Continuing with my GP2X posts, I finally got MAME working on it. There actually wasn’t anything to it, you just have to use version 0.34 MAME ROMS. There is a tool called clrmame that is supposed to help you convert your ROMs down to 0.34 but I couldn’t get it to work. I ended up having to download the 0.34 ROMs via bittorrent.

So how does it play? It’s great! All the classics (Pacman, Time Pilot, Arkanoid, Frogger, Galaga, Joust, etc.) play flawlessly. It can also play Neo Geo games, but I haven’t tried those yet since I still have only a 128MB SD Card (1GB on the way).

The coolest thing (to me anyway) is that you can press both shoulder buttons and it will rotate the screen so that vertical games like Pacman will take up the whole screen and you play the game by holding the GP2X sideways. So cool. I’ve been playing a lot of Time Pilot this way.

Here’s a great video that shows the GP2X playing MAME (and shows it switching the orientation too) it also shows it playing some movies and even outputting the movie and games to a big-screen tv:

tags: geek, gaming, games, gp2x, mame, portable, pacman, arcade