Documentation to build AdvanceMAME.

This file contains the instructions to build the Advance programs from the source archives.

1 Build

What to install depends on your system, but in general you need the GCC compiler, and the SDL library.

For Ubuntu run:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install build-essential git autoconf automake libsdl2-dev libasound2-dev libfreetype6-dev zlib1g-dev libexpat1-dev libslang2-dev libncurses5-dev

For Raspbian run:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install git autoconf automake libsdl2-dev libasound2-dev libfreetype6-dev zlib1g-dev libexpat1-dev libslang2-dev libncurses5-dev

Note that in Raspbian it's highly recommended to run the Advance programs outside the X Window graphics environment to get the best performance. For this reason the SDL library "libsdl2-dev" is not required, and you can omit it if you like.

At this point you can get the source code from the http://www.advancemame.it site, and untar it with:

$ tar xf advancemame-*.tar.gz
$ cd advancemame-*

or alternatively you can get it directly with git:

$ git clone https://github.com/amadvance/advancemame.git
$ cd advancemame
$ sh autogen.sh

Now you can build and install using the typical sequence of commands:

The -j3 option uses three parallel processes, speeding up the build.

The build process may be long, up to 45 minutes on a Raspberry Pi 3, or 25 on Raspberry Pi 4.

No option is generally required. You can get the complete configure option list with the `./configure --help' command.

The default installation prefix is /usr/local. You can change it with the `--prefix=' option.

The default host configuration directory is /usr/local/etc. You can change it with the `--sysconfdir=' option. Please note that instead of /usr/etc is always used /etc.

The configure script automatically detects all the available libraries and the optimization flags. You can use the --with-sdl-prefix and --with-sdl2-prefix option to search for the SDL and SDL2 libraries in a specific location.

The `make install' command installs the binaries and the documentation.

The binaries are installed in $prefix/bin, the program data files in $prefix/share/advance, the documentation in $prefix/share/doc/advance, and the man pages in $prefix/man/man1.

In Mac OS X ensure that the directory $prefix/bin is in the search PATH. Generally /usr/local/bin isn't.

After the installation, you can check if AdvanceMAME starts with:

$ advmame robby

and AdvanceMESS with:

$ advmess ti99_4a