Arcade games on your Xbox360 – Bad Update and RGH/Jtag – Full Mame install and setup

With a modded Xbox360 you can do much more than just play Xbox 360 games. Whether you’re using a hard modded console or running the Bad Update exploit you have access to a whole range of homebrew emulators to run retro console and computer games directly on your Xbox.

In this video I’ll show you how to set up an emulator called MAME which will turn your console into an arcade machine with almost every game ever released before 2000.

So let’s get started.

Getting Ready

There are a number of ways to install homebrew apps but the best and easiest way is to use the Homebrew Store. For this you’ll need to install the Aurora Dashboard onto your Xbox. I’ve covered this in both my RGH3 and Bad Update videos so please do refer to those if you’re not sure how to manually install apps.

But once you’ve got it installed you should end up on the dashboard with a list of your installed apps and games.

From here we need to make sure that the console is connected to the Internet. With an RGH console or Bad Update active this is safe as both exploits will block traffic to the Microsoft servers whilst still allowing us to connect to other online services.

So press your Xbox guide button and navigate to the settings page and then select system settings. Say yes to any prompts and you should now be on the standard dashboard. Go down to Network settings and connect to either your ethernet or wireless network.

Once that’s active you can test the Xbox Live connection and you should see that although we’re connected to the network, the console can’t find the Microsoft servers. That’s what we want.

We now need to get back to the Aurora dashboard, so click the guide button and either select the Aurora option or click Y to go back to the home screen. If you’ve followed my installation video that should take you back to Aurora, otherwise you’ll need to go back through the XeXmenu route.

Install Homebrew Store

Next we can install the homebrew store if you haven’t already done so. We’ll go though the process quickly here but you can always check out my Homebrew Store video for more information.

In Aurora click the Back button to go to the System menu. Then select the scripts option and then the Aurora Repo Browser. This should connect to the web and then show you a list of script categories. These scripts are basically apps that add functionality to the Aurora dashboard. We want to open the Utility scripts and then install the Homebrew Store script. Select Yes to install it and once that’s confirmed just press B to get back out to the main dashboard.

Install MAME

To use the Homebrew store you need to go back into the System menu with the Back button, select scripts and you should now see the Homebrew Store. Select this and the script will download the latest content and then show you a list of repositories.

We want to open the Emulators section which should then present you with a list of emulators that we can install directly onto our Xbox 360. As you can see there is a good range of retro consoles that we can emulate and I will be covering the setup of a number of these in upcoming videos.

For now we want to find the MAME 0.72 listing. If you select that you’ll get a pop up window with details about the app and where it’s going to be installed. So this will be saved onto our hard drive in an Emulators folder in a Mame360 folder. We need to remember this location as we’ll need to connect the app into Aurora.

All we need to do now is select Yes to install the App, and that will download the files and install Mame for us automatically.

Connect Mame to Aurora

Once the installation is finished we need to back out to the main dashboard again.

This time we need to go to the Settings menu by clicking the start button. Then Content. Aurora uses paths to find games and apps so we need to tell it that we’ve added an app in the Emulators folder. If you’ve already set this up skip this step otherwise select the Add button under Manage Paths. The change the location and find the Emulators folder on the Hard Drive. Don’t open the emulators folder, just highlight it and then select it with the Y button. This will set the path. Next go to the depth slider and change the depth to 3. Then go down and right to save this new path.

Once the path is added we can highlight the Scan Now button and select that to get Aurora to have a look for any new apps.

If we now go back to the main dashboard we should be able to find Mame listed in our games section.

Adding Games

That’s Mame installed and ready to go but the default installation doesn’t contain any games. So let’s sort that out next.

Our game ROMs need to be copied into the roms folder in the Mame installation folder on the Xbox 360 hard drive.

So we first need to get hold of a Mame ROMset for Mame 0.78. Once we have that we can rename the folder containing the game files to roms. This will just make it easier for us to copy the whole folder across rather than having to copy each file.

To get the folder onto the Xbox we need to copy it to an FAT32 formatted USB drive and then plug that into the console.

We can then use the File Manager in the System Settings in Aurora to copy the whole folder into the MAME360 folder. This will put all the files into the roms folder on the hard drive.

If we now go back to the dashboard and start Mame we should have some games ready to play.