Yep. You’ve read it properly. After spending quite a bit of time on this, I’ve got MAME (not based on MacMame, but rather xmame), running fullscreen on my old TiBook with elder ATI Radeon video, at an average of 60 frames per second. Unheard of? Not anymore.

SDL: Info: Video mode set as 640×480, depth 32 Using 16bpp video mode SDL: sysdep_display_alloc_palette(65536); info: requesting mono sound at 44100 hz info: sound device is Built-in audio controller info: emulating mono onto stereo info: sysdep_dsp: using coreaudio plugin info: dsp: using timer-based audio Average FPS: 59.045509 (1433 frames)

Caveats and warnings: · It only works in full-screen mode. I’ve disabled the ability to run in a window. It just doesn’t play nice with others (at the moment).
· It currently has no useful documentation, and I am only offering this release as a ‘seeder’ for feedback; this is hardly ‘release’ quality.
· If a game is unable to properly render it’s colormapping under this SDL port, the game might very well run, but most of the time, you’ll just get a black screen. Hit ‘Esc’ to quit out of the emulator. You can change modes with ’-bpp 8’, and ’-bpp 16’ on the command line, respectively.
· It has no configuration GUI. It’s a very raw port from xmame, and you are expected to understand how xmame works, as well as the command line; for ease of use, I suggest MAMEGui.

If you’re interested, it’s available as a MacOS X Installer package, here, or as a unified diff against xmame 0.71.1 is available here.

Update: Added link to MAMEGui. ;)