Tulsaboyw

I know that for me.. once i get a particular version of mame working with many of the games ive played.. and with possibly hyperspin or similar. and also a Hercules mainframe emulation (had both in past)... but I now have a 6yr old laptop that Im replacing the vista32 on it with 64bit Linux Mint (was a 64bit laptop to start with, school was cheap and put 32bit on it for the classes i took). Anyway, once its upgraded to linux etc this laptop will only be for emulations and probably never anything else. Is mame soley a windows deal? The Hercules mainframe emu is both .. I had it in a windowsxp setup, and am moving it to Linux.. but per that is a fullblown redo. If mame is not Linux capable.. I'm not sure I will want to bother...