Overview

This page documents how to setup the Arcade cores. They are all quite similar, just vary slightly in supported features.

Many new Arcade cores have been ported by Gehstock https://github.com/Gehstock/Mist_FPGA/tree/master/Arcade_MiST. Follow the Discussions. These support VGA & 15kHz modes.

Also Jotego's Arcade core collection: https://github.com/jotego/jtbin

Installation

Download the MRA tool.

The Arcade cores are normally self-contained in their own *.rbf file, so it is enough to copy them and a ROM file (if needed) to the root of an SD card.

MRA and ARC files

Newer updates contains the so-called MRA files (invented in the MiSTer project), which greatly simplifies the creation of the ROM files. Just get a collection of zipped MAME ROM files (e.g. archive.org) and use the MRA tool to process the MRA files which creates ARC files. An example how to use it:

mra -A -z /path/to/mame/roms Defender.mra

This will create DEFENDER.ROM and "Defender (Red label).arc" files. Copy both of them next to the core's RBF (Defender.rbf in this case). Why do you need an ARC file? Some cores support more than one arcade machine, and the ARC file contains information about the hardware variant, and the ROM file to load. So instead of having 4 RBFs for the Defender-like hardware, there's only one RBF, and 4 ARC files.

You can specify a number of MRA files to process in a batch:

In Linux/MacOS shell, you can create ROMs and ARCs from several MRAs easily:

mra -A -z /path/to/mame/roms *.mra

The same in Windows shell:

for %f in (*.mra) do (mra -A -z /path/to/mame/roms "%f")

If a core supports only one machine variant, you can omit the ARC file creation (-A switch), and create the ROM only. Although some games require DIP switch information present only in the ARC file so in case of malfunction when using the RBF directly, try generating the ARC and running from it.

If you don't want to see the RBF file in the core list, you can set the hidden attribute on it (very handy if you created a separate Arcade directory):

fatattr +h Defender.rbf

on Linux

attrib +h Defender.rbf

on Windows.

Or simply hide all RBFs in one directory:

fatattr +h *rbf

or

attrib +h *.RBF

To set file attributes for exFAT file system on Linux exfat-utils provides exfatattrib.

MRA tool usage

Usage:
        mra [-vlzoOaA] [my_file.mra]...

Convert a number of MRA files to ROM files for use on MiST arcade cores.
Optionally creates the associated ARC file.
For more informations, visit https://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?t=38224

Options:
        -h              this help.
        -v              when it is the only parameter, display version information and exit. Otherwise, set Verbose on (default: off).
        -l              list MRA content instead of creating the ROM file.
        -z directory    add directory to include zip files. Directories added with -z have priority over the current dir.
        -o filename     set the output ROM file name. Overrides the internal generation of the filename.
        -O directory    set the output directory. By default, ROM and ARC files are created in the current directory.
        -a filename     set the output ARC file name. Overrides the internal generation of the filename.
        -A              create ARC file. This is done in addition to creating the ROM file.
        -s              skip ROM creation. This is useful if only the ARC file is required.