MAME and the Via EPIA 5000

I've begun working in earnest on my MAME Cocktail Table. The first step: getting a minimal OS and MAME install that supports the video and audio built into the Via EPIA 5000. I got this motherboard for the first pass at my Balloon Aerial Photography project and ended up shelving it.

The Via EPIA 5000 is the perfect board for a MAME machine running classic arcade games. The 533Mhz CPU is too slow for most advanced games but I'm only interested in Pac-Man, Galaga, Donkey Kong... You know - the real classics of arcade. Coupled with an IDE Compact Flash Adapter, you get very low power draw and no moving parts. The motherboard board also has two USB 1.1 ports and supports booting from USB-Floppy and USB-ZIP but not USB-Hard Drive.

I've been experimenting with different operating systems. The main MAME reference build is developed for Win32 and DirectX 8 but there are compilations for Linux and older compilations for DOS.

I started with DOS and got a nice boot working with DOS 7.1. Even though Via provides DOS-based drivers for the sound card, I couldn't seem to get sound to work in MAMED (MAME for DOS).

When I used this motherboard for BAP, I actually used Windows ME. I know it's the bastard step-child of DOS-based Windows, but it's well-supported by VIA. I set this up and got working except that the reference compilation of MAME ran really, really slow.

Then I checked into AdvanceMame and the AdvanceCD. AdvanceCD builds a Linux boot partition (FAT) with AdvanceMenu and AdvaneMAME for Linux already setup. The AdvanceCD build even includes MAKEBOOTFAT and can format a USB stick as USB-ZIP. Using the simple MAKEUSB.BAT resulted in a USB stick that the Via EPIA 5000 would boot and automatically start up AdvanceMenu. The AdvanceMAME handled the video and audio almost perfectly. In fact, the only drawback is AdvanceMAME includes many low-level video tweaks that smooth out the old low-res games on newer high-res monitors. I want this to look more like the original! I also need to figure out how to get AdvanceMENU to work in portrait-mode for the cocktail table.

One drawback of the USB stick is that the controller is only USB 1.1 and the boot process is really slow. I dug up an old 48MB CompactFlash card and used MAKEPART.BAT. Using this with the IDE Compact Flash Adapter sped up the boot-time immensely.