MAME on a PCDUINO Nano Lite (AllWinner A20)

So I am going to attempt to “catalog” this project as I do it. Yeah I know, the first fucking time, ever. If it happens we’ll see, jury’s out.

So I have a AllWinner a20 PCDUINO Nano Lite that I snagged for $15 bucks a while back, and its been collecting dust ever since then. Haven’t done shit with this super ardunio-half-pi. Yay me. I wanted an arcade cabinet and this was here so bam diggity! I decided to try and purpose it for this task and since it happens to have a SATA port on it and I happen to have a 250GB SATA drive sitting here… Who’da fucking though eh? Perfect for MAME, its got all the space too (thats what she said).

So.. Ubuntu 12.07 Linaro, precise.

In case you wanted to know, df -h gets me:

I am following this guide https://www.anavi.org/article/177/. He gets all the credit.

I used Filezilla to copy all of my CHDs and ROMS over to the hard drive on the pcduino. Getting that setup was hella easy. Won’t cover it here.

Always sudo apt-get update (it always seems to give errors for some packages on the pcduino, i just have never bothered to removed them from the list).

sudo apt-get install build-essential libgtk2.0-dev libgnome2-dev libsdl1.2-dev libxv-dev libxv1

I installed 28.5mg of new crap and took up 83.9 overall, not bad so far.

That last edit was quote a ways down..

Build the source code

…and that too for fucking ever. Jesus.

xmame.x11 roms/starfir2.zip

It works! But requires lightdm to be running. Need to figure out how to ditch the desktop if I can.
Dude on the tut page recommends using the gflags -ah 720 -ws 5 to adjust the resolution.

-ah height, -arbheight depth
Scale video to exactly this height (0 = disable).

-ws xaspect, -widthscale xaspect
Set X-Scale aspect ratio.

-b depth, -bpp depth
Specify the colordepth the core should render, one of: 0 (auto), 8, 16.

-ah 720 -ws 5 -b 16
all the commands here

Basically, the dude has it all right, easy peasy. For once. Follow his guide and you should get a working xmame emulator. No fancy GUI or anything but it does work. Not sure it will work for what I want. I do not think so. I want a nice easy to navigate GUI to be able to use from the cabinet hardware. Not a keyboard and mouse. There seems to be a few of those exact things available for the Pi so I will probably go the unwanted route of using the Pi2 with a USB hub and a USB hard drive. Which fucking sucks. I wanted to use the built-in SATA port. That was the whole fucking point. But I am not about to reinvent the wheel. I will adjust lanes.