MAME - Happy 10th Birthday

[CHook/OTT]

Originally Posted by Ironclaw

100% accurate arcade speed in mame...

I have removed the offending rom so will have to take your word for it

[Ironclaw]

Always take my word for everything.... ehh... yup... I never lie . and besides... why wouldn't it run perfect in mame anyway? .

[CHook/OTT]

having not believed you 100% i have just put the afore mentioned zips back on my pc from backup and loaded it up and can confirm it plods along at a very nice speed however there is no excuse for the very camp combing of the hair and cheesy grin from van dammes character when he wins a fight, this choice of victorious celebration has annoyed me somewhat and now i will have to remove the game once more.

[MethodGit]

I'm going to be controversial too, guys............. MAME has actually technically gotten worse features-wise since they decided to take an anal approach towards "accuracy" by dropping great features like the highscore-saving, and the AVI-recording support, and having people redo their entire config setup for each game again due to the switch to XML. Mr Stuart Campbell explained the situation much better two years back than I could possibly do myself.


Don't get me wrong, MAME is good for emulating the odd interesting rare gem on occasion, but I just don't like the overly-serious approach they've taken of late. I rarely use MAME these days myself.

[Duke]

MAME has gotten technically worse? Are you on drugs? Especially the new super high res artwork support is fantastic, see here for a quick example with Space Invaders:

http://home.arcor.de/startaq/space_invaders.png

High-score saving support was taken out because it was an ugly hack that caused stupid bugs. It is being replaced by the save-state support anyway, so if you want to record your scores just save the state (or enable auto-save, then it gets saved automatically when you close MAME).

AVI recording was replaced by MNG recording. MNGs combined with the WAVs you can output can be converted to an AVI if you want.

As for the config thing, I have no idea how many configs you need really, because MAME supports general controls that are valid for all games anyway. Maybe you need special controls for 10 games - big deal to redo those.

And MAME hasn't taken an overly-serious approach as of late - it was always like that. It's even in thier FAQ.

[Ian]

How about WinUAE?

You taken offence to Toni's desire to get the emulation far more accurate too?

After all, it's now far slower than 8.8 was.

[MethodGit]

Please don't try and start a flame war here. WinUAE and MAME are NOTHING alike.
(And for the record, I see no serious problem with 1.x and above - I haven't used 0.8.8 for a long time to be honest.)

I'm not against maintaining accuracy altogether - it's just I wonder whether dropping features plenty of people loved in the past is often the right way to go about it.


Also, MAMEDev seem to devote a lot of time towards adding support for newer, more CPU-hungry games like San Francisco Rush that are never remotely playable in their preliminary form straight from the off (even on the most ninja of PCs), instead of - say - trying to fix older games that have had problems for ages (or even breaking certain games slightly through newer updates).

[Ian]

Do you think Toni would bat an eyelid when dropping a feature that caused a problem emulating a genuine feature of an Amiga?

[Duke]

MethodGit, you should really try to read the MAME FAQ. Pretty much all of your questions are answered there.

G15. Why don't the devs fix old games instead of adding new ones?

[Dizzy]

Marz this belong in the crap-joke thread

[CHook/OTT]

Agree with the above that the config set-up and changes are damn annoying, also not sure if it only occurs with MAME32Plus! but if i start the emu with my usb controller adaptor unpluged it automatically removes all your joystick/pad settings from the default.cfg so you have to set it all up again ..... NIIIIICE!

[S. Campbell]

Originally Posted by Duke

MAME has gotten technically worse? Are you on drugs? Especially the new super high res artwork support is fantastic, see here for a quick example with Space Invaders:

http://home.arcor.de/startaq/space_invaders.png

High-score saving support was taken out because it was an ugly hack that caused stupid bugs. It is being replaced by the save-state support anyway,

Oh shush. High-score saving worked perfectly fine for nine years, and at the current rate of progress will be "replaced by the save-state support" sometime in the year 2157. It's a HUGE loss of functionality for no good reason other than that the MAME devs are anal twats (which is a trick in itself) who absolutely hate the fact that anyone can use the emulator to play arcade games on their PC. They loathe the emulator's users - they'd make it private tomorrow if they could.

Nice artwork, though.

[MethodGit]

Speaking of the Space Invaders artwork, it looks like I'm going to need a monitor that goes higher than 1280x1024 if I want to display it in that sort of admittedly snazzy high-quality.


But then, doesn't artwork tend to restrict your play view somewhat by shrinking it down?

[DamienD]

Originally Posted by MethodGit

and having people redo their entire config setup for each game again due to the switch to XML.

This happened when v0.100 came out...

To be honest out of the 5778 games available at the time of v0.100 I did have 292 custom v0.99 configurations for use with my HotRodSE as the defaults were not how I remembered them. A very good example off the top of my head is the Mortal Kombat series. Ok, these were a pain to redo them but hey...

I do agree with Duke though, MAME has always been about accuracy and the MAMEDev team continually strives towards this. Look at all the work Aaron Giles has been doing in terms of rewriting the core systems to make things run more efficiently. That's a massive task in itself

What annoys me is when people say that newer games run too slow on their new high spec'd PC. You only have to take a look at what these arcade systems really consist of i.e. massive motherboards, dual processors, graphics cards, custom chips which are all dedicated for only one purpose. Of course they are not going to run on your high spec'd Windows PC, same reason why there are still no successfull PS2 emulators out as yet...

Check out System 16 for some arcade system details

[S. Campbell]

Originally Posted by DamienD

What annoys me is when people say that newer games run too slow on their new high spec'd PC. You only have to take a look at what these arcade systems really consist of i.e. massive motherboards, dual processors, graphics cards, custom chips which are all dedicated for only one purpose. Of course they are not going to run on your high spec'd Windows PC, same reason why there are still no successfull PS2 emulators out as yet...

Obviously. But people aren't moaning that they run badly, they're moaning that the MAME team are spending huge slices of time on completely pointless work emulating hardware that won't be playable on a home PC for a decade, instead of fixing all the stuff they've broken and taken out just to piss off the people who actually use the program.

[thor]

But the devs are spending their spare time doing hard work with programming for free, so obviously they can decide what they're prefer to work on. And sometimes they probably need something new to keep the spirit up. And those who moan usually do not spend anything of their time to improve those projects/don't contribute a single line of code. So they should either learn how to program and help there or wait for things to come and maybe give constructive criticism, but no moaning.

[DamienD]

Edit: while writing my reply I've seen that thor has written something similar...

Originally Posted by S. Campbell

But people aren't moaning that they run badly

Really, I see it all the time on MAME forums

Originally Posted by S. Campbell

they're moaning that the MAME team are spending huge slices of time on completely pointless work emulating hardware that won't be playable on a home PC for a decade

I do understand the point you are making...

Ok, you may think that some directions taken by the MAMEDev team are completely pointless but obviously they don't. At the end of the day it's their project so they can do whatever they choose to do with it... These pointless areas that you refer to may be an area which interests a specific MAMEDev or he / she doesn't have knowledge in the areas that most users deem important...

I for one would really love to see Raiden II and Raiden DX emulated but unfortunately nobody can fully crack the encryption as yet. This doesn't mean that they haven't been trying damn hard though but obviously it's no simple task

Originally Posted by S. Campbell

instead of fixing all the stuff they've broken and taken out just to piss off the people who actually use the program.

I highly doubt they do it to "piss off the people who actually use the program". MAME is an absolutely massive project, one can only start to imagine how hard it is to make sure 6500+ games still work after changes / improvements to the emulator / core systems have taken place...

Do you ever visit the MAME Testers forum and give bug reports?

[S. Campbell]

Originally Posted by DamienD

I highly doubt they do it to "piss off the people who actually use the program".

They've said as much on numerous occasions. Users, to them, are an unfortunate side-effect of programming.

Do you ever visit the MAME Testers forum and give bug reports?

I've put countless hundreds of hours into contributing towards various aspects of MAME in the past (that's my name there in the big list of thanks in the anniversary readme), but unfortunately I don't have the 23 spare years necessary to go through the ridiculous registration/approval process they make you undertake if you should want to do something as absurd as helping them out nowadays.

[DamienD]

Originally Posted by S. Campbell

They've said as much on numerous occasions. Users, to them, are an unfortunate side-effect of programming.

Guess sometimes they get frustrated with people moaning and say that wrong thing / become a bit negative. Can happen to us all...

Originally Posted by S. Campbell

I've put countless hundreds of hours into contributing towards various aspects of MAME in the past

Cool, good stuff

[spiff]

This is almost OT, why not use the mame thread ... Fantasy Zone 2 now runs

Nicola found a weakness in the way Sega generated their keys for the M8123 which made decrypting Fantasy Zone 2 and Opa Opa much easier than anybody had expected. ... Aaron should be thanked too for noticing that the FD1094 keys were generated by a Psuedo-Random number generator rather than actually being Random, this was also found to apply to the MC8123 and was the basis of Nicola’s work.