Getting Mame (the arcade game emulator) working on my Thinkpad T500 took the following steps:
- Install mame and the pulse audio driver:
sudo aptitude install mame libsdl1.2debian-pulseaudio
- At this point, sounds was crackling, but enabling multithreading fixed that:
mame -multithreading
And that's it. I modified my /etc/sdlmame/mame.ini to enable multithreading, lower the volume, and have it run in a window rather than fullscreen so I don't need to specify those options on the command line. Try 'man mame' for explanations of other options. When starting mame, 'TAB' pops up the mame option menu including all the keyboard command mappings. 'ESC' quits the menu or the game. '1' starts game play.
Also, Mame seems to be the best supported emulator. I tried to get a few others (nestra, fceu) working without success.