Anybody working on porting MAME? I just started playing around a bit to try and get SDL to compile with an aim towards using it to get the SDL port of MAME on the iPhone. Of course, the real fun will be figuring out an input method so you can actually play the games once it's actually ported.

I don't know all that much about coding, but I'm looking to learn and figure the iPhone is a good place to start. Been using computers since the 1980's, the first computer I had was an Atari ST. I've got a basic understanding of C/C++ (read a few books, such as The C++ Programming Language by Bjarne Stroustrup) but haven't gotten into much actual coding. I thought about trying to port MAME to the iPhone as a good project. Have you started anything or do you know of anyone else or group working on it? The main problem seems to be how to emulate the controls on the iPhone.

Eh... My opinion, if you're interested, is that the iPhone is not a good place to start programming. Sure, you can write some C/C++ programs and run them in the terminal, but if you want to write real apps you're going to have to learn Objective-C and Cocoa, and then deal with trying to reverse engineer Apple's UIKit and other frameworks to make your program actually work on the iPhone. It's made a little easier because there are a number of 3rd party iPhone apps out there where the source is available, but there's great potential for extreme frustration trying to write an app for the iPhone.

If you've got a Mac, start playing with Xcode and write some Cocoa apps and that'll get you more prepared to deal with the iPhone.

Yeah, thanks for the info. I've got a couple Macs w/ Xcode, I'm going to dig into that and see what I can get going. You ever read Mac OS X Internals: A Systems Approach by Amit Singh? I'm reading that right now, only about 150 pages into it though - out of 1600 pages total Seems to be "the bible" on OS X.
What do you think of ADC? I got a Student membership to ADC (got a nice discount on a MacBook Pro) since I'm starting college this month. I want to get a Ph.D. in Computer Science.

I haven't heard of anyone else doing it, so I've started working on it. I should have it up and running before too long.

http://code.google.com/p/iphone-sdl-mame/

Rickbdotcom, how do you build your SDL? I added the source files, but what is the command to compile it?

Oh sorry I haven't added instructions for compiling yet on the project page, too busy trying to get MAME to work. Assuming you've got the iPhone tool chain compiled already, use these options for configure.

./configure --host=arm-apple-darwin --prefix=/Developer/SDKs/iPhone/usr --enable-shared=no

Take a look at the iphone-sdk README for setting up the SDKs/iPhone directory.

I also symlinked arm-apple-darwin-gcc -> arm-apple-darwin-cc otherwise you'll have to also specify the compiler with --build option.

Rickbdotcom, I'm having some trouble building SDL. Could you possibly zip your SDL folder and upload it to **********? That would be awesome

If you don't have the toolchain and Developer/SDKs/iPhone directory set up correctly then you're not gonna be able to compile anything regardless. If everything is setup correctly configure should just work with those options. Get the SDL source and add/replace those files (or run the patch). Eventually this will all get added to the main SDL source tree, and I will provide a binary download of the libs and MAME. For now, if you wanna live on the bleeding edge and pretend to be an uber hacker you're gonna have to live with this level of support and figure out how to compile stuff on your own until that's done. What errors are you getting when you try to configure or compile? Take a look at config.log to get some ideas if ./configure is failing.

I have a built toolchain and I have had it for two weeks now, it's just that when I configure SDL with your fixes, it still reverts to quartz and cocoa when compiling. It never goes to to the iPhone Video c files.