Running MAME on iPhone via ArcadeMania

[AGMS]

I was able to successfully emulate the NABU on my iOS 16 iPhone 8-Plus! And run my NthPongWars game!

There are a few steps. Download the "ArcadeMania" application, it's published by Infinite Evolution Technologies, and currently implements MAME 0.283. Upload the NABU ROMs to the iPhone. It has various import routes, via iOS Files app (which I used to stuff files directly in the ArcadeMania rom directory, maybe a mistake - got some extra junk), or upload via a temporary web server it can run. Once you've got the ROMs loaded, you should see a NABU screen in the list of games available.

You can run that NABU, but it boots up and just times out waiting for the adapter. To fix that, hold-click on the NABU game in the game listing to get to the advanced arguments. There you can type in:

Code: Select all

-hcca null_modem -bitb socket.123.123.123.123:5816

Replace the 123.123.123.123 with the address of your computer running the Nabu Internet Adapter fake server, and adjust firewalls if necessary. Unfortunately I don't know of a NIA for iOS, so you have to run it on a computer somewhere else.

Now run the emulated NABU, and you'll see errors on the NIA complaining about receiving $FF and not getting the hello message. That's progress, you've got a malfunctioning connection! The problem is the emulated baud rate, which you can change in the NABU MAME settings while running the game (when it's displaying the MAME menu just before starting to run, pick Configure from the pop-up menu, then use the joystick and buttons to navigate). The Machine Configuration menu has the baud rate, see the attached screen shot for working settings.

After that, the big joystick and buttons work and you can play Nth Pong Wars! Well, if you added the .nabu file from Alex's NABU Directory to your NIA. Have fun!

MAME Machine Configuration screen shot for NABU

NabuMAMEMachineConfiguration.jpeg (89.67 KiB) Viewed 5730 times

[MagnumPEI]

Nice to see you got NABU running on an iPhone. (...not that it helps me. I've never owned a "smart phone".)

I did play NthPongWars on my real NABU though. I won repeatedly - even though I didn't know what the hell was going on.

What does this mean? (screenshot clip from internet adapter window)

Screenshot 2025-12-23 at 3.43.56 pm.png (28.23 KiB) Viewed 5721 times

[AGMS]

Congratulations, you are the first person to run Nth Pong Wars on a real Nabu! Nice to hear that it works, thanks for testing.

Well, easy to win because I have a lot of work to do on the game-play (currently you can move too fast and just trash the AIs), and improve the AIs. But when it's ready, I hope game-play will be interesting enough to have a tutorial series of levels to explain it. For now, you can try playing against other Humans if you have more joysticks (up to 4) or add in the keyboard (arrow keys and Yes button).

That giberty-goo text is some secret CABUILD sauce (an ancient lost utility that makes .nabu files), which I suspect adds a description to the program. It seems to be displaying random strings from the program code. Owner, DirtR and so on are strings in the tile dump code. I did try seeing if the very first string in the game code did anything, but no. Maybe Leo knows how to specify that metadata. Or perhaps DJ Sures manually has a database entry for each game on his server. I see there is a file in the Internet Adapter cache folder named HTTPS-CLOUD.NABU.CA-HOMEBREW-TITLES-FILESV3.JSON which has the descriptions. Anyone know how to get proper descriptions to show?

[GTAMP]

Code: Select all

-noskip_gameinfo -hcca null_modem -bitb socket.192.168.x.x:5816

DJ's adapter has a parser that just looks for text strings, it has logic but it's meant to look random. Hopefully he allows us to add our own author and description in the future. It finds some funny strings in the MSX conversions.

I'm used to only seeing ancient versions of MAME on phone, so great to see a more modern version.

I'm stuck at the configure part, pushing that button does nothing and I can't hit it before the NABU screen loads because it's instant on my iPhone 16.

Configure works at any time in the default installed system, so I wonder why it's not like that with NABU.

edit: adding -noskip_gameinfo gave me unlimited time to hit the configure button and it worked. The default controls were far too sensitive to adjust the serial settings but you can change those settings or in my case, I hooked up an iCade bluetooth controller.

[AGMS]

Good thing I have a slow iPhone 8, so I could click on that menu.

Hmmm, bluetooth joysticks? I wonder if a PS5 joystick would work with it. Apparently it does, https://appleinsider.com/inside/iphone/ ... ne-or-ipad And that PS5 Bluetooth sync (hold PS button and upper left share button until it starts flashing rapidly) also works with Linux and MAME running in Linux.

Now I'll just have to randomly put in strings with the game info for the Internet Adapter to pick up. It also seems to pick up just one word from any string! That's annoying.