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MAME 0.223 Released!


Tafoid

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MAME 0.223

 

MAME 0.223 has finally arrived, and what a release it is – there’s definitely something for everyone!  Starting with some of the more esoteric additions, Linus Åkesson’s AVR-based hardware chiptune project and Power Ninja Action Challenge demos are now supported.  These demos use minimal hardware to generate sound and/or video, relying on precise CPU timings to work.  With this release, every hand-held LCD game from Nintendo’s Game & Watch and related lines is supported in MAME, with Donkey Kong Hockey bringing up the rear.  Also of note is the Bassmate Computer fishing aid, made by Nintendo and marketed by Telko and other companies, which is clearly based on the dual-screen Game & Watch design.  The steady stream of TV games hasn’t stopped, with a number of French releases from Conny/VideoJet among this month’s batch.

 

For the first time ever, games running on the Barcrest MPU4 video system are emulated well enough to be playable.  Titles that are now working include several games based on the popular British TV game show The Crystal Maze, Adders and Ladders, The Mating Game, and Prize Tetris.  In a clear win for MAME’s modular architecture, the breakthrough came through the discovery of a significant flaw in our Motorola MC6840 Programmable Timer Module emulation that was causing issues for the Fairlight CMI IIx synthesiser.  In the same manner, the Busicom 141-PF desk calculator is now working, thanks to improvements made to Intel 4004 CPU emulation that came out of emulating the INTELLEC 4 development system and the prototype 4004-based controller board for Flicker pinball.  The Busicom 141-PF is historically significant, being the first application of Intel’s first microprocessor.

Fans of classic vector arcade games are in for a treat this month.  Former project coordinator Aaron Giles has contributed netlist-based sound emulation for thirteen Cinematronics vector games: Space War, Barrier, Star Hawk, Speed Freak, Star Castle, War of the Worlds, Sundance, Tail Gunner, Rip Off, Armor Attack, Warrior, Solar Quest and Boxing Bugs.  This resolves long-standing issues with the previous simulation based on playing recorded samples.  Colin Howell has also refined the sound emulation for Midway’s 280-ZZZAP and Gun Fight.

 

V.Smile joystick inputs are now working for all dumped cartridges, and with fixes for ROM bank selection the V.Smile Motion software is also usable.  The accelerometer-based V.Smile Motion controller is not emulated, but the software can all be used with the standard V.Smile joystick controller.  Another pair of systems with inputs that now work is the original Macintosh (128K/512K/512Ke) and Macintosh Plus.  These systems’ keyboards are now fully emulated, including the separate numeric keypad available for the original Macintosh, the Macintosh Plus keyboard with integrated numeric keypad, and a few European ISO layout keyboards for the original Macintosh.  There are still some emulation issues, but you can play Beyond Dark Castle with MAME’s Macintosh Plus emulation again.

 

In other home computer emulation news, MAME’s SAM Coupé driver now supports a number of peripherals that connect to the rear expansion port, a software list containing IRIX hard disk installations for SGI MIPS workstations has been added, and tape loading now works for the Specialist system (a DIY computer designed in the USSR).

 

Of course, there’s far more to enjoy, and you can read all about it in the whatsnew.txt file, or get the source and 64-bit Windows binary packages from the download page.

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2 hours ago, Keatah said:

Bloating up s'more with CLAWGRIP crap.. When will it stop?!?! And those software lists? They can never be finished, they don't even begin to cover the 17,000+ Apple II titles!

 

It is all part of the progress.. a dump of a machine is documentation.  MAME welcomes anything that runs on a cpu or not.  New and unique additions only add to the lure for many programmers to explore, learn and make the machines work in emulation.  Apple 2/E/C Titles number 3400+ right about now with more added every release as they are being dumped and cracked properly and pushed to archive.org under "4AM Crack" and "Woz-a-Day" collections among others.  MAME also often adds notable released prototypes as well for all consoles.  Softlists are for helping the user experience by documenting software available and increasing use/testing cases.  Not entirely sure why this needs to be a negative as they are not at all required unless you care to use them.

 

My advice is to keep that glass half full rather than half empty.

 

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I suppose so..

 

Maybe the magic of "early-days" MAME is gone. I know thousands of people no longer look at it as a wondrous thing. A magical thing. Which actually applies to all emulation. It's just commonplace now.

 

What would renew my excitement would be emulation of the C-380 Video Pinball & Breakout console. And all of the early Mattel RED LED games like AutoRacing, Football, Basketball, Baseball, and others.

 

And so would the TRS-80 Pocket Computer series. There's Pockemul, for now. But it's rather rough. One can wish.

 

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7 hours ago, Keatah said:

I suppose so..

 

Maybe the magic of "early-days" MAME is gone. I know thousands of people no longer look at it as a wondrous thing. A magical thing. Which actually applies to all emulation. It's just commonplace now.

 

What would renew my excitement would be emulation of the C-380 Video Pinball & Breakout console. And all of the early Mattel RED LED games like AutoRacing, Football, Basketball, Baseball, and others.

 

And so would the TRS-80 Pocket Computer series. There's Pockemul, for now. But it's rather rough. One can wish.

 

 

That's fair.  For a lot of people the magic of being steamrolled by release after release of new arcade machines is pretty much gone.  Periodically, a new prototype or something long known of but finally dumped will show up but mostly what is added in the arcade spectrum are different regions of existing machines and a fair amount of bootlegs.  Other non-arcade targets allow for more magical moments as experienced by some with all the recent Game and Watch additions.  Some computers in recent memory worked on are also finding a following such as the Sony NEWS computers, Sun Microsystems + SparcStation and Intergraph's Interpro/Interserve.  It is nice to see you have targets for MAME which are not within its original "arcade" scope.  Everything you've listed seems like a valid target for emulation and should be possible provided the data contained can be electronically dumped or decapsulated in some way.  The TRS-80 Pocket Computers, as I understand, are essentially rebranded Sharp and Casio Pocket Computers.  Many of those original models are in MAME but do not appear to be in a fully usable state currently.  I'm sure over time that will change.

 

 

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I'm not a fan of joining MAME and MESS, but I understand that there were reasons important to the devs. So I can just set some filters and it's not a big deal.

 

And I'm more than pleased there are people who try to electronically replicate even the most obscure systems. For me that's magic all right :)

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14 hours ago, Keatah said:

Bloating up s'more with CLAWGRIP crap.. When will it stop?!?! And those software lists? They can never be finished, they don't even begin to cover the 17,000+ Apple II titles!

I just don't understand why it all needs to be in a single binary.    The full binary is now so large that there is a perceptible lag in loading it.   I know you can build mame-only or mess-only which helps,  but I wish it were easier to filter out the arcade systems I have no interest in..   I need maybe 2% of what Mame and Mess supports.   Maybe it is easy to do that but I don't know where the instructions are.

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I understand the current system is rather versatile and whatnot -  but I still want to see more simplicity and clarity in configurations/settings. More in-depth description of the .ini priorities and hierarchies. What overrides what. Where they're stored. It's like BGFX settings tweaked through the menu aren't saved, but other settings are. Things like that. Consistency. Seems I always need to review any ol'arbitrary setup before making changes, less so with other emulators. Significantly less so.

 

It's like there's too much drilling down. There's Configure Options, Configure Machine, Plugins.. And sub-menus within sub-menus under each of those, and more.

 

There's like 5 different places to configure or define controls, some are global and affect all games, some affect one game.. Same with vector effects. Which .ini file overrides the other? Which is global? And what is their priority/order.

 

Well.. I suppose the worst thing is the not saving of the BGFX settings. Though the impression that they ARE saved is given.

 

1st world problems!

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15 hours ago, Keatah said:

I suppose so..

 

Maybe the magic of "early-days" MAME is gone. I know thousands of people no longer look at it as a wondrous thing. A magical thing. Which actually applies to all emulation. It's just commonplace now.

In the early days, every emulator release brought something new to the table and you were able to play things you couldn't before.

 

Nowadays, many systems have one or two very mature emulators capable of running 99+% of its software library correctly,  and new releases happen once a year or less.   And when they happen, they aren't groundbreaking.

 

What could bring excitement back is if people tackled emulation for systems that never got perfect emulators.   Apple IIgs and Atari Jaguar + Falcon come to mind, but I'm sure there are many others.

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1 minute ago, zzip said:

What could bring excitement back is if people tackled emulation for systems that never got perfect emulators.   Apple IIgs and Atari Jaguar + Falcon come to mind, but I'm sure there are many others.

 

Proper and complete emulation for the IIgs would be a great thing. I especially believe that in these times, some 30 or 40 years after a machine has been manufactured, emulation is becoming more and more important. But in different ways. Additional ways. Despite any misgivings I may have expressed..

 

Emulation serves as an interactive reference & tutorial sandbox that behaves like the original machine and allows for testing and familiarization with real hardware. There've been many-a times I tried stuff in MS-DOS (PC-EM or DOSbox) prior to doing it on my original 486 rig. Experimenting and throwing around ideas is often faster with emulation.

 

What I want to see next is printer emulation when printer output goes straight into a PDF. Ohh I've heard of  half-assed implementations where it can be done with a litany of procedures, additional software, and tedious/fragile setups. Yeh. Just. No..

 

PR#1

<run the program & do the work>

Bam! There's the 8.5" x 11" output!

 

That's what I expect.

 

 

 

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Now I have a bona-fide MAME question. How can BGFX sliders be adjusted while viewing the resulting output? Do I need 2 monitors for this? Or is there a way to adjust Alpha in order to see the game under the sliders menu?

 

Very tedious adjusting a parameter, checking the results, and going back to adjust the same parameter again. Especially when it's on the last page.

 

For example, emulator Stella has hot-keys that let you adjust brightness and pallette and other effects options without obscuring the game screen.

 

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10 hours ago, zzip said:

I just don't understand why it all needs to be in a single binary.    The full binary is now so large that there is a perceptible lag in loading it.   I know you can build mame-only or mess-only which helps,  but I wish it were easier to filter out the arcade systems I have no interest in..   I need maybe 2% of what Mame and Mess supports.   Maybe it is easy to do that but I don't know where the instructions are.

I run recent Mame on a computer that's fifteen years old.  I haven't noticed any startup lag and the download isn't all that big.  The rom set is huge.

 

It's been so long since Mess was merged.  I didn't like it at first but now find it super convenient as I now use Mame for not only arcade machines but for home systems as well.

 

Still waiting for the intellivision emulator bugs to be fixed and the keyboard component emulation to be finished.

 

5 hours ago, Keatah said:

Now I have a bona-fide MAME question. How can BGFX sliders be adjusted while viewing the resulting output? Do I need 2 monitors for this? Or is there a way to adjust Alpha in order to see the game under the sliders menu?

 

Very tedious adjusting a parameter, checking the results, and going back to adjust the same parameter again. Especially when it's on the last page.

 

For example, emulator Stella has hot-keys that let you adjust brightness and pallette and other effects options without obscuring the game screen.

 

Best to ask here.

https://forums.bannister.org/ubbthreads.php?ubb=postlist&Board=1&page=1

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10 hours ago, zzip said:

I just don't understand why it all needs to be in a single binary.    The full binary is now so large that there is a perceptible lag in loading it.   I know you can build mame-only or mess-only which helps,  but I wish it were easier to filter out the arcade systems I have no interest in..   I need maybe 2% of what Mame and Mess supports.   Maybe it is easy to do that but I don't know where the instructions are.

 

Well, yes - 400MB of data (binary/symbols) is not an instant load the first time especially if you have MAME on an external USB drive or device.  Successive runs once cached should be nearly instant to start.  As far as options to make smaller binaries containing only desired machines, there is a "tiny" subtarget which only builds what is needed for support for the free ROMs listed at mamedev.org (those which are free for non-commercial use).  You can also use the SOURCES= flag in your MAKE string to compile only certain drivers which contains, again, machines you wish to have part of the compile.

 

As an example, you can opt to only compile neogeo games (neogeo.cpp).  Pulling from the Batch File which is used by MAMEDEV to compile its integer binaries from,  you can use the following MAKE assuming you have a proper environment set up to do so:

 

>  make SUBTARGET=neogeo TOOLS=1 SEPARATE_BIN=1 PTR64=1 OPTIMIZE=3 SYMBOLS=1 SYMLEVEL=1 REGENIE=1 -j9 SOURCES=src/mame/drivers/neogeo.cpp

 

The only thing you'd need to likely adjust is where -j9 is and change it to match your system.  Best way to come up with the j value to use is to determine amount of cores your have and add 1 - the compilation will use that many threads in an effort to do the job as quickly as possible.  Please note that if in Windows, linking may take a LONG TIME to do, especially on 64-bit compiles.

 

Hopefully this will give you a start.

You can get more info at MAMEDEV

 

 

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6 hours ago, Keatah said:

I understand the current system is rather versatile and whatnot -  but I still want to see more simplicity and clarity in configurations/settings. More in-depth description of the .ini priorities and hierarchies. What overrides what. Where they're stored. It's like BGFX settings tweaked through the menu aren't saved, but other settings are. Things like that. Consistency. Seems I always need to review any ol'arbitrary setup before making changes, less so with other emulators. Significantly less so.

 

It's like there's too much drilling down. There's Configure Options, Configure Machine, Plugins.. And sub-menus within sub-menus under each of those, and more.

 

There's like 5 different places to configure or define controls, some are global and affect all games, some affect one game.. Same with vector effects. Which .ini file overrides the other? Which is global? And what is their priority/order.

 

Well.. I suppose the worst thing is the not saving of the BGFX settings. Though the impression that they ARE saved is given.

 

1st world problems!

 

There is agreement that the built-in/internal UI isn't a perfect solution.  Stuff has been added it the code that was original submitted was sort of crammed into the sourcecode and hasn't really been rewritten.  In order to do so, it will take a lot of laying waste and rebuilding from the ground up which will no doubt carry along its own unique bugs.  For most casual users, though, the current UI gives you a solid base from which to start your MAME journey and works well for many people. 

 

Sadly though, yes, a majority of the slider values that deal shaders as well as sliders related to use of CHEAT (over/underclocking of CPUs) are for various logistical reasons unable to be saved easily.  The best way currently to deal with those shader settings is to adjust current screen, see your adjustments in real time and jot down on paper the new values, exit MAME, make the adjustments in your mame or machinename.ini file then restart to see them saved.  You can view .ini/.cfg read order detailed in the MAMEDEV Docs and also see attempts to read for settings using -verbose command-line trigger.

 

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6 hours ago, zzip said:

In the early days, every emulator release brought something new to the table and you were able to play things you couldn't before.

 

Nowadays, many systems have one or two very mature emulators capable of running 99+% of its software library correctly,  and new releases happen once a year or less.   And when they happen, they aren't groundbreaking.

 

What could bring excitement back is if people tackled emulation for systems that never got perfect emulators.   Apple IIgs and Atari Jaguar + Falcon come to mind, but I'm sure there are many others.

 

I think many people would be happy for any stable Jaguar solution.  Currently flagged as NOT_WORKING, it actually has a decent handful of games which boot and perfectly playable among them being, my favorite, Tempest 2000.  Apple IIgs actually is not flagged with anything determental and I can boot a game from the softlist when I recently tested it.  It may not be perfect but it appears to be functional once you add the proper gameio slot device in menu.  Atari ST/Falcon emulation isn't too far along.  Supposedly there are CPU core reasons why things have not progress farther.

 

You can keep track of status of things by viewing this links - MACHINE_NOT_WORKING

 

0000.png

0002.png

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On 8/7/2020 at 8:20 PM, Tafoid said:

As an example, you can opt to only compile neogeo games (neogeo.cpp).  Pulling from the Batch File which is used by MAMEDEV to compile its integer binaries from,  you can use the following MAKE assuming you have a proper environment set up to do so:

 

>  make SUBTARGET=neogeo TOOLS=1 SEPARATE_BIN=1 PTR64=1 OPTIMIZE=3 SYMBOLS=1 SYMLEVEL=1 REGENIE=1 -j9 SOURCES=src/mame/drivers/neogeo.cpp

lets say I wanted to make a small binary that can run a handful of games, but using different subtargets    Maybe Pac-man, Donkey Kong, Frogger

 

Can such a build be done? 

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45 minutes ago, zzip said:

lets say I wanted to make a small binary that can run a handful of games, but using different subtargets    Maybe Pac-man, Donkey Kong, Frogger

 

Can such a build be done? 

Run the game you are interested in creating a 'tiny' build MAME. 

Press the 'TAB' button and go to "Machine Information". 

Reference the driver being used and substitute for the neogeo.cpp.

 

For Pac-Man = pacman.cpp.  For Donkey Kong = dkong.cpp.  For Frogger = galaxian.cpp.

 

Pac-Man.PNG.c4423924cf9b301c82b9a2c89536ebe2.PNG

1491142429_DonkeyKong.PNG.e91774afc94741c3dda37453b5e02f19.PNG

Frogger.PNG.d16c19cd267896eae4d683c69fb1da14.PNG

 

To compile multiple drivers, separate each reference with a comma, no space.

 

I.E. SOURCES=src/mame/drivers/pacman.cpp,src/mame/machine/dkong.cpp,src/mame/machine/dkong.cpp

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On 8/7/2020 at 8:51 PM, Tafoid said:

I think many people would be happy for any stable Jaguar solution.  Currently flagged as NOT_WORKING, it actually has a decent handful of games which boot and perfectly playable among them being, my favorite, Tempest 2000.  Apple IIgs actually is not flagged with anything determental and I can boot a game from the softlist when I recently tested it.  It may not be perfect but it appears to be functional once you add the proper gameio slot device in menu.  Atari ST/Falcon emulation isn't too far along.  Supposedly there are CPU core reasons why things have not progress farther.

I know the MESS Jaguar emulation can run some games fairly well.   The Virtual Jaguar emulator can run some games Mess can't and Vice Versa,  neither can run the entire library.  There's a Russian Jaguar emulator that has high compatibility, but forces you to use its own front-end.  (I want something that I can use with my front end).  So there's no perfect Jaguar emulator

 

With IIgs I found the quality of the emulators across the board rather poor, even though I did manage to get them running some software.

 

Atari ST has great emulators,  Falcon not so much.  Hatari has some Falcon emulation, but it's not 100%

 

The problem I've seen using Mess/Mame for running home computer emulation is that computers are complex beasts with lots of options -- different memory sizes, different OS revisions, different media types (cart, cassette, disk, hard disk image, host hard disk etc), emulate a TV vs hi-res monitor,  and the list goes on and on.   Mess doesn't have the flexibility to deal with all of these options and will usually emulate a fixed configuration instead.    Usually there's a standalone emulator that better handles all these options, so I only use Mess as a fallback.

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On 8/10/2020 at 9:08 AM, zzip said:

Do I need to specify a subtarget as well, and does it take a comma separated list?

SUBTARGET not needed.  For example, with a command line as follows: 

make -j5 SEPARATE_BIN=1 PTR64=1 OPTIMIZE=3 SYMBOLS=1 SYMLEVEL=1 STRIP_SYMBOLS=1 REGENIE=1 SOURCES=src/mame/drivers/pacman.cpp,src/mame/drivers/dkong.cpp,src/mame/drivers/galaxian.cpp

The above generates a build file named the same as the main executable mame64.exe, just a lot smaller (~40MB vs ~270MB), and only incorporated the games (400) that leverage those drivers.  

 

If SUBTARGET=tiny is added, the same build is created with just the executable named differently, tiny64.exe. 

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