There have been a fair number of MAME emulators created for the handheld gaming systems. Thankfully, those of you looking to try out those classic arcade titles on the big now have the chance to do so thanks to developer nuvalo's SDLMame 0.125 for Wii-linux distro.

This old-school arcade emulator makes full use of the Wii-Linux Kernel POC 0.4 and should eat up around 100MB of space on your SD card and 52MB on the MEM2 for swapping purposes. SDLMame runs almost any ROM very efficiently, with very frameskip once it gets started.

However, one of the major flaws in the program is the slow loading time for the ROMs. The developer also mentioned that users should avoid using the homebrew channel to launch the Wii-Linux kernel since it has some problems with NWC24.

To get the emulator started, all you have to do is copy "boot.elf" and "mamefs-fs" files to the root directory of your SD card. Afterwards, copy all the contents of the "mame" directory there as well. Finally, just create a "mameroms" directory on the root of the SD card then boot up the "root.elf" file using the Twilight hack.

The developer explained that the next update will include solving the game save option and allow multiple save games to be chosen. A keyboard and joystick interface will also be one of the priority updates.

For more information on installing the emulator and its different in-game controls, please take a look at the documentation included with the program.