mame MAME and Atari 2600?

[Thomas Jentzsch]

How do I start a ROM in MAME where the bankswitching type is detected wrong? Is there a commandline parameter where I can provide the bankswitching type?

[+Andrew Davie]

On 6/28/2020 at 12:04 AM, Thomas Jentzsch said:

How do I start a ROM in MAME where the bankswitching type is detected wrong? Is there a commandline parameter where I can provide the bankswitching type?

Not having used MAME myself, nonetheless, a bit of digging turned up a file named a2600.xml, and inside that...

 

<!-- Since the released cart is undumped, let us include at least these demos to test 3E bankswitch code -->
	<software name="bdash">
		<description>Boulder Dash (Demo v2)</description>
		<year>2014</year>
		<publisher>&lt;homebrew&gt;</publisher>
		<part name="cart" interface="a2600_cart">
			<feature name="slot" value="a26_3e" />
			<dataarea name="rom" size="32768">
				<rom name="boulder dash (demo 2).bin" size="32768" crc="2f7b6112" sha1="adcb4b38413ad6851a1562cacd376dbf25a4dd00"/>
			</dataarea>
			<dataarea name="ram" size="32768">
			</dataarea>
		</part>
	</software>

I reckon a similar entry would do the trick.

 

[Thomas Jentzsch]

Cool! Where did you find that?

[+Andrew Davie]

52 minutes ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

Cool! Where did you find that?

I downloaded MAME for MacOS, eventually figured out 'a2600' was the machine name for Atari 2600 (NTSC), did a web search on mame a2600 and somewhere saw a reference to 'a2600.xml'.  Then I did a search for that on my machine, found it in the 'hash' subdirectory. Opened with a text editor and found the above.

 

[Thomas Jentzsch]

I had looked into several subdirectories. But it never even remotely occurred to me, that 'hash' would contain anything useful.

[+Andrew Davie]

2 minutes ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

I had looked into several subdirectories. But it never even remotely occurred to me, that 'hash' would contain anything useful.

Well, I figure it has to be manually edited, not auto-generated, because of the comments regarding 3E support.

In any case, pretty fair assumption that 3E is working in MAME I'd say.

 

[+Karl G]

I'm curious what the interest is in using MAME for Atari 2600 emulation? Is it on a platform supposed by MAME but not Stella? 

[Thomas Jentzsch]

For me, I often check what other emulators can do to get inspiration for Stella.

[+bhall408]

On 6/28/2020 at 9:59 AM, Karl G said:

I'm curious what the interest is in using MAME for Atari 2600 emulation? Is it on a platform supposed by MAME but not Stella? 

We're using part of* the MAME 2600 support in Projet Argon for Android/Chromebook/Amazon/Raspberry Pi...

 

(*the BSD parts -- we had to bring in/provide our own replacements for the portions that are not under BSD license)

[Keatah]

On 6/28/2020 at 12:03 PM, Thomas Jentzsch said:

For me, I often check what other emulators can do to get inspiration for Stella.

 

Stella, like Altirra, is mainly feature-complete. I can think of some piddly stuff to add like..

 

1- customizable menu & rom selector colors. But whatever you do don't give up the green.

 

2- focus on CRT phosphor masks and other effects shaders like NTSC/RF noise and hiss. Geometry distortion like rounded CRT edges. MAME has some of that. So does Altirra. But the current effects are really nice and I have them all dialed in.

 

3- ability for the user to edit the rom database.

 

4- have the rom information screen show a crc or checksum of some kind.

 

Just kinda making shit up you know.