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New MAME release


mizapf

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3 hours ago, mizapf said:

try running with one of those options: "-video auto", "-video soft", "-video opengl", "-video bgfx". I did not encounter any problems. Do you have the guest additions installed?

Using the switch -video auto did the trick. Thanks. Should I install the guest additions though? I thought they were primarily needed for access to the host computer from virtualbox...

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42 minutes ago, mizapf said:

The guest additions enable 3D acceleration and USB 3.0 access. Without the guest additions, my virtual desktop did not resize itself when I changed the window size, and the background image was not shown. Also, the bgfx video did not work.

Got it, even though I have not had desktop resizing issues on my end without them. I'll install them.

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Interesting to see that the Raspi installer had more response than the Windows installer.

I already had a cross-platform MAME installer tool (written in Java) in mind, with this script as a precursor, but if there is only a couple of interested people...

 

Anyone tried it? Problems?

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1 hour ago, mizapf said:

Interesting to see that the Raspi installer had more response than the Windows installer.

I already had a cross-platform MAME installer tool (written in Java) in mind, with this script as a precursor, but if there is only a couple of interested people...

 

Anyone tried it? Problems?

I think having to install Cygwin in order to run an installer defeats the purpose. A plain zip file with everything included would be useful, but that would have to be maintained for each update, which is probably not something you want. ?

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I can imagine that a Java-based installer is somewhat easier to handle, although some people already have Cygwin on their machines. In the Java case I'd have to recommend to install a Java RE instead. I admit it is still not the easiest way of installing that you can imagine, but I may not distribute a MAME build together with the ROMs. However, we have them on WHTech, and they are on a fixed position, so using wget to pull them to your installation and unzip them is an effective way to go. And since the initial configuration is basically the same every time, a script can do that job pretty well. The advantage of Cygwin is that it brings wget and unzip with it, whereas if I tried to create something with, say, PowerShell, I don't know whether this contains those commands or an equivalent.

 

 

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5 hours ago, mizapf said:

I can imagine that a Java-based installer is somewhat easier to handle, although some people already have Cygwin on their machines. In the Java case I'd have to recommend to install a Java RE instead. I admit it is still not the easiest way of installing that you can imagine, but I may not distribute a MAME build together with the ROMs. However, we have them on WHTech, and they are on a fixed position, so using wget to pull them to your installation and unzip them is an effective way to go. And since the initial configuration is basically the same every time, a script can do that job pretty well. The advantage of Cygwin is that it brings wget and unzip with it, whereas if I tried to create something with, say, PowerShell, I don't know whether this contains those commands or an equivalent.

 

 

I removed Cygwin from my Windows PC as I've not used it much any more.  I do have the MAME build tools enviroment since I compile MAME from git frequently.   The MAME build tools enviroment uses c:\msys64 and I build in a Linux-like enviroment (win32env.bat).   Bash, test, wget are all available in this environment so I only needed to install unzip with "pacman -S unzip".  After that, I installed the  MAME executable to c:\mame0218b and copied your mameprep_cygwin file into that directory.  From the msys64 environment [MINGW64] c:\msys64\src, I cd'd to c:\mame0218b and executed "bash mameprep_cygwin".   Voila,everything worked as planned.   I have the "MAME Launchers" folder on my desktop and everything seems to work like the Rasbian install.

Edited by mdorman
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I hope you did not start yet ... I just updated the installer script on WHTech. As described above, download the MAME binary zip and the installer from https://ftp.whtech.com/emulators/MAME/full/windows/

 

Run the installer in Cygwin/MinGW in the directory where you unpacked MAME. It will create starter batch files for

  • TI-99/4A
    • with Editor/Assembler
    • with Extended Basic
    • with EVPC
    • with HSGPL
    • with EVPC and HSGPL
    • with P-Code system
  • SGCPU (TI-99/4P)
  • TI-99/2
  • TI-99/8
  • Geneve 9640

For all HSGPL support, it downloads a suitable NVRAM image that is automatically installed (no more installation marathon). For the Geneve, it downloads a bootable hard disk image, containing GeneveOS 6.50, GPL system, QDE, Editor/Assembler, Extended Basic, and TI Invaders images. For the UCSD system, it downloads the UCSD disks and mounts the Editor/Filer 1. For the Editor/Assembler, it downloads Disk A. All batch files are suitably configurated to be run without changes. You can, of course, use these files to create customized versions to your needs.

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Just a single video that shows how easy it has become to do the installation. I dare to say it's not going to become much easier :) . The sound is a bit chopped because VirtualBox has a heavy performance impact (about half as fast as the native system, at least here, running Windows as a guest), and the emulations cannot run at full speed.

 

Don't worry, I'm not going to turn this thread into a promotion channel (more than it is already now...). I'll return to MAME announcements after this.

 

The waiting times during installation are clipped, the real time from start to end is about 9 minutes.

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Hi Everyone,

 

Happy to report that I now have a MAME 0.219 going, as a TI-99/4 - and remarkably it runs TI-BASE properly.  It's the only emulator that has been able to do this and I've tried them all.  So, now that I have it running I'm hoping the team can help me with some questions.

 

1. Is there any way to set the clock speed of the machine to run faster than 3MHz?

2. Has anyone created an XB 2.7 Suite all in one cart for it?  (any way to extract such a cart from Classic99)  Can I steal cart .bin files, zip them up and use them?

3. What about access to FIAD or something of that nature?

4. Is the HW that I see at https://www.ninerpedia.org/wiki/MAME_TI_emulation_usage all there is?

 

Sorry for the many questions.  I have been running my large TI physical system in production as a DB machine for 36 years...  exciting to finally be getting serious about emulating it!

 

Thank you, Arthur...

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For DSDD access you have to use the HFDC or BwG controller.

 

There is no way to speed up the CPU. After all, we are trying hard to make it run at the exact physical speed. You won't believe how much work goes into that alone.

 

MAME can only access disk images; there is no way to access single files on the file system.

 

Ninerpedia may have outdated information. Have a look at https://www.mizapf.de/13-comp/49-tiemufeat

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I know standard carts can be packaged up for MAME, many have done so. Classic99 doesn't have a special cart "format", it just reads raw memory dumps, so for MAME you just need to produce the information file it requires.

 

I'm curious why Classic99 can't run TI-BASE, though - what issue are you hitting? I'd like to fix it.

 

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The 32k internal 16bit expansion is actually emulated in MAME. I just changed the default to the unexpanded console. The internal expansion can be selected in the OSD.

 

I am sorry if my above posting sounded somewhat terse, but this is easily explained: I am sitting in a hotel in the Alps for a week of skiing, and I have only my tablet here. It is truly a pain to type longer texts on a touch screen. So @aftyde, I hope you did not understand it wrong. Questions are always welcome.

 

Argh... and this text is already difficult enough to type. Hell must be some place where they take away your keyboard and force you to do debugging on a smartphone.

 

 

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17 hours ago, Tursi said:

I know standard carts can be packaged up for MAME, many have done so. Classic99 doesn't have a special cart "format", it just reads raw memory dumps, so for MAME you just need to produce the information file it requires.

 

I'm curious why Classic99 can't run TI-BASE, though - what issue are you hitting? I'd like to fix it.

 

Hi Tursi, it always boils down to diskette access.  However, I just downloaded the latest Classic99 and tried it with the DSK1 and DSK2 images I created for MAME and it works!  :)  (or appears to be working)  So for the moment - I am going to switch this over to Classic99 and experiment a bit more.  (as I much prefer Classic99) Could be the much smaller disk images I am testing with.

 

DSK1 and DSK2 are double sided, 40 track, 9 sec per track, single density 720 sectors total.  OK for a very small subset of the data I need on hand.

 

In the past - I would get device access errors or weirdness with anything bigger - as I recall.  It would help to know what formats of disk image Classic99 supports?  DSDD 40 or 80, 1440???  Hard disk image?  CF7 image?

 

Have been using Fred K's Ti99Dir to make images...

 

Ideally - I'm looking for a minimum of 2880 sectors (DSDD 80 track, 18 sectors) of space on a diskette as TI-BASE seems unable to work when I point it as HDX, SDS or some other large capacity device. 

 

The joy of running ancient software! 

 

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16 hours ago, mizapf said:

The 32k internal 16bit expansion is actually emulated in MAME. I just changed the default to the unexpanded console. The internal expansion can be selected in the OSD.

 

I am sorry if my above posting sounded somewhat terse, but this is easily explained: I am sitting in a hotel in the Alps for a week of skiing, and I have only my tablet here. It is truly a pain to type longer texts on a touch screen. So @aftyde, I hope you did not understand it wrong. Questions are always welcome.

 

Argh... and this text is already difficult enough to type. Hell must be some place where they take away your keyboard and force you to do debugging on a smartphone.

 

 

LOL - no worries.  I understand the requirement to pin the clock speed and get the predictable response just right - games would be unplayable and so forth.  At the moment - it seems like MAME might be able to give me some big storage options to experiment with.  I run a very large TI-BASE database - and am pushing the limits of what I can do with my physical Myarc DDCC w 80 track ROM - 2880 sectors at a minimum is what I need these days to run the whole system.

 

So ideally - I'm looking for tools that can support big storage images - and emulation options so I can carry the system around with me.

 

Enjoy the slopes!  :) 

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12 hours ago, aftyde said:

Hi Tursi, it always boils down to diskette access.  However, I just downloaded the latest Classic99 and tried it with the DSK1 and DSK2 images I created for MAME and it works!  :)  (or appears to be working)  So for the moment - I am going to switch this over to Classic99 and experiment a bit more.  (as I much prefer Classic99) Could be the much smaller disk images I am testing with.

 

DSK1 and DSK2 are double sided, 40 track, 9 sec per track, single density 720 sectors total.  OK for a very small subset of the data I need on hand.

 

In the past - I would get device access errors or weirdness with anything bigger - as I recall.  It would help to know what formats of disk image Classic99 supports?  DSDD 40 or 80, 1440???  Hard disk image?  CF7 image?

 

Have been using Fred K's Ti99Dir to make images...

 

Ideally - I'm looking for a minimum of 2880 sectors (DSDD 80 track, 18 sectors) of space on a diskette as TI-BASE seems unable to work when I point it as HDX, SDS or some other large capacity device. 

 

The joy of running ancient software! 

 

Can I get copies of your test disks and instructions for the steps that fail versus steps that work? I don't have TI BASE nor knowledge how to use it. (Maybe drop over to private message).

 

Classic99 has three completely different disk access systems, configurable per disk:

 

 - Files (FIAD) - files in a directory (as per V9T9) - there are no sectors here, this is files in the Windows file system with V9T9 or XMODEM (TIFILES) headers. There are no restrictions on number of files or filename length (although most TI software has limits ;) )
- Image (DSK) - Disk image - Classic99 supports any sector-based, TI-style image dump (SSSD, DSSD, SSDD, DSDD, CF7, and custom sizes) or original sized PC99 images (just the four original sizes). 

- TI Controller (DSK) - Disk Image using the TI controller ROM - this is for debugging software only and is not supported for general running (you can do it, but I'm not interested in solving issues with it). Only works on DSK1, DSK2 or DSK3, and only supports SSSD and DSSD. That's TI's restriction, not mine. ;)

 

Hard drive images are not supported. I don't like image formats. I also use TI99Dir so that shouldn't be an issue.

 

We'll jump out of your thread shortly, Mizapf! ;)

 

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Just wanted to say, that it's absolutely fantastic, that MAME can emulate the "C64 Final Chesscard" since about half a year now. Really Superb !!! :thumbsup:

 

I waited since a long time for a "C64 Chesscard" emulation and now it's here. Just found this out, some days ago.

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Fantastic and easy to install

(did it on windows 7 - 64 bit)

and I also saw that the other TI-roms are there, like TI-99/4 and TI-99/4A-QI, maybe good to add them to the .bat list as well

UCSD Pascal P-code card, somehow I cannot get the MAME-menu by pressing TAB to set the dip-switch to boot this card.

 

Furthermore I opened all to show the TI titlescreens and menu page.

 

59118211_ScreenHunter_291Mar_0419_49.thumb.jpg.11bc08188f747dcc6075eaaa9b0eabca.jpg

 

130653109_ScreenHunter_290Mar_0419_47.thumb.jpg.01dc0e5c8755c29bafcc8c6f929367af.jpg

 

20200304_195253.thumb.jpg.daf448f2abba1630ee88c6e6d90f9a74.jpg

 

20200304_195146.thumb.jpg.465b219291cfb4202ab70b618a29b10e.jpg

Edited by globeron
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On 3/4/2020 at 2:02 PM, globeron said:

UCSD Pascal P-code card, somehow I cannot get the MAME-menu by pressing TAB to set the dip-switch to boot this card.

There is nothing particular with that one; ScrlLock should toggle the keyboard emulation mode, and TAB opens the OSD in partial mode. Does ScrlLock work?

 

Another well-suited key for the keyboard mode could be the Enter key from the number pad ("-uimodekey ENTER_PAD" or set this property in mame.ini).

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On 3/7/2020 at 9:21 PM, mizapf said:

There is nothing particular with that one; ScrlLock should toggle the keyboard emulation mode, and TAB opens the OSD in partial mode. Does ScrlLock work?

 

Another well-suited key for the keyboard mode could be the Enter key from the number pad ("-uimodekey ENTER_PAD" or set this property in mame.ini).

The scr lock to full keyboard emulation did the trick to get the tab key to work and set the dip switch

 

20200312_211331.thumb.jpg.cbbabd22e127d47dc6be502fb5661474.jpg20200312_211412.thumb.jpg.5d1035530903504e28392b3a7edb3cbf.jpg20200312_211351.thumb.jpg.e96a00a7b13ab28050e0787c5ef67e6b.jpg20200312_211406.thumb.jpg.0e66b9c3a079e3cfb5e3c8bb21d7065c.jpg

20200312_211358.jpg

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