Shmupmame 4.2: Lagless Mars Matrix, Strikers 1945, Galaga 88

[GaijinPunch]

The only thing left now is sound in Dogyuun & V-V and we can all just give up on the hobby!

[PsikyoFan]

Currently there are a few drivers that I want to "patch" but have no clue how to do make these work, these drivers are:

Code: Select all

seibuspi.c  (Raiden Fighters hardware)
neogeo.c  (Neogeo...)

For seibuspi.c - the game performs the buffering - triggering the copying of the spriteram via dma. The only way you might be able to change this is instead of waiting for the DMA to be triggered, to directly write each sprite to the dma address. Might be fiddly to make it work, and the liklihood of side-effects is much higher.

neogeo.c - I'm not touching that with a bargepole, if you even look at it that the raster effects will fall apart quicker than you can say Mushihimesama.

[captpain]

What do I do if a game asks for an eeprom?

[evil_ash_xero]

So, does this work with Garegga? It stll seemed a little "off" to me.

[dmauro]

I couldn't find cabmame for 129, so I'm just gonna roll this up with the cabmame diff hacks as a 137 build if anyone wants the binary when I'm done. I'll post back on how it works.

[azinth]

So, does this work with Garegga? It stll seemed a little "off" to me.

It only removes one frame of lag, so games with more than that will probably feel imperfect, but sill improved. Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Garrega have like four frames of input lag in MAME?

Anyways, this is great, many thanks to nimitz for this!


And one more thing: forgive me if this is a noob question(I usually use wolfmame99), but is there a way to fix that 'Anonymous Timers' error I'm getting when I try to make savestates for some games?

[Obiwanshinobi]

So, does this work with Garegga? It stll seemed a little "off" to me.

You can measure it by yourself with step-frame method. It takes away one frame from the Garegga's input lag. There are still two frames left. How much of a difference it makes for you is another story. To me Garegga feels improved (if not quite perfect) with this hack.

[clp]

What do I do if a game asks for an eeprom?

+1 where the hell do you aquire eeprom files and why does this mame require them when all the exact roms work in my other mame?

[Obiwanshinobi]

What do I do if a game asks for an eeprom?

+1 where the hell do you aquire eeprom files and why does this mame require them when all the exact roms work in my other mame?

I don't think this matter can be safely disputed on these forums. MAWS says it's been added to the latest version of Dangun Feveron ROM for example.

[lewisit]

Please post any bug you may encounter in this thread.

dunno if this is a "bug" or just a glitch - but (at least) in the attract-mode of Strikers 1945 the shadow of the ships turn pink:

[dmauro]

Thank you for putting this together! I just got MAME all in order with the new ROMs and a custom compiled version with cabmame and it works perfectly. The difference is very noticeable in Guwange for example; I played one credit and got further than I ever have with a new top score.

Quick question: I noticed with Battle Bakraid and Dangun Feveron, the parent roms changed since 129. What's the point of that? (Fever SOS for instance, is the new parent rom of Dangun Feveron o_0)

[Enhasa]

MAME devs are all about refactoring. YEAH

Thanks nimitz, this is hella cool, but I'm not going to test it for now since updating MAME roms is such a bitch. Are you going to be maintaining this with each new release? It would be cool if someone would at least, even if you have posted the source already.

Also, I'd rather stick to one MAME version if I can (I'm sure others feel the same), so maybe you could enable as many drivers as possible in this version? I don't care if the latency fix doesn't apply to all games, I'll take what I get. Maybe a readme with list of helped games, or even a cfg or folder or whatever MAME uses.

Definitely switching next time I update MAME, because I use MAMEplus and I think they deprecated the GUI version and now go purely the frontend route. Which is cool I guess, but my comp has issues with the frontend.

[Obiwanshinobi]

Just unzip this hack into the regular MAMEUIFX32 folder, you don't need to keep it separately. Also, you probably need to update only a few roms: Cave (except for Progear) and late Psikyo. Let me tell you something: Guwange alone is worth it. Just sayin'.

[emphatic]

I would prefer diff patches, really, as I (like dmauro) like to build my own binary.

[nimitz]

-For everyone asking for EEPROMS, you need to get mame 137 compatible games, just like the official mame 137. Then extract the EEPROM file into your nvram folder


-As for updating this build on every mame version, probably not because this build only has a few drivers as of now, so unless the new mame build affects one of the modified driver positively or add games I won't update the build for no reason.


-lewisit : I haven't tried Strikers 2 in official 137, so I really can't tell you.


-Finally, about releasing a "complete" build with every driver available I might do it in a few days if there's enough people asking for it.

[Axelayer]

Hi there,just registered here at the forums to say that this mamebuild is really great-spent a few credits on guwange,donpachi and esp.ra.de,reaction times are much better than before,havent tested anything else but its worth it alone for the cave games(at least these are the games i prefer to play under mame).especially guwange is the shit now,there is no delay between control of your shikigami and normal control,with my other mame versions it always felt sort of rubbish change between the modes,but now-perfect!

for the eeprom issue,i solved it by taking the nvram files of a older mame version and added this nvram to the rom file.zip that you want to play-works

[evil_ash_xero]

-For everyone asking for EEPROMS, you need to get mame 137 compatible games, just like the official mame 137. Then extract the EEPROM file into your nvram folder


-As for updating this build on every mame version, probably not because this build only has a few drivers as of now, so unless the new mame build affects one of the modified driver positively or add games I won't update the build for no reason.


-lewisit : I haven't tried Strikers 2 in official 137, so I really can't tell you.


-Finally, about releasing a "complete" build with every driver available I might do it in a few days if there's enough people asking for it.

If you could get games like Batrider working well with this, that would be just fantastic. Thanks for all the great work. This was necessary.

[DC906270]

for anyone whos asking about updating cave/psikyo games to work in this emulator and mame 0.137 , all you have to do is make sure you open/have opened the game within mame 0.135 or whatever (when the it was working), then copy the nvram file from the nvram folder which has/was created when you did this, into the correct game rom zip archive. this means the rom now has the eeprom for use in mame 0.137.

[lgb]

So, does this work with Garegga? It stll seemed a little "off" to me.

you're better off just using garemame for Garegga

[Arcatech]

Thank you sir for taking to time to compile this and post it for everyone.

[Ex-Cyber]

Quick question: I noticed with Battle Bakraid and Dangun Feveron, the parent roms changed since 129. What's the point of that? (Fever SOS for instance, is the new parent rom of Dangun Feveron o_0)

It's a MAME convention to have the latest "world" or "international" build of a game as the parent set. This leads to some shuffling when an older/region-specific version of the game is dumped/supported first, as happened with Dangun Feveron and Fever SOS.

[ZOM]

Yeah, the only thing missing is AP Batrider and I'm fine with the selection so far.

[JOW]

Well done nimitz - fantastic effort

The difference is very noticeable in Guwange

this

Guwange alone is worth it

this

especially guwange is the shit now

...and this

Is Guwange only improved by 1-frame? The difference is incredible

[gameoverDude]

Dragon Spirit does seem improved. Small taps are actually possible- the dragon is easier to stop on a dime when you need a small move to go through gaps between bullets. There's none of this "give a little, get a lot" shit going on with movement. Should the Namco System 2 driver get a similar boost, I might have to try Dragon Saber (and Rolling Thunder 2, since I'm assuming this lag shit hurts all the Namco S2 games) again.

Hella good work, nimitz- and thanks for sharing.

The only thing left now is sound in Dogyuun & V-V and we can all just give up on the hobby!

I'll throw Fire Shark onto that. Shame FS didn't get a tateable PS1 or Saturn port BTW.

[dog$]

Registered to say thanks.

[rancid3000]

Just tried this for the first time and holy crap!!! I didn't know what I was missing with those extra frames!!! Thanks so much for this. I feel like I'm playing a different game when I use this.

[nimitz]

Just a quick post to say thanks for all the positive comments guys, much appreciated.

Concerning many other drivers, like the Namco system 2, the frame buffer (if there is indeed one, which seems obvious with such lag) Is handled by the game itself, like PsikyoFan mentioned earlier for seibuspi.c.

This means that making only one driver work for that kind of system would take about as much time as fixing all the drivers that have been done as of now. I will spend some time trying to fix that namco system 2, but some help from good coders will be much needed if the build is to have a decent ammount (maybe even any) of these "hard to fix" drivers.

[PsikyoFan]

Small taps are actually possible- the dragon is easier to stop on a dime when you need a small move to go through gaps between bullets. There's none of this "give a little, get a lot" shit going on with movement.

The changes made cannot change the behavour in the way you describe, this is a placebo effect.

Just to make this absolutely plain and clear - there's a few different changes in here, but they mostly amount to the same thing; rendering the sprites a frame or two earlier (At the expense of hw accuracy and synchronisation with backgrounds if used).
That means that you see the baddies/bullets/whatever slightly earlier, that your ship will appear to start/stop moving slightly more responsively. It does not mean that for an input of the same duration the game will overall respond any differently.

For advanced tetris players where the background is static, the benefits are almost certainly going to outweight the negatives. For me, this is not a beneficial change to shmups since it results in the sprites and backgrounds falling out of sync.

the frame buffer

A 'frame buffer' is something quite specific - and it's not this.

As I said in the original thread, If someone does have the time and knowledge of the subject, then really where you should be looking is the vblank period and ensuring that it is optimally configured versus where MAME reads the inputs for each driver. This could actually be submitted to MAME as a fix, versus these changes which will get laughed/flamed if they were submitted.

[mufunyo]

For advanced tetris players where the background is static, the benefits are almost certainly going to outweigh the negatives. For me, this is not a beneficial change to shmups since it results in the sprites and backgrounds falling out of sync.

About that, thanks from all of us. The shmupmame patch has been going through the TGM player community like a shockwave. We already had our own TGM-specific MAME build, and I've merged those changes with shmupmame to form what we now call "ShmupmameTGM". People have already been hitting new records with it .

[cul]

Now how do I bind my third button to autofire on games like DDP, because I don't have custom button in that mameFX build (I usually use mameplus) and I can't find a way to have regular shoot+laser on button 1 and autofire on the third.