Tiger Arcade – free MAME arcade emulator for Android
25 June, 2010 11 Comments
Update: apparently, this app is now listed on the Market under TigerArcade(MAME) – some of the info may be out of date. If anyone finds the official site for this app, let me know.
Yesterday I found Tiger Arcade in the Android Market. It’s an arcade machine emulator, based on MAME, for Android, and it’s free.
I installed it, grabbed the arcade ROMs for Final Fight and Street Fighter II and was surprised to see how well it’s working so far. It ran a bit slow on my HTC Magic, and the graphics were a bit glitchy, but it was just about playable (though of course it’s a bit easier for those of us with a gamepad or physical keyboard).
A few more features could make a big difference to the fun factor:
- smoother play (speed optimisations or maybe just a frameskip option)
- fewer graphical glitches
- save states
- more customisable on-screen controls (the latest version of Snesoid is a good example of the kind of options that are useful)
But there’s plenty of hope that these features may get added soon: today an update was released which includes a feature that was missing until now: support for more than 4 buttons! (The Streetfighter games are a lot more fun with this).
If this sounds like your thing, search for tiger arcade in the Android Market.
Shoryuken! (search for that in the market too)
* * *
M. G. Owen 
I didn’t know these things existed, now I want a phone Mame
With the correct bios roms games that require old slow consolegames like pac man should work too but why not in tiger arcade?
Ok, problem solved
For those who don’t know (as I didn’t)
You HAVE to unplug your USB cable after copying the ROMS or the game can’t access your SD card.
Well,
I have done exactly what was said.
I tethered to my phone, created /roms/arcade as the application stated
I copied neogeo.zip, neogeod.zip, mslug.zip to the folder (which works fine in mame on my Linux PC)
Started the app
Roms are not found.
So, can someone say why or is this application broken?
Or maybe I was wrong that it does more than Capcom….but if so, it’s a matter of what version MAME Tigerarcade is relative to, hence what rom versions you need.
Also, the path should be /roms. It finds that automatically. Anything else, including ‘rom’, it needs to be urged: ie – menu>search games.
For those who might be having troubles getting roms to show, there are two things to consider:
– tigerarcade doesn’t do much besides Capcom stuff
– and /rom works: at the list screen (blank, right?), you need to select menu on your phone, and press ‘search’. When I did this, all supported games that I had roms for showed in the list. Not any I want to play, but alas.
I allso have the problem that the games are not shown, i have downloaded 1942 .zip and have set it to search all folders
On the linked page, it says ‘this application seems to be removed from the Android Market’.
I downloaded the tiger mame emulator. Read the help file and copied games to it along with downloading a couple games from the app itself. I created /rom/arcade and put the games in that folder. When I search for games, nothing is found. I left them as zip files as well. I also told the app to search all folders and still nothing… Any thoughts on why or what I’m doing wrong? Phone is a Tmobile MyTouch 4G.
Sorry, no idea. I put mine under /Games/arcade, and the search feature just found them. Sorry I can’t be more help.
Anyone else had this problem?
Be sure to download the NEO-GEO BIOS file into the same folder you mentioned. Then they should work.