MAME just bloated up again.. Post new mame bloat here.

[Keatah]

..this time they're doing some bullshit development system for microprocessors. Probably buggy as all hell and therefore useless too.

 

 

 

[BillyHW]

Who the hell thought it was a good idea to merge MESS and MAME?

[Keatah]

Some idiot with "pet-project" mentality. The kind that push things through regardless if its a good idea or not. It J U S T H A S to happen! Maybe a politician in disguise?!?

 

---

 

While I admire the talent in the project. I do not admire the management there. IMHO the whole project needs to stop right now. And everything be reevaluated. So much could be done so much better. Even my own butthole is smarter, it can separate poo from farts. And is careful with releasing things.

Edited August 6, 2017 by Keatah

[mr_me]

Here's a mame version without computers, consoles, or pinball machines (windows only).

http://arcade.mameworld.info/

 

When mame and mess merged it went from about 25MB to 50MB. It's still small. My rom set of arcade games is a thousand times bigger.

[+DrVenkman]

​My biggest issue with MAME for the past couple years is THEY RELEASE TOO DAMNED OFTEN! Monthly releases is just absurd. They long-ago should've gone the way most projects operate - a major release whenever warranted (maybe yearly), and an experimental branch that releases every few weeks when it's worthwhile. Along the way, they should've revamped the ROM management/cataloging aspect to make it understandable and usable by people who just want to play some damn games. It shouldn't matter what version of MAME you're using, a properly-configured filed named GALAGA.ZIP or whatever should just load and play f*#)$) game, not pop up some stupid warning, requiring to you to spend an hour or three googling only to uncover the GALAGA.ZIP" you have is missing some piece of cruft added to emulate the particular brand of particle board and speaker magnets used ....

[Osgeld]

I use advancemame which is on 0.167

 

I use it on my linux running atom based bartop which boots deviant logs in and fires up the menu no x no desktop bare bones

 

Works well and has all the games I give a scrap about not mess not pachinko not pinball (though I do love pinball machines)

[Keatah]

I'm not too concerned with frequent monthly updates. If they want to waste their time, it's theirs to waste. I may update my rig every year or two or something like that. If a mame release has something I want right now I have no problem with setting up a specific folder to support that one title.

[mr_me]

When they first merged mame and mess I didn't like it and found versions that kept them seperate and upto date. Now I just use the combined version; it's simpler for me.

[S1500]

I wish they would just work on the GUI a bit. Make it smoother. Make it friendlier. Everything just seems like stubs that a developer might not ever get to. Somehow, I managed to get all my arcade ROMs, and even an obscure console to work, but it wasn't easy.

 

What strikes me as odd is they are trying to emulate just about every electronic device for the past 50 years. I don't see why it needs Mattel Electronic Football emulated.

[mr_me]

I was surprised when they first included the GUI; it is a cross-platform program. I still use the gui in MameUI64; I like it alot but it is Windows only. Electronic games aren't a bad idea if they are playable. They have pinball machine computers emulated that you cant play without a pinball machine. Maybe someone writing pinball simulators can use it. Then there are alot of things in there that I dont even know what they are or do; might require hardware like pinball.

Edited August 7, 2017 by mr_me

[S1500]

There is the separate PinMAME used with Visual Pinball where you can use it, but why include it with MAME? It's not playable there. Strange.

 

The "filter" option always gets me. When you check a box, it removes those form the view. So check to filter OUT games. I always had it thought backwards until now. Again, it could use some clarification.

[Tanooki]

​My biggest issue with MAME for the past couple years is THEY RELEASE TOO DAMNED OFTEN! Monthly releases is just absurd. They long-ago should've gone the way most projects operate - a major release whenever warranted (maybe yearly), and an experimental branch that releases every few weeks when it's worthwhile. Along the way, they should've revamped the ROM management/cataloging aspect to make it understandable and usable by people who just want to play some damn games. It shouldn't matter what version of MAME you're using, a properly-configured filed named GALAGA.ZIP or whatever should just load and play f*#)$) game, not pop up some stupid warning, requiring to you to spend an hour or three googling only to uncover the GALAGA.ZIP" you have is missing some piece of cruft added to emulate the particular brand of particle board and speaker magnets used ....

That's why 15 years ago now I stopped using MAME entirely. I got what they were doing unlike a lot who got confused, but what infuriated me to no end was the weekly updates where some 'genius' jerk would decide they didn't like the way a ROM set had all the files named within so they'd change it to something else to make room for yet another set revision that was supported. No, couldn't just have that new set have its own name, you had to go and play a nice asinine digital equivalent of 52 card pick up. Basically it forced people to just erase their stuff and download another full set over and over and over again. I got fed up doing more maintenance than using of things. The horrors of that stupidity remain today, even certain programs I can't even get to detect legitimate rom sets because MAME deemed them slightly something else or decided to rename a few files or whatever (ie: Neo Geo not working in Retroarch or other offshoots using a MAME core.) They've made repeated stupid/bad design decisions going on probably now nearly 20 years. And what's bad now compared to 15years ago, you go from like a >100MB set of total files to download in a zip to now like what 20GB? Totally unacceptable. I'm still trying to track down a set of Neo Geo MVS board they think are correct without grabbing that huge file when I want like 1-2% of it's contents.

[zzip]

I've often been baffled by the priorities of the Mame team. It's like they want to add emulation for everything under the sun, even if it's not video game hardware, but then they never seem to go back and fix broken emulation they added in the past (like Jaguar)

 

But in spite of adding all that bloat, they can't bother keep the code that would allow users to still load their old rom-sets when newer dumps become available. This has been a major headache for upgrading Mame

[zzip]

That's why 15 years ago now I stopped using MAME entirely. I got what they were doing unlike a lot who got confused, but what infuriated me to no end was the weekly updates where some 'genius' jerk would decide they didn't like the way a ROM set had all the files named within so they'd change it to something else to make room for yet another set revision that was supported. No, couldn't just have that new set have its own name, you had to go and play a nice asinine digital equivalent of 52 card pick up. Basically it forced people to just erase their stuff and download another full set over and over and over again. I got fed up doing more maintenance than using of things. The horrors of that stupidity remain today, even certain programs I can't even get to detect legitimate rom sets because MAME deemed them slightly something else or decided to rename a few files or whatever (ie: Neo Geo not working in Retroarch or other offshoots using a MAME core.) They've made repeated stupid/bad design decisions going on probably now nearly 20 years. And what's bad now compared to 15years ago, you go from like a >100MB set of total files to download in a zip to now like what 20GB? Totally unacceptable. I'm still trying to track down a set of Neo Geo MVS board they think are correct without grabbing that huge file when I want like 1-2% of it's contents.

yeah and then on one hand they tell you "Mame is about preservation, and does not condone piracy in anyway. Do not run the game if you don't own the roms!"

 

but then on the other hand, when people complain about the rom naming changes, they say "Just go download the new roms!" (from the seedy rom sites that encourage piracy)

[bradhig1]

mousetrap doesn't work due to missing roms. Exidy shooters don't have collision detection anymore. Lazarian sounds haven't been fixed ,and astro fantasia colors are wrong all while they add games and screw up perfectly working ones. It went downhill after retrograde was discontinued. The preservationists are ruining Mame trying to make everything perfect. we need another emulator to challenge mame.

[Tanooki]

Hah yeah I remember that -- hypocritical ass coverage.

 

Oh and here's a good one. Back for the 25th anniversary of the Neo Geo, SNK got together with DOTemu to put up 23 emulated copies of their arcade games for a humble bundle sale. Unlike the Android releases which have some hacked together and otherwise tweaked/combined ROMs, the PC releases are stock ripped from the boards copies of the actual game chips popped into a ZIP file for distribution.

 

Imagine that, those very ROMS do NOT work in any MAME build and are not (and probably likely never will be) supported. They'd tell me to go download the ROMS too, the ones their majesties decided are the 'right' ones. Like SNK has no clue what is a correct ROM set to their own boards. Whatever right? I've tried throwing the standard public dumps of games at MAME (Retroarch) and even the SNK drops from that archive and neither work -- Retroarch refuses so much to even see them on a directory scan coming up as blank. That's what got me hot about it after ignoring MAME for over 15 years. Seems to me a case of selective preservation.

[NE146]

Here's a mame version without computers, consoles, or pinball machines (windows only).

http://arcade.mameworld.info/

 

When mame and mess merged it went from about 25MB to 50MB. It's still small. My rom set of arcade games is a thousand times bigger.

Thanks.. looks good, but it seemed to be missing some games or is it me? For some reason the first game I looked out for was Marine Date (to see if it had any improvements yet), and it's not listed. Go figure.

[DanBoris]

I've often been baffled by the priorities of the Mame team. It's like they want to add emulation for everything under the sun, even if it's not video game hardware, but then they never seem to go back and fix broken emulation they added in the past (like Jaguar)

 

But in spite of adding all that bloat, they can't bother keep the code that would allow users to still load their old rom-sets when newer dumps become available. This has been a major headache for upgrading Mame

 

The way thy MAME team worked in the past when I was active, and I assume it still works this way, is that there are just a large group of people who contribute the game/system drivers and they work on whatever most interests them. There is no one handing out tasks for people to work on so there is no single entity setting priorities. If someone worked on a driver for a while but lost interest before the bugs were worked out, no one is going to tell them they have to finish that before they move on to something else.

 

Not supporting older rom-sets is actually a good thing, since it encourages people to get rid of the inaccurate sets thus helping to preserve the more accurate ones. In an ideal would you wouldn't want any invalid ROM images to be floating around on the net, only ones that were correct.

[BillyHW]

via Imgflip Meme Generator

[zzip]

The way thy MAME team worked in the past when I was active, and I assume it still works this way, is that there are just a large group of people who contribute the game/system drivers and they work on whatever most interests them. There is no one handing out tasks for people to work on so there is no single entity setting priorities. If someone worked on a driver for a while but lost interest before the bugs were worked out, no one is going to tell them they have to finish that before they move on to something else.

That makes sense. Still it surprises me that they can find people interested in emulating some really obscure pieces of coin-op hardware but can't find anyone interested enough to fix the fairly mainstream systems that are still broken in the MESS portion.

 

 

Not supporting older rom-sets is actually a good thing, since it encourages people to get rid of the inaccurate sets thus helping to preserve the more accurate ones. In an ideal would you wouldn't want any invalid ROM images to be floating around on the net, only ones that were correct.

I would disagree a bit. I think what they should do is give the user a warning to the effect that this romset is deprecated and may be discontinued in the future if the code that supports it breaks. For the most supported romset, obtain "xx"

 

And the romset names should never change, instead they should be appended with a dump revision like pacman pacman_d02 pacman_d03. That would minimize all the confusion of which romset named "pacman" goes with which version of Mame, and what does it need to be named to work-- which causes so much frustration right now.

[+wongojack]

Even my own butthole is smarter, it can separate poo from farts. And is careful with releasing things.

 

I'm going to reuse this

[bradhig1]

can't even find the mousetrap files on usenet or torrents.

[jce3000gt]

So, being really out of touch with arcade and MAME in general for the last 10 years I'm not missing anything? Was about to update all of my emulators to current versions in preparation of my PC emulation machine and I cannot remember if FBA runs all that I play but if it isn't NG/CPS I only have interest in some Midway stuff (NBA Jam, MK, etc). Should I keep my decade old MAME (not sure which version) and ignore all of these new releases?

[Keatah]

There have been improvements in accuracy and video rendering options. There is no reason not to have more than 1 version going. Try it out and see for yourself.

[jce3000gt]

There have been improvements in accuracy and video rendering options. There is no reason not to have more than 1 version going. Try it out and see for yourself.

 

Should I hunt for one that only had improvements in the literal 3-4 non CPS/NeoGeo arcade games I play? I doubt Mortal Kombat, NBA Jam, Pac-Man, and Galaxian have had much improvement in the last 10 years. LOL Otherwise I could probably stick to Final Burn Alpha for almost everything else and the older MAME for the aforementioned.