Anyone running the Amiga in MAME?

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by sparhawk

I don't know the source structure of MAME. I also had the impression that all different machines were basically seperate projects within MAME, so I always wondered why it made sense to put hundreds of seperate machines into a single executable.

The mission is clearly to have one program for all emulation purposes. I would not call that bloat, but more... over-enthusiasm. What amazes me is that it isn't crashing and burning, apparently people really are able to manage such a monolithic code base. I'm impressed.

[Gzegzolka]

Please do not think I dislike MAME, I actually like it a lot. I have just different point of view about development and where it should go, that is all.

[Minuous]

Sure, the MESS emulators are often inferior to standalone ones, but not always so, many of them are very good.

That site only compares MAME vs. standalone emulators for Linux. Therefore it ignores all the cases where a standalone emulator for Windows, MacOS, etc. emulates the game better than MAME. So, that page is only really of use for a subset of Linux users; ie. those lacking WINE, and of no use at all for users of other platforms.

[Hercules]

Yup, I'm running the Amiga in MAME 0.217 via the included Arcadia arcade romset... Those were arcade machine that actually had an Amiga inside of them

[kkgarbod]

Originally Posted by Minuous

That site only compares MAME vs. standalone emulators for Linux. Therefore it ignores all the cases where a standalone emulator for Windows, MacOS, etc. emulates the game better than MAME. So, that page is only really of use for a subset of Linux users; ie. those lacking WINE, and of no use at all for users of other platforms.

it also only cover "nonmame" systems, or better stated "systems where MAME sux"

[Hewitson]

Originally Posted by LongLifeA1200

That's basically what MAME is in a way. Each arcade game needs custom code to emulate accurately.

No it doesn't... The same arcade hardware is often used on many different games. Capcom CPS-2 or Sega System 16 for example.

Originally Posted by dreadnought

Yeah, let's take a massive dump on people who made arcade gaming in your room possible, and bothered to write countless emus for forgotten machines. Seriously...

I'm not taking a dump on anyone. I'm calling MAME a bloated piece of shit, because that's exactly what it is.

I can only assume you've never taken a look at the code, in which case, you're not really in a position to comment.

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by Minuous

So, that page is only really of use for a subset of Linux users; ie. those lacking WINE, and of no use at all for users of other platforms.

Not really, because MAME/MESS is included also in Retroarch thus making it available on a host of other platforms (Mini consoles, Switch etc).
Besides, it's not really the major point - nobody is claiming that MAME is better than popular standalone emulators. It's an alternative, with different aims and methods. It's good that it exists, even if I rarely use it myself.

Originally Posted by Hewitson

I'm not taking a dump on anyone. I'm calling MAME a bloated piece of shit, because that's exactly what it is.

I can only assume you've never taken a look at the code, in which case, you're not really in a position to comment.

MAME is open source, so instead of just looking and then whining about it on the net you are welcome to rustle up your own amazing, non-bloated piece of shit fork. I'm sure you can do much better than those guys.

And pretending you're just cussing the code, without insulting the devs, is rather childish. It did not conjure itself out of thin air after all.

Overall, I'm not saying that MAME is perfect or that I'm happy with it merging with MESS. But I'm not the one doing that work for free, so the one position I'm definitely not in is to bitch about it. Bloated or not, arcade MAME is still beyond awesome and every release improves the quality of some games and adds new ones. And the machine side preserves countless obscure systems and aims for accuracy too, which might be important one day. So I'd rather praise their voluntary work (which is still not hiding behind Patreons and such, as is the modern trend) than complain about how awful it is.

[jotd]

MAME is definitely not crap. The fact is it needs a lot more CPU power than previous versions.

Which explains why Mame4All (most raspberry/android arm based ports) is based on mame 0.34 something (fron around year 2000 ...). And the mamereloaded app has more games but even Galaga crawls on that one.

MAME puts accent on emulation faithfulness. That's why they removed patches, hardcoded stuff in romsets, etc... and emulate all chips instead of taking shortcuts, because they don't really care about speed (they even converted from C to C++). And the generic architecture makes it even more difficult to be fast on such or such system

Same problem with MESS. At the time, I pointed out a bug on the Oric module of MESS: you could not load a tape because of a 6522 emulation issue. I proposed a fix but it was rejected because 6522 emulation is shared between all machines. But it was clearly wrong, since the Oric module was borked...

I love MAME on my bloated PC though Slightly off topic: I wanted to re-do / improve the AmiMAME port done in 1998 by trying to rebuild it with gcc, find ways to improve c2p or re-do display for specific games, but after having a hard time rebuilding it, I wasn't even able to run it... So I gave it up...

WinUAE for ever

[drHirudo]

The original MAME developer Nicola Salmoria also created NewIcons for Amiga https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NewIcons.
Currently he is not involved with MAME, but hundreds of other programmers are improving the code base.

Some MAME ports for classic Amiga 68K run games up to year 1982 pretty well. With 68060 or Apollo 68080 and SuperAGA games up 1986 are viable. On Amiga with PPC you can play some late 1980-ies early 1990 games without frame skip.

Oric emulation works pretty well on MAME. There are only some Oric games, where the keyboard is not working.

[jotd]

with a fast gfx board you don't have chunky2planar speed issue. But it remains slow. Last time I checked it sucked playing MAME on 68060 with Pixel64 for instance (when DOOM worked with a very good frame rate) when a cheap Pentium 100 runs most classics at 60 fps... Maybe it's party a compiler issue. That's why I wanted to test on a modern gcc like this awesome Bebbo gcc 6 build.

Oric emulation works pretty well on MAME. There are only some Oric games, where the keyboard is not working.

glad to see that it was fixed. I forgot to mention that I reported this issue on MESS in 2006

[AmigaHope]

MAME was always going to need Amiga support regardless of it merging with MESS or not, because there are a number of arcade games that are just an A500 with a ROM expansion and arcade cabinet harness added.

https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob.../arsystems.cpp

[SquawkBox]

I do have access to a large chunk of Retroplay set of WHD'fyed games through a 15k enabled Hyperspin based ready made package that is offered on a French web site (Windows 7+ compliant). P-UAE was the core Tom used in Retroarch (unlike e.q. emulation of the Saturn, there are no other Amiga cores to choose from if you want to stick with Retroarch I assume). It lacks a few CD games that I would have loved to play from that "mamebox". He told me he was mostly done with it and that I could assemble a "DLC" if I wanted to.
As far as standard MAME development is concerned, I wouldn't raise my hopes about Amiga support to be improved anytime soon . On the other hand, P-UAE is being constantly updated. I was busy with testing other systems from that very box (Naomi etc.) these last weeks (make that months), so I didn't have a chance to play more than a couple of Amiga games that way, but it seems to work as intended.
Pretty amazing what one can do with a 40 quids (non-Trinitron, I insist) 90's CRT TV, a vga to scart cable, a special set of drivers and a directX 11 ready HD Radeon (and a dose of dedication). Now, if someone asked me if using P-UAE have any advantage over using e.q. FS-UAE in terms of accuracy, I actually couldn't say. Having said that, I would gladly look under the hood with tom's permission for bits and bolts that could help any of you with his own 15k setup, should the latter be dysfunctional or faulty.

[jotd]

MAME wasn't going to ignore the Amiga machine. Of course WinUAE is better, given the time & skill that Toni invested in.

Small anecdote: MAME 68k core is Musashi-based (another 68k emu). I used Musashi for another project and noticed that some instructions were buggy or missing. I fixed them and implemented some others (FPU, mainly), then could put them back in musashi base. The FPU additions that I had made made their way into MAME code base

Then I heard that MAME 68k core had completely refactored Musashi core, rendering ports from one to another very difficult. I wrote a python script (nothing much than regex search/replace, but helps) to make them match & allow merging. That's when I saw that MAME 68k core is waaaay more advanced & bugfixed than Musashi where it originates from, and I'm going to backport MAME changes into musashi

I could recently commit TRAPcc PC increasing bug in MAME too (already fixed in WinUAE since 4.4). Not sure it will be useful for anything MAME runs but...

In the meantime, WinUAE was always ahead in terms of accuracy for CPU or FPU instructions, thanks to cputester.

I was planning to use Toni cputester in MAME running amiga setup to cross check musashi core against cputester. I'm just too lazy to create even one simple MAME Amiga setup just for that.

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by jotd

I'm just too lazy to create even one simple MAME Amiga setup just for that.

That just sounds so contradictory to me after reading the rest of that story

[jotd]

you're right! but I hate configuring software. I prefer to write code

If someone has ideas/a tutorial that would be awesome

[gimbal]

Okay if you describe it like that I relate to it I have the same thing with my game hobby projects. I can get as far as making the game code work well including the level editor but if I have to make levels myself... it's end of the line.

In my current project I switched to trying to do random generation instead. I don't know what's worse. Having to create levels by hand or trying to click them together in code. What a mind job.

[coldacid]

Well, level design is a totally different set of skills than programming, so that's understandable. I don't mind doing the level design for my own projects but I know that someone else with the appropriate skills would blow my levels out of the water -- and I'm fine with that. (And of those two options, gimbal, the latter is worse. Trust me.)