Your experience with MAME - Page 3

exoticaga · 23 April 2009, 04:39

Quote:

Originally Posted by Deleauvive

Also, I don't really get how newer MAME binaries can be slower. Are you talking about the GUI or the games themselves ? It seems to me MAME is throttled when a game in launched, so I am surprised to read it feels slower for you. Also, if some games won't work, there must be some discrepancy between your version of MAME and the roms.

Its out of context your talking of the games, i was refering to the rom checking nm.

Retroplay · 23 April 2009, 17:56

Quote:

Originally Posted by Supamax

Do you know who digitalized the audio/video clips? How is the quality?
11.5 GB is *very* big... I would say huge!
1 hour DV video is about 12 GB.
1 hour MPEG-2 video is in the range 2..5 GB.

So I suppose that, with 11.5 GB, the a/v quality of those games would be superb, fantastic, impressive

... (since the total a/v length of all the video clips is relatively short). But I feel skeptic, dunno why...

Don't know who dumped the laserdiscs.
Well to be honest, I think, no make that sure, that better compression could easily have been accomplished without reducing quality.

Big-Byte · 24 April 2009, 16:27

Later versions of Mame are getting slower because they are getting more accurate. There is great explanation about this on one of the developers blogs: http://aarongiles.com/

Ive dowloaded all the mame 0.130 roms just this week but still have a few sets missing. Am also downloading the chd's but only have about 3gig out of 100gig!

NewDeli · 01 May 2009, 17:02

I'll have to revert it : It seems some older games won't work with 0.130 binaries. That strengthen the following thought : It's a pity that Mame++ dev. was halted and subsequent MAME dev. may lack a certain cohesiveness. Well, too late to go back to 0.119 anyway, since I updated most of the roms.

By the way, if some of you are interested in knowing what CHD games are worth playing, we could try to establish a fav' list of some sort.

Retroplay · 01 May 2009, 17:54

Have you tried official 0.131 binaries ?

Photon · 01 May 2009, 20:28

I go with a major update, get rom versions of same, and don't change a thing. So I can't play game xx. Big deal

Retroplay · 01 May 2009, 20:56

If you have a rom set for an older MAME version just check/rebuild with clrmamepro.

NewDeli · 24 July 2009, 12:53

Hurray !
I managed to have Rolling Thunder II working with build 0.133 of MAME +

Fabulous challenging game, especially with cheat mode on !

Just a note to those who would download MAME + binairies, the zip files cannot be opened with Windows unzipping engine routines.

Paul_s · 24 July 2009, 13:41

Rollin Thunder is cool... try out Bad Dudes vs. Dragon Ninja

PWLM · 24 July 2009, 14:39

The best games IMHO are the 'classics' like Double Dragon, Super Mario Bros, Elevator Action etc - small files and when you need to update most are less that 1Mb so don't take long to acquire.

Photon · 24 July 2009, 23:13

I got the latest version there were roms available (

) for and didn't update since. Simple!

NewDeli · 25 July 2009, 12:56

Hey, I think I finally dig the .chd update process

.
You don't need to re-download theses big (to huge) .chds. Simply use chdman (included in regular MAME binary distro) with a command based on this example :

Code:

chdman -update simpbowl.chd simpbowl_new.chd

(this updates Simpsons Bowling). Delete the old .chd, rename the new one as simpbowl.chd and replace it in its folder, in the roms directory.

You don't need to do it most of the times, to play the game, but the game name will be displayed in red in EmuLoader and you get a warning.
chdman fixes the checksum and that's what you need, until your chd is corrupt (unlikely)...

Another thing which prevented me from playing some of the .chd games is that the /diff directory was full of obsolete shit.
I had to delete its content (I believe it can be done safely, it seems to behave like a temp dir for .chd games), and all went fine again.

It's very easy and logical to add missing .chds : Simply right click > Scan Games > Selected Game
(and to work from the check results : right click > Scan Result > Selected Game )

Why did I have missing .chds

, well it's a bit embarrassing

. I fully understood the parent/clone principles only today.
It means I had game clones with the right roms, but no parent rom, on few occasions.

When a game has a US & a Japanese name, I choosed to have the most popular version e.g Warzard/Red Earth.

See

? may be not... But the important thing is romkeeper.com has it all (roms + decent sized CHDs). Beautiful site, indeed.

Sometimes the parent has copy protection and won't work as smoothly as the clone, in case you wonder why they're used.
Search for a parent aka a game as people know it, and you'll have the dependencies displayed one click away.
You don't need the whole set to play the game, but it's safer to have both, even if you will never play the parent.
In turn, this makes things look better when you add a game to the favorites -it shows the parent AND the clones.

Finally, the twisted part for me is when the rom has changed in a way you cannot make explorer panes file2file comparison.

I mean, when a few files are missing no problem :
You can keep your existing roms and complete them in their respective .zip containers,
just re-download the rom in romkeeper.com and copy/paste what's missing at sight.

When you notice the roms are the same, but the game name stills appear in red, you can bet the game roms were recently reorganized by the MAME team.
In this case, download selectively the missing roms from the latest torrent, replace the whole rom sets of these games and you're done.
I only had that problem with Last Duel & Mario. Yeah, ClrMamePro might be the right tool to use in such situations, mmmmh...

My explanations may not appear crystal clear compared to those of some of the seasoned MAME dudes (see last post on this page),
so sorry for those who find this tedious to read but now my selection of MAME games (makes a list of about 400 games) is all cleared up

.

As a side note, it may be necessary to play with F2 -the test switch & F3 -the reset switch to make some games initialize properly.

Also, don't be fooled by the size of the LD which are proposed are part of MAME sets.
The most popular ex-Daphne games such as Dragon's Lair I & II, Space Ace haven't been ported yet.
I would only want to try MACH 3 from the 4 or 5 games that have been ported up to now.
Daphne has been updated to v1 so I guess you can stick with the mpeg/ogg rips for some time more.

Supamax · 25 July 2009, 16:56

I still don't understand a simple thing:
since MAME roms are dumped from the games' chips, wouldn't it be EASY to find a FINAL format to store them?

Why in hell am I forced to download again the rom sets any time?

Once you have a binary dump of all the game ICs, you're done. Every MAME version could use them as they are... or not?

DamienD · 25 July 2009, 18:10

Quote:

Originally Posted by Supamax

Why in hell am I forced to download again the rom sets any time?

A few reasons I can think of:

... Maybe some of the roms were bad dumps and then replaced later when a good dump has been achieved / verified. Dumping roms can be very difficult, just check out some of the information / images posted by The Guru and you'll get a better idea of the complexity.
... The names of roms have been renamed to match schematics.

There are probably a few other possible reasons that sadly elude me at present.

Hercules · 25 July 2009, 19:30

Built my own MAME cabinet which runs Mame and Gamebase Amiga 1.6 if anyone wanna check it out...

Videos are on my YouTube channel, so please have a look:- http://www.youtube.com/amigajunkie

If you view my videos, then please give them a star rating, and feel free to leave me comments :-) More video's appearing soon for MAME and emulator fans :-)

Macca · 25 July 2009, 20:41

Quote:

Originally Posted by DamienD

A few reasons I can think of:

... Maybe some of the roms were bad dumps and then replaced later when a good dump has been achieved / verified. Dumping roms can be very difficult, just check out some of the information / images posted by The Guru and you'll get a better idea of the complexity.
... The names of roms have been renamed to match schematics.

There are probably a few other possible reasons that sadly elude me at present.

As said by Damien really. If you go through CLRMAME before you update your ROMs that will fix / rename the majority it can and then get rid of the rubbish ones before it updates to the latest version. To be honest the ROMs are the least of your worries. It's the CHD's that are the killer and if they get mis-dumped and you have to donwnload them again it's a very sickening moment!

M.

DamienD · 25 July 2009, 23:09

Yup, ClrMAMEPro is definitely a must for any MAME enthusiast

Supamax · 27 July 2009, 00:04

Ok mates, CLRMAME will be my *dear* friend!

Harrison · 29 July 2009, 18:24

Quote:

Originally Posted by Supamax

I still don't understand a simple thing:
since MAME roms are dumped from the games' chips, wouldn't it be EASY to find a FINAL format to store them?

Why in hell am I forced to download again the rom sets any time?

Once you have a binary dump of all the game ICs, you're done. Every MAME version could use them as they are... or not?

As mentioned, many roms are flagged as bad dumps, even though many of them do still run. People redump these as they find original hardware and so these get replaced in the next version, making the older bad dumped versions of the roms obsolete.

Another reason, and more the main reason for changes to the roms with each revision is the merging of identical rom code into a parent/child/clone rom set structure. Many games used the same underlying cabinets, and many games share a lot of the same roms (using the same libraries and other code on existing roms from other games, and just added a couple of additional roms for the specific game's code). Or other versions of the same games were released in slightly different forms for different countries or markets, and for these most of the roms were identical, so the games are classed as clones of the original and can use the majority of the same roms.

Therefore there isn't really any need to have duplicate copies of the same dumped roms held in the full MAME rom set for all these clones of the same games or games based on the same original game cabinet. These are referred to in MAME as child rom sets. And as new versions of MAME are developed more games that use identical rom sets are found, and so these games become child sets of the original games parent rom sets. So only one of these roms is needed to load and run a large number of games that shared it. This means that the actual rom set file structure is completely changed, and is the biggest reason why games that used to work on an older version of MAME might not work on a newer one. Because the rom set structure has changed.

I hope that made sense.

Harrison · 29 July 2009, 18:45

I love MAME. It is one of the greatest inventions in the whole emulation world. I've been using it since the very early public versions were released, and have seen, followed and used all versions develop over the years.

Originally not that many games were supported. I think the first version I used supported maybe a couple of hundred games, but even then it was amazing in the late 90's to be able to fully emulate real original arcade games.

These days I tend to just use MAMEUI x64 (originally MAME32). It is a great all in one MAME and frontend solution. Some of the other branches of the MAME32 code are interesting, but all seem to have slightly different complete rom sets, and MAMEUIs is the one most torrents are aimed for.

I never bother with the interim u MAME releases and only ever update when a new full version is released. And it is so easy to update the MAME rom set these days. Years ago I remember having the hassle each time, of needing to download the latest MAME version update package (which just contained the differences), and then using ClrMAMEPro to rebuild the whole set and try to make it complete. Needing it to rename roms and sets, merge sets etc....

But now that the roms are Torrentzipped it is so easy. I used Pleasuredome to update and maintain my MAME sets. Just download the latest full torrent, point it to your existing MAME rom set, utorrent then checks the files against the new torrent and automatically downloads just the differences and brings the MAME set fully up to date. Normally updates are 1-3GB at most and can be brought up to date in a few hours. Great solution to something that used to be such a big hassle.

CHDs are still however a bit of a nightmare. As mentioned by someone earlier in the thread the whole CHD file structure was changed recently. This was to try and make the CHD filetype more accurate, so it stored each game image more like its original, and more versitile. Originally before this, the CHD file format was only designed to hold HDD stored games, but with the update the format was reworked so the format can now be used to stored any large game data, originally stored on HD, Laserdisc or anything else.

But it still isn't easy to manage and rebuild a CHD set. ClrMAMEPro doens't really handle CHDs that well. Mainly because they are generally just huge single files, unlike rom based games that have more smaller rom files per game that can be managed, renamed and rearranged within the file structure easily. They need to built the functionality from chdman into a new version of this rom manager.

And I think they still need to do some thinking about how CHDs are stored and managed. Something needs to still be worked on to improve them.

CHDs are also not so important to the enjoyment of MAME. More a final huge download for the completest emulation fans among us. A 100GB torrent is quite a size for anyone to download via torrent.

24 July 2009, 12:53	#48
NewDeli Banned Join Date: Oct 2007 Location: Paris / FRANCE Age: 50 Posts: 1,248	Hurray ! I managed to have Rolling Thunder II working with build 0.133 of MAME + Fabulous challenging game, especially with cheat mode on ! Just a note to those who would download MAME + binairies, the zip files cannot be opened with Windows unzipping engine routines. Last edited by NewDeli; 25 July 2009 at 08:11.

24 July 2009, 23:13	#51
Photon Moderator Join Date: Nov 2004 Location: Eksjö / Sweden Posts: 5,650	I got the latest version there were roms available () for and didn't update since. Simple!

25 July 2009, 12:56	#52
NewDeli Banned Join Date: Oct 2007 Location: Paris / FRANCE Age: 50 Posts: 1,248	Some more findings Hey, I think I finally dig the .chd update process . You don't need to re-download theses big (to huge) .chds. Simply use chdman (included in regular MAME binary distro) with a command based on this example : Code: chdman -update simpbowl.chd simpbowl_new.chd (this updates Simpsons Bowling). Delete the old .chd, rename the new one as simpbowl.chd and replace it in its folder, in the roms directory. You don't need to do it most of the times, to play the game, but the game name will be displayed in red in EmuLoader and you get a warning. chdman fixes the checksum and that's what you need, until your chd is corrupt (unlikely)... Another thing which prevented me from playing some of the .chd games is that the /diff directory was full of obsolete shit. I had to delete its content (I believe it can be done safely, it seems to behave like a temp dir for .chd games), and all went fine again. It's very easy and logical to add missing .chds : Simply right click > Scan Games > Selected Game (and to work from the check results : right click > Scan Result > Selected Game ) Why did I have missing .chds , well it's a bit embarrassing . I fully understood the parent/clone principles only today. It means I had game clones with the right roms, but no parent rom, on few occasions. When a game has a US & a Japanese name, I choosed to have the most popular version e.g Warzard/Red Earth. See ? may be not... But the important thing is romkeeper.com has it all (roms + decent sized CHDs). Beautiful site, indeed. Sometimes the parent has copy protection and won't work as smoothly as the clone, in case you wonder why they're used. Search for a parent aka a game as people know it, and you'll have the dependencies displayed one click away. You don't need the whole set to play the game, but it's safer to have both, even if you will never play the parent. In turn, this makes things look better when you add a game to the favorites -it shows the parent AND the clones. Finally, the twisted part for me is when the rom has changed in a way you cannot make explorer panes file2file comparison. I mean, when a few files are missing no problem : You can keep your existing roms and complete them in their respective .zip containers, just re-download the rom in romkeeper.com and copy/paste what's missing at sight. When you notice the roms are the same, but the game name stills appear in red, you can bet the game roms were recently reorganized by the MAME team. In this case, download selectively the missing roms from the latest torrent, replace the whole rom sets of these games and you're done. I only had that problem with Last Duel & Mario. Yeah, ClrMamePro might be the right tool to use in such situations, mmmmh... My explanations may not appear crystal clear compared to those of some of the seasoned MAME dudes (see last post on this page), so sorry for those who find this tedious to read but now my selection of MAME games (makes a list of about 400 games) is all cleared up . As a side note, it may be necessary to play with F2 -the test switch & F3 -the reset switch to make some games initialize properly. Also, don't be fooled by the size of the LD which are proposed are part of MAME sets. The most popular ex-Daphne games such as Dragon's Lair I & II, Space Ace haven't been ported yet. I would only want to try MACH 3 from the 4 or 5 games that have been ported up to now. Daphne has been updated to v1 so I guess you can stick with the mpeg/ogg rips for some time more. Last edited by NewDeli; 25 July 2009 at 13:37.

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24 April 2009, 16:27	#43
Big-Byte Long time member Join Date: Jul 2001 Location: UK Posts: 754	Later versions of Mame are getting slower because they are getting more accurate. There is great explanation about this on one of the developers blogs: http://aarongiles.com/ Ive dowloaded all the mame 0.130 roms just this week but still have a few sets missing. Am also downloading the chd's but only have about 3gig out of 100gig!

01 May 2009, 17:02	#44
NewDeli Banned Join Date: Oct 2007 Location: Paris / FRANCE Age: 50 Posts: 1,248	I'll have to revert it : It seems some older games won't work with 0.130 binaries. That strengthen the following thought : It's a pity that Mame++ dev. was halted and subsequent MAME dev. may lack a certain cohesiveness. Well, too late to go back to 0.119 anyway, since I updated most of the roms. By the way, if some of you are interested in knowing what CHD games are worth playing, we could try to establish a fav' list of some sort.

01 May 2009, 17:54	#45
Retroplay Lemon Curry ? Join Date: Sep 2004 Location: Denmark Age: 49 Posts: 4,133	Have you tried official 0.131 binaries ?

01 May 2009, 20:28	#46
Photon Moderator Join Date: Nov 2004 Location: Eksjö / Sweden Posts: 5,650	I go with a major update, get rom versions of same, and don't change a thing. So I can't play game xx. Big deal

01 May 2009, 20:56	#47
Retroplay Lemon Curry ? Join Date: Sep 2004 Location: Denmark Age: 49 Posts: 4,133	If you have a rom set for an older MAME version just check/rebuild with clrmamepro.

24 July 2009, 13:41	#49
Paul_s Registered User Join Date: Nov 2006 Location: Amigaville Age: 46 Posts: 3,337	Rollin Thunder is cool... try out Bad Dudes vs. Dragon Ninja

24 July 2009, 14:39	#50
PWLM He found it at the zoo.. Join Date: Jun 2008 Location: Townsville / Australia Posts: 151	The best games IMHO are the 'classics' like Double Dragon, Super Mario Bros, Elevator Action etc - small files and when you need to update most are less that 1Mb so don't take long to acquire.

25 July 2009, 16:56	#53
Supamax Da Digger :) Join Date: Nov 2008 Location: Monza, Italy Posts: 2,822	I still don't understand a simple thing: since MAME roms are dumped from the games' chips, wouldn't it be EASY to find a FINAL format to store them? Why in hell am I forced to download again the rom sets any time? Once you have a binary dump of all the game ICs, you're done. Every MAME version could use them as they are... or not?

25 July 2009, 19:30	#55
Hercules Vodka monster. Join Date: Jul 2009 Location: UK Posts: 337	Built my own MAME cabinet which runs Mame and Gamebase Amiga 1.6 if anyone wanna check it out... Videos are on my YouTube channel, so please have a look:- http://www.youtube.com/amigajunkie If you view my videos, then please give them a star rating, and feel free to leave me comments :-) More video's appearing soon for MAME and emulator fans :-)

25 July 2009, 23:09	#57
DamienD Banned Join Date: Aug 2005 Location: London / Sydney Age: 47 Posts: 20,420	Yup, ClrMAMEPro is definitely a must for any MAME enthusiast

27 July 2009, 00:04	#58
Supamax Da Digger :) Join Date: Nov 2008 Location: Monza, Italy Posts: 2,822	Ok mates, CLRMAME will be my dear friend!

29 July 2009, 18:45	#60
Harrison classicamiga.com Join Date: Dec 2007 Location: UK Age: 50 Posts: 155	I love MAME. It is one of the greatest inventions in the whole emulation world. I've been using it since the very early public versions were released, and have seen, followed and used all versions develop over the years. Originally not that many games were supported. I think the first version I used supported maybe a couple of hundred games, but even then it was amazing in the late 90's to be able to fully emulate real original arcade games. These days I tend to just use MAMEUI x64 (originally MAME32). It is a great all in one MAME and frontend solution. Some of the other branches of the MAME32 code are interesting, but all seem to have slightly different complete rom sets, and MAMEUIs is the one most torrents are aimed for. I never bother with the interim u MAME releases and only ever update when a new full version is released. And it is so easy to update the MAME rom set these days. Years ago I remember having the hassle each time, of needing to download the latest MAME version update package (which just contained the differences), and then using ClrMAMEPro to rebuild the whole set and try to make it complete. Needing it to rename roms and sets, merge sets etc.... But now that the roms are Torrentzipped it is so easy. I used Pleasuredome to update and maintain my MAME sets. Just download the latest full torrent, point it to your existing MAME rom set, utorrent then checks the files against the new torrent and automatically downloads just the differences and brings the MAME set fully up to date. Normally updates are 1-3GB at most and can be brought up to date in a few hours. Great solution to something that used to be such a big hassle. CHDs are still however a bit of a nightmare. As mentioned by someone earlier in the thread the whole CHD file structure was changed recently. This was to try and make the CHD filetype more accurate, so it stored each game image more like its original, and more versitile. Originally before this, the CHD file format was only designed to hold HDD stored games, but with the update the format was reworked so the format can now be used to stored any large game data, originally stored on HD, Laserdisc or anything else. But it still isn't easy to manage and rebuild a CHD set. ClrMAMEPro doens't really handle CHDs that well. Mainly because they are generally just huge single files, unlike rom based games that have more smaller rom files per game that can be managed, renamed and rearranged within the file structure easily. They need to built the functionality from chdman into a new version of this rom manager. And I think they still need to do some thinking about how CHDs are stored and managed. Something needs to still be worked on to improve them. CHDs are also not so important to the enjoyment of MAME. More a final huge download for the completest emulation fans among us. A 100GB torrent is quite a size for anyone to download via torrent.

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