has anyone has some time with the Raspberry Pi?

I
bought one today and have been messing around with it 9 hours, the most
I've done so far is put a port of XBMC on it and got it to work. We've
been starting to attempt to use Arduinos at work to run our LED
fixtures, so I figured I'd order one of these and give it a try...

But
back to my title topic, it would be very cool to have a MAME and
emulators on this, even a GameEX port. If I could carry around the Pi
and a hard drive of all my games, that would be make this much simpler
to travel with. Currently if I want to travel with GameEX I have to
bring an entire laptop with the external drive, not the biggest deal,
but that would be a huge decrease in footprint.

Anyway, what's your 2 cents on the Raspberry Pi?

[ehuonder]

I'm interested in anyone's responses as well. I have Raspberry Pi as well, but it too is simply running XMBC. I would definitely be interested in how to get it running well with MAME and other emulators. My fear is that it is too under-powered to run recent MAME builds, and my guess is that it would be painful to try and get an older version and all of it's required files in sync... But I'm a rookie at that, so I could be wrong.

[celly]

Only running XBMC also, Lego case. I know i've seen Pi running MAME in a forum somewheres. I'll look through my bookmarks and let you guys know if i come across it.

[naborneo]

I was able to get their Linux version (Raspbian) running last night. (Coming from someone that has never used linux till last night) I would be under the assumption that any emulators that could run in that envirorment would work on Pi.

It would be nice to have a Stand Alone version(i.e. RasPBMC), where you just see a GameEX-esk frontend, but baby steps I guess.

[hansolo77]

I think that device is coolest looking thing. I'd love to get my hands on one just to play around with it and get totally geeked out.

[ehuonder]

@ naborneo - I would agree with you that any emulator that works on linux will have a good chance of 'running' on the Raspberry Pi. The problem is how will it perform. The RPi is not a beefy machine by any stretch of the imagination (700MHz ARM processor, 256MB memory (early adopter like me) or 512MB). I've seen a couple of web pages with RPi's running MAME, but none of them discuss the software setup or versions... Maybe the recent builds just work...? I haven't had time to try yet.

I found this blog tonight regarding a release of PiMAME 0.5.