MAME4droid… IT LIVES!

For many moons I have been searching for a decent arcade emulator for my Android tablet, and there just wasn’t one. There was a Neo-Geo-only emulator that I tried and couldn’t get to run on my little flat friend (not surprising, as it’s a budget model rather than a luxury model), and besides… Neo-Geo only? Really? Nah. But now the folks who made MAME available for the iPad right around Christmas last year – and managed to keep it in the Apple App Store for all of about 72 hours before it got yanked for being a dirty filthy emulator – have also given the world a magical thing: MAME4droid. Behold.

MAME4droid is exactly what it says on the box: MAME for Android devices, be it a tablet, a phone, or some gadget that’s been rooted to run Android. It has a nice menu screen and on-screen controls, the effectiveness of which will be determined by the limitations of your device’s touchscreen. Since my tablet isn’t multi-touch, I have to lean heavily on games that don’t require a lot of joystick-and-button action at the same time (think Pac-Man, Make Trax, and others of their ilk; Defender = definitely off the table). If you hold your tablet in “landscape” orientation for gaming (as I often do), the controls will be a ghost overlaid on the image; in “portrait” mode, the game image is framed in a “bezel” and the controls are located at the bottom of the screen.

The good news is that, if you have an outboard input device (like, say, a little flexible keyboard thingie that you take with you everywhere the tablet goes), you can map specific keys to do specific things for MAME.

Even though my tablet isn’t really top-of-the-line, I have yet to see any artifacts of MAME overtaxing the processor – everything looks and sounds great.

The thought occurred to me that one could gut an old Coleco mini-arcade game, stick a tablet in there running MAME4droid, jerry-rig the existing tiny joystick and button to work with the tablet, send the resulting Rube Goldberg device back in time to my ten year old self and blow his freakin’ mind.

Now, someone do an Android Odyssey2 emulator. C’mon, the touchscreen keyboard possibilities are both endless and obvious.