Reasoning for MAME not having proper autofire

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SynthRicardo
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Reasoning for MAME not having proper autofire

Post by SynthRicardo »

What's the justification for not having custom buttons and good autofire options? Such as being able to have several different autofire rates for the same button simultaneously, which is key for some old games.
Japanese arcades have this and it's the standard for competition, yet for MAME you have to either rely on some outdated fork (MAMEPlus, Shmupmame) or external autofire (i.e. having a stick with that feature built-in).
What's usually said is that autofire is considered a cheat (even though it's not as mentioned previously), which is why the barebones and inconvenient autofire that regular MAME includes has to be unlocked from the cheat menu. Yet MAME has actual cheats that don't need unlocking nor are labelled as such, like pausing, frame advance or slowing the game down. And then you have the amazing practice tool that is save states not present in arcade/PCB, and yet again not considered a cheat nor something to unlock.
I'm not saying to remove all those features, they're nice to have, just pointing out the big hypocrisy and inconsistency of it all.
It would hurt nobody if you included this feature to MAME, on the contrary.
Example: if you want to play Same! Same! Same! to its fullest, you have to get a Shmupmame build, an old rom, install samples because that old build didn't have sound for it yet, and then have at least three different rates: one with no autofire for the red weapon, one with max autofire rate for pointblanking, and one with a moderate rate for general blue weapon use (having two rates and toggling on/off can also work). We shouldn't need to go back to an old inconvenient build for this, nor have to juggle between different MAME forks for basic stuff.
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Re: Reasoning for MAME not having proper autofire

Post by MameHaze »

It's a cheat because people in communities just like this one asked for it to be a cheat so that it couldn't be used for setting high scores, or replay files without it being obvious it was turned on.

Can't please everyone I guess.

As I said elsewhere, you could probably write an autofire lua plugin that would work without modification in current MAME if you so wanted tho, that's actually the model we want to encourage people to use for such things. Once written it could be distributed, maybe even included with MAME, and the existing functionality removed.

(of course the current hiscore support doesn't actually even care if cheats are turned on anymore, since that too is now a lua plugin, so yes, MAME is moving away from the model where we even care about that. We've found it to be better to generally ignore opinions of the community when it comes to such things, rather than take the suggestions on board as we did when it was hidden behind a cheat option in the first place; creating ugly special cases for specific user groups was never a great idea and had it been done today, it would have probably never been put behind a cheat option in the first place)
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Re: Reasoning for MAME not having proper autofire

Post by SynthRicardo »

MameHaze wrote:It's a cheat because people in communities just like this one asked for it to be a cheat so that it couldn't be used for setting high scores, or replay files without it being obvious it was turned on.
Don't listen to clueless communities then because actual arcades and actual competition has autofire! Isn't it all about preservation and being faithful to the true arcade experience?

Who is capable of writing such code? Can we get in contact with him?

Look, it's not even an opinion, real arcades have autofire and scoreboards consider that. You're pandering to people that have no idea.
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Re: Reasoning for MAME not having proper autofire

Post by BareKnuckleRoo »

Technically the mainline MAME has autofire options as far as I know, if you enable the cheat function in the game. The interface is generally terrible for it though, and you should generally be playing a proper version that supports autofire properly + custom buttons such as AutoMAME, MAMEPlus, and Shmupmame. The autofire and custom button options from those builds should absolutely be standard in the mainline version of MAME.

There's even crazier requirements in the MARP community that requires a specific emulator and flat out bans enabling autofire such as in games with built-in autofire in the test menu that, for whatever reason, had it disabled by default (Progear, Donpachi). For obvious reasons, most shmuppers do not submit scores on MARP. You also are not allowed to do things such as map the same button to multiple keys, which would actually be totally doable in an actual arcade cabinet if you had extra buttons to work with. For instance, some beat em ups have a desperation attack if you press Attack + Jump at the same time, but have somewhat finicky input detection, so you can reliably trigger this special attack by mapping a button that presses both at exactly the same time. Again, you could easily wire up an arcade cabinet to function this way.

There are some shmups like Darius Gaiden where autofire clearly gives you way more power than you were intended to have, so to be fair you can set autofire to a reasonably acheivable tapping speed. And in those cases modern scoreboards simply ask players to state if they used autofire or not. Generally speaking the "ANY KIND OF AUTOFIRE IS CHEATING" usually consist of insular groups of players who haven't really gotten out to any modern, active arcades in Japan and see that for button mash heavy games you often see they've installed autofire buttons for player convenience on the cab. There's a lot of shmups where you are encouraged to mash all game long at risk of a repetitive stress injury, but that are quite fun and playable when an autofire button is enabled, and hence in modern arcades it's seen as perfectly normal to use autofire for those sorts of games instead of demanding constant mashing. Autofire's also sometimes used for beat em ups, but that's somewhat uncommon as those generally are less taxing on one's hands because it's not a constant all stage long one button tapping, makes it harder to control combos, etc.

Autofire's an expectation in any competent shmup nowadays and anyone posting scores on this forum can safely be assumed to be using autofire. Button mashing all game-long in shmups is not a fun mechanic and autofire makes the games more accessible for people with arthritis, etc. Mashing constantly is a physical chore that can suck the fun out of 1 button press = 1 bullet shmup as in some older games, or where the game gives you a more powerful shot for mashing above a certain speed and thus basically demands strenuous tapping all game long (Blazing Star for instance - it also has charge shots but a lot of the time you should be using the rapid tap shot).

Basically, some people get all nostalgic about having to hurt their fingers button mashing like crazy through a shmup, wearing out their finger, hand, and button. It's silly for sure, and whether or not autofire is actually a cheating advantage or simply a player convenience that makes the game enjoyable can really depend on the individual game, and if the shmup has a built-in upper limit on how fast the player can fire shots (making a weapon fire in 3 shot bursts for instance, Giga Wing is a good example of a game that requires a relatively low tap speed to max out the firing rate) then autofire really just is a player convenience, not a game-breaker.
It's a cheat because people in communities just like this one asked for it to be a cheat
I can safely say that 99% of the people here setup autofire for playing shmups when possible, because button mashing in shmups, especially ones where you are encouraged to button mash all game long in order to fire a machine gun or laser cannon, is a stupid game mechanic.

The most extreme example of autofire as a central game mechanic is in Thunder Blaster by Irem. You mash shoot to fill a meter which progressively makes your shot stronger and wider as you mash more quickly, and then you can fire off a bomb whose size is determined by how high up the meter was when you launched the bomb. To max out the meter by tapping is quite difficult. It's a neat game, but it's in spite of the autofire mechanic, not because of it, and plays better when you setup autofire for it and treat it as a shmup with a rapid recharging reusable bomb, thus is the perfect example of why button mashing in shmups sucks; even a competent game that is designed around button mashing as a mechanic is more fun when it's removed in favor of autofire.
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Re: Reasoning for MAME not having proper autofire

Post by SynthRicardo »

BareKnuckleRoo wrote:The autofire and custom button options from those builds should absolutely be standard in the mainline version of MAME.
Agreed completely. No reason whatsoever not to include this. If you include autofire don't do it halfassedly then; it's already been done so it should be easy to implement. That being said, the options in those forks are a bit limited; it would be best if you could have as many custom buttons with as many respective different rates as you wanted.
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Re: Reasoning for MAME not having proper autofire

Post by MameHaze »

BareKnuckleRoo wrote: The most extreme example of autofire as a central game mechanic is in Thunder Blaster by Irem.
I'd say this was the most extreme example of autofire working around a game mechanic tbh

Once you have autofire the mechanic is negated, rendering it pointless to have in the first place.

It clearly wasn't meant to be played with autofire even if it's more enjoyable that way (that's not really the point tho, that's a flaw of the game design and what gives it character, them thinking it was a good mechanic might have been a mistake, but it defines what the game is)

MAME is a public project, anybody can contribute, there are plenty of people out there with the skills to do a lua plugin with more flexible autofire options, this stuff is barely interesting to those reverse engineering hardware etc. People are already doing all sorts of complex game self-playing AI scripts using the functionality, which is good to see, it clearly shows it isn't inaccessible.
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Re: Reasoning for MAME not having proper autofire

Post by BareKnuckleRoo »

In practice, there's rarely a reason to use more than 1 autofire button, most shmups that benefit from it don't realistically need a several autofire buttons per player. In your example scenario, you have 2 autofire buttons (max speed and a moderate speed) and then the normal shot button. Honestly can't think of a game that would use more than those aside from a weird case like Mushihimesama's and its counter banking bug. I'm not sure if they limited the number for a certain reason, but all those builds allow you to have up to 4 autofire buttons as far as I know + your standard shot button, which should be plenty for whatever you're playing. If you really want to get crazy and have extras you could always set them up using JoyToKey to have a game controller send keyboard input to shoot at various speeds per button.
Once you have autofire the mechanic is negated, rendering it pointless to have in the first place.
Exactly; it's not a fun mechanic and plays better without it. High-speed button mashing all throughout a shmup as a central mechanic is not fun and the game is better with a modest autofire rate that can reach the highest section of the meter as an aggressive shmup with a quick recharging bomb.
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Re: Reasoning for MAME not having proper autofire

Post by SynthRicardo »

Are you going to cherry-pick that while ignoring all the other valid points, MameHaze? Why not just provide the users with the option to decide if they want to mash or not? And properly, not like now. No, telling your users to program the feature themselves is not valid.
Where are the people capable of doing this? Tell us and we'll contact them.
BareKnuckleRoo wrote:In practice, there's rarely a reason to use more than 1 autofire button, most shmups that benefit from it don't realistically need a several autofire buttons per player.
You need more than 1 in most Toaplan games, for instance. And in my example I mentioned the bare minimum, you could use more rates; for instance, 60Hz + 10Hhz + 6Hz + No Autofire. It makes a difference, with just 60Hz + 10 or 6 I have to tap for some stretches.
There's also stuff like games that demand holding but also benefit from autofire in the same button, such as R-Type or Sengoku Ace. These games can't be enjoyed on regular MAME due to the lack of custom buttons if you don't want to tap and thus you have to play them on say Shmupmame.
And yes, autofire makes a big difference in them; check this survival difference against one of the final bosses:
https://streamable.com/tiqph
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Re: Reasoning for MAME not having proper autofire

Post by BareKnuckleRoo »

These games can't be enjoyed on regular MAME due to the lack of custom buttons if you don't want to tap and thus you have to play them on say Shmupmame.
Ah yes, I forgot that MAME's cheat menu enabled autofire doesn't allow you to keep a basic shot button (for charge shot) + the same button mapped to autofire. It's not essentially not functional for any game with a button that has different functions depending on if you tap or hold the button as you can't setup both. I haven't used the basic MAME build for anything in ages for this reason.

I strongly recommend checking out AutoMAME; it's a relatively up-to-date MAME build that has the autofire and custom buttons of MAMEPlus/Shmupmame implemented in it. I currently use AutoMAME or Shmupmame depending on what I'm playing.
Last edited by BareKnuckleRoo on Fri May 03, 2019 7:08 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Reasoning for MAME not having proper autofire

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It's just more of mamedev's bullshit morale to annoy people. Ok it's been some time so here I go.

thing's an emulator playing roms they will themselves dump, code drivers to make play, and tell you to grab 60+GB of at a torrent site...then next discussion they call everyone a pirate.

thing's always claimed aiming at pure accuracy, you point at things in some of the most popular games ever that haven't been playing accurately...and they rip your head off saying they're not whore devs taking 'unreasonable' requests, and games don't need to play correctly anyway it's just a library of code for developers in 100 or 200 years, not for petty gamers (people who want to play video games are absurd anyway, aren't they?)

thing like all emulators got pause, and savestates you can reload anytime, nobody bats an eye. Yet you want to use particular autofire settings for specific games like it's done indeed by even the best players around and you'd like that to save...they call you a cheater
...and tell you to actually do it but using that LUA plugin thing you have to be a fucking software engineer to understand the first thing about, yeah it's for 'everyone', yeah...

thing's got a nice UI, like any emulator right? nope, you type to search a game...you get unending lists of whatever including toasters and barbie electronic toys except the game you seek, or parents that are dumbed down US/overseas versions.
Everyone remembers fondly the nice GUI builds of yore, haze shits on them and the ones who tried to maintain those

thing's got a 'fantastic' new backend for video called BGFX featuring crt shaders that should make up for retroarch's...but the settings don't save.
and the input daly is too high, nothing to mitigate it like a setting to set a shorter frame queue for vsync (which i've heard could be done at this point of BGFX developement) but nope.
if you ask for stuff like that you get MAIMED again by furious devs on cocaine telling you they're not paid so don't take 'unreasonable' 'features 'request from pirate kiddies.

thing's been Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, THE acclaimed and loved arcade games emulator for like 15 years, but since about when the merge with MESS happened, they've been DENYING THAT NAME AND GLORIOUS PAST ALL DAY, pure revisionism taking users for idiots and telling them it's better than ever now as repulsive to most common users as its become, better with its tons of crappy non-arcade toys and devices, and even consoles no one asked for.

etc etc, mamedev are engineers, developers, talented, and doing something useful if you look ONLY at the preservation side, but they're also a bunch of complete dorks very removed from the reality of video games and the people that play them. hearing them attempt preaching video games and piracy ethics is like visiting that retirement home with its poor old fools yelling whatever like they're on shrooms 24/7.
unable to understand present reality, to communicate outside of their bubble, unable to change, seeing anyone questioning their logic and attitude as a maggot, and they send Haze everywhere on the internet to exterminate the vermin.
It's not exaggerated to say the project as good as it is at the core (say 80% of its value; purely the dump-and-code part), has increasingly become a stinker for users because the remaining 20%, related to everything useability and playability (and communication!) that mamedev doesn't give a rat's ass about, is absolutely crucial to the user-players so they can enjoy the 80%.
What a terrible misundestanding of the very material they've been working on, what terrible miscalculation of policy from mamedev, who have never witnessed nor acknowledged the natural audience and culture of users-players, because the consequences are shmupmame, retroarch, retropie, dodgy commercial emu-toys etc.
Delusional in believing they're doing God's work, in fact precipitating their own doom and accelerating the decadence of retro games emulation and even compomising dear preservation.
mamedevs: awesome skills and dedication, dramatically flawed and distorted perception of non-engineer reality (you know like 99.9% of humanity), dead-end ahead.



PS: SynthRicardo you won't get anything but bullshit from Haze, he's the entitled preacher-propagandist fror mamedev, working hard to wash brains or make more enemies.
So, somewhere Shepardus posted a link to the full custom autofire patch, which is unfortunately a bit too ancient and already had issues with some games like neogeo.
best thing would be someone able to update that to current MAME and then we could compile with whatever builds
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Re: Reasoning for MAME not having proper autofire

Post by gray117 »

It's their ball, they do what they want.

I'd be surprised if anyone from mame gave a fck about highscore tables, except where they might point to incorrect behaviour or different rom versions.

The preservation aspect of mame was not so you could play the games or replicate the arcade experience. These are side benefits. It was the archiving of the (built) game programs and the hardware structures. Save sates no doubt originated as a tool for testing/debugging/communicating rather than practising play.

And yep you might also imagine a variable autofire speed could be a handy tool. But I *imagine* someone just thought of it as something to sort out that wasn't (originally) a key part of mame. Since then yes, I imagine it got seen as something that could break, or get applied haphazardly, and just be faff. And that was the way things continued.

Yes it's somewhat inconsistent when viewed from a distance. And at marked odds to how most people use mame. But mame is a pretty wierd and wonderful project that is actually pretty consistent within it's own boundaries... it's just that the project often (understandably) gets confused with an entertainment product for its users. It's not; it's more for the entertainment of it's developers.
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Re: Reasoning for MAME not having proper autofire

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I did get a more recent build by Shepardus which indeed has inconveniences with Neo Geo games. However, that was for 0.197 which had a nasty regression in Sengoku Blade (we spent half a year in 2018 with that...)
I know someone who has somehow been able to apply that patch to newer builds (still with the Neo Geo issues). Not very convenient stuff, let's just say.
I'll just leave this here:
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Re: Reasoning for MAME not having proper autofire

Post by MameHaze »

and with such hateful posts you're basically making sure your opinion is 100% ignored, it's the emulation equivalent of xenophobia.
Last edited by MameHaze on Fri May 03, 2019 5:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Reasoning for MAME not having proper autofire

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>muh tone

>xenophobia parallels
This guy can't be serious.
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Re: Reasoning for MAME not having proper autofire

Post by MameHaze »

100% serious, you're basically saying anything that isn't what you want doesn't matter and shouldn't be there and blaming problems on entirely unrelated things.
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Re: Reasoning for MAME not having proper autofire

Post by SynthRicardo »

The point is not that the MESS stuff is there but rather that so much focus is directed at that while regressions in games that people actually play don't get fixed for months and something as basic as proper autofire isn't implemented either, which again is something that actual players use. In real arcades.
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Re: Reasoning for MAME not having proper autofire

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and the Psikyo stuff got broken by an external contribution

I ended up telling the contributor that broke them (cam900) that we weren't going to accept any more contributions from him until he went back and fixed all the stuff he's broken, which he did.

Completely unrelated to what we're working on. I moved away from doing arcade stuff because I found the arcade scene to be entirely toxic, while the scene surrounding the stuff I'm working on now is significantly less so, my own mental health etc. comes first I'm afraid.

Also as I said, we've given people the most powerful external scripting we possible can, and are improving it all the time with the lua stuff, a lot of people absolutely love it as it's giving power to the users they never had before to do things exactly like you're asking for .... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dapV20G3iw this is Robotron with an lua script to do an AI player, same has been done for Nilbbler and others, unimaginable some years ago, doesn't even require you to recompile MAME. (here is nibbler) https://www.reddit.com/r/MAME/comments/ ... n_nibbler/ or https://github.com/FrankRizzo890/NibblerBot for direct link, so yeah, doing an Autofire script that can be used on any current version of MAME is easily something the community could do, it's trivial compared to these (and the author of the nilbber one even admits it's the first time he's even touched lua) You could even, if you wanted, write scripts specifically to point-blank enemies or whatever else you could imagine.

Basically right now, you, the users, have all the power, all the control. The only thing not happening is the devs (who have little interest in aufofire and the arguments surrounding it etc.) writing said autofire script code.

The haters are just going to hate to the point where as I said, their opinions no longer even get considered. People hitting on Mahjong games and acting like they don't belong or should have lower priority just because they don't understand them due to them being heavily based in foreign culture has no place in the emulation scene.
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Re: Reasoning for MAME not having proper autofire

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MameHaze wrote:it's the emulation equivalent of xenophobia.
oof
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Re: Reasoning for MAME not having proper autofire

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MameHaze wrote:I moved away from doing arcade stuff because I found the arcade scene to be entirely toxic, while the scene surrounding the stuff I'm working on now is significantly less so, my own mental health etc. comes first I'm afraid.
That is the point of it all, that the people behind Multiple ARCADE Machine Emulator left behind the community that actually uses the thing you're working on.
You get less quote unquote toxicity from other sources because the demand is far lower and thus you get less of everything. What you call toxicity is feedback from people that care about what you're doing. The fact that you're doing this for free doesn't shield you from criticism.

Again I'll ask, tell me who's able to do the autofire script so we can contact him and hopefully get that in regular MAME or at the very least an updated, proper fork. I've asked this many times so stop dodging the bullet because it's the most important question.
Last edited by SynthRicardo on Fri May 03, 2019 6:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Reasoning for MAME not having proper autofire

Post by MameHaze »

SynthRicardo wrote:
MameHaze wrote:I moved away from doing arcade stuff because I found the arcade scene to be entirely toxic, while the scene surrounding the stuff I'm working on now is significantly less so, my own mental health etc. comes first I'm afraid.
That is the point of it all, that the people behind Multiple ARCADE Machine Emulator left behind the community that actually uses the thing you're working on.
You get less quote unquote toxicity from other sources because the demand is far lower and thus you get less of everything. What you call toxicity is feedback from people that care about what you're doing. The fact that you're doing this for free doesn't shield you from criticism.
Most of it is people trying to tell us what we SHOULD be doing, even if it is detrimental to preservation etc. and acting like they know better, and generally showing zero appreciation for what is often a huge amount of effort. Constructive criticism is one thing, outright saying we're wasting our time doing what we want because we should be working on something else is not constructive. Acting like one specific field of game is more important than another is not constructive. Insisting MAME throw away important principles for short term gain at the expensive of long term ones is not constructive.

When I say toxic, I mean toxic, hence my previous parallels.

But yes, the scene has mostly driven away the devs interested in doing arcade stuff (and the ones that have replaced them, such as cam900 who broke the Psikyo stuff, apparently aren't good enough)

Even by asking me 'who to contact' you're still basically expecting me to do work I've washed my hands of. I don't know who to contact, there are millions of people online, a boatload of users on this forum, if you're telling me none of them can write a lua script I don't believe you. We've put this in the hands of the community (since they apparently know better anyway)
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Re: Reasoning for MAME not having proper autofire

Post by SynthRicardo »

Don't go on dumb tangents MameHaze, proper autofire options are in no way detrimental to preservation and in fact bring the emulator closer to actual arcades, again with 0 cost to everything else the emulator has to offer. You say it's very easy, then include it and the community of actual users of MAME will be happy. Simple as that.
Also, grow a pair. How pathetic of you to stop focusing on arcades deliberately just because you find the community to be mean.
And you're still avoidig the big question: who can we contact so we get this stuff done? I don't know how to do this, so tell me who has the knowledge.
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Re: Reasoning for MAME not having proper autofire

Post by MameHaze »

and that reply is the perfect example of toxic.

I've answered your question. It's your job at this point, find out, do the research, I don't know, I haven't looked into it, I've no reason to look into it.
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Re: Reasoning for MAME not having proper autofire

Post by Xyga »

gray117 wrote:The preservation aspect of mame was not so you could play the games or replicate the arcade experience. This are side benefits.
this is the absolute bullshit narrative they've shove in everyone's head and that's i'm still baffled that so few realize how absurd it is.

to begin games are to be played, a games emulator is for that purpose, and i it's arcade games even more so than anything else, it's no RPGs and poin-and-clik, it's THE original pure gaming culture.
saying you make a software of which purpose is to turn all that into archives and playing is not important, is stating the project is flawedat its very base.

plus, people don't get that narrative served the purpose of divert attention from IP holders, that and claming poor users of being pirates all day, while they the mamedevs are the very crew manning the greatest pirate ship ever

it could have stopped at that, just the narrative for that purpose, but no, at the same time it's become a convenient one for a number of the devs, who wanted to indeed attend to their engineers/devs entertainment logic, that has nothing to do with the world of actual game and playing them, and they've steered the ship full speed ahead into the big library of code made and thought for other engineers/devs before everyything, and giving the finger to users.

gray117 wrote:It's their ball, they do what they want.
yes and no, they don't leave people be at all, especially Haze whos's stuck on the balls of everyone like a tick, preaching the bullshit mamedev propaganda every fucking day, and he's a really slimy manipulative crazy bastard I don't trust. *spit*
and he's not the only dev to serve bullshit and wipe himself with users, those people don't give a shit about video games and they hate us.

Do you find that right? not me, I feel fooled. it's unfortunate that it's basically their project that we've put all love and trust for so long believing it could continue to be THE arcades amulator ever getting better and enjoyable for playing, an that it's all in their hands.
had we been more aware of their diametrically different 'culture' and their personalities WAY SOONER, maybe people around would have do whatever they could either to make it so things would end up how they are today.
Maybe we could have influenced them before it was too late, or maybe raised awareness and supported a different project.
I think we've mainly started to realize that it wasn't going in the direction we believed it would continue to go, around the time the merge with mess and the big rehaul happened. I remember I was promised all kinds of great improvements on MW yet all ended half-assed and it soon became obvious that from there the devs were going to leave everything at that and isolate themselves in their bubble more than ever in order to entertain themselves emulating oscilloscopes and barbie toys, leaving the arcades part mostly where it was leaving very wanted and anticipated things like wait states emulation, input delay reduction, and UI&useability improvements, unattended and in a slumber for the next decades, if not forever because 'playing games' and making a software humanely practicable for the average person who plays games but lacks skills the likes of developers actually 'usable', was not longer - was never even if they weren't honest about it - their objective.

To think they thought for instance that the merge with MESS would save the project, they were only looking from their exclusive superdorks engineer perspective. The moment it was done people have never ceased to complain about the tons of unrelatable files bloating the list and impossibility to search and sort efficiently so we can have clean easily navigable arcades list like in the GUI builds before that. And that shit situation was ON PURPOSE because they thought that if people had no choice but to have to see and browe all that crap they would become curious and develop an interest and help the project! *facepalm* :shock:
You see the kinds of unrealist dorks they are, they'll piss off like 90% of users because guys like them live with the blinders of their social-economic-trade niche, they don't know anything else.
Like, I've read enough of Vas's ridiculous readme intros since then making it sound how fantastic progress it is to have more tigers or vsmile or obscure computers unsed to calibrate steel pipes finally making another bleep bloop this version, and the two-three persons on earth who care actually posting to show the world how fucking awesome news it is! :lol:
Nope, definitely they should have kept a pure MAME for arcades in parallel and maintain much more devforce on it. The narrative that there isn't much to do anymore with arcades is completely false and more bullshit from them, fucktons of games still need work, many 2D hardwares still have plenty of 10-20 yars longstanding issues, and 3D ones no need to spell it. There's the much needed wait states and input delay mitigation that iirc requires a massive rewrite.
There aren't many more new/undumped games left to dump, yes, but that's not the same thing.

Today it's too late anyway, no other better project will take over MAME, because the world erronously thought there was no need, and time passes anyway.
The time for making MAME great and enjoy was the one that's about to end, the demographics for whom it mattered the most that MAME's be the even better arcades emulator that we hoped it would become since it's been around, is spend and it didn't really happen.
Instead we got shmupmame, then retroarch, both fundamentally flawed or not making up for what's missing, yet a new demographics that comes from the later waves of the history of retrogaming is less attentive, less interested if not completely unaware of what it was before and what we hoped for.

So I don't know if ou get my point, but I resent mamedev because they were the only ones or rather the best who could do it and do it right when it mattered, and we believed they would or at least that they would honestly continue to try and make live MAME, the real MAME as the great arcades emulator. Instead they've made narratives, policies, postures, attitudes, propaganda, Haze and its garbage propaganda and toys, so people users-gamers wouldn't realize or react too brutally to the fact that mamedev were turning their backs on it all in order to go full dorks in their comfy dorks bubble.

EDIT: Oh I love it, the A LOT !!!! :lol: POWER TO THE USERS (with a degree in prorgamming, so we're talking about A LOT of people, sure, sure...) buahaha :mrgreen:
Also as I said, we've given people the most powerful external scripting we possible can, and are improving it all the time with the lua stuff, a lot of people absolutely love it as it's giving power to the users they never had before to do things exactly like you're asking for
Last edited by Xyga on Fri May 03, 2019 6:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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MameHaze
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Re: Reasoning for MAME not having proper autofire

Post by MameHaze »

amd this reply is another perfect example of toxic

if you want to know why I'm not doing anything to help the arcade side of things, look no further.

post completely ignores the facts. MAME is 100% more productive since all the stuff he's complaining about, it's making much more of a difference than ever, there are more talented people becoming involved than ever before, but poster would rather just rant.

this is why we ignore such BS
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SynthRicardo
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Re: Reasoning for MAME not having proper autofire

Post by SynthRicardo »

MameHaze wrote:I've answered your question. It's your job at this point, find out, do the research, I don't know, I haven't looked into it, I've no reason to look into it.
if you want to know why I'm not doing anything to help the arcade side of things, look no further.
You might as well not say anything if this is what you'll give us. Keep the bitching and moaning to yourself, don't waste our time.

To Xyga (because mamedevs seem like a bunch of manginas), an example of their bullshit: Sexy Parodius has had an issue since 2015 or so, where a sprite blocks sight when in the arcade it's transparent. Before that sprite wasn't there, but that's preferable.

EDIT: I know someone who managed to apply the old version of Sexy Parodius to a new build. This should be very easy to implement. But hey, let's focus on shit nobody asked for.
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Re: Reasoning for MAME not having proper autofire

Post by Xyga »

Dude Haze you're radioactive, I've read your bullshit and hypocritical propaganda for years, go away, even quit MAME please, PLEASE.
You decided yourself not to work on arcades anymore without arguing with people, you're always turning criticism against people to make yourself look a victim, every damn time you slime.
Go emulate your toys for toddlers and stop bothering people who care aout arcades games then, you're a disservice to MAME, to emulation, to arcades and the video games culture as a whole.

MAME went in a wrong direction because of people like you. People use retroArch and old romsets because of people like you. period.
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Re: Reasoning for MAME not having proper autofire

Post by MameHaze »

There's been a Konami rewrite underway for years. It's hard. Again tho, all that comes through here are toxic attitudes.

My point about not knowing is that I'm not your slave.

I reverse engineer hardware, I emulate it based on what interests me at a given time. Those results go into MAME. I think the lua stuff I've seen people do with the scripting ability they've been given is exceptionally cool. I haven't researched it further myself, it's one of those things where if somebody wants to do an autofire they're going to have to do the research.

My entire MAME development philosophy is that if I want something doing I have to take action to make it happen.

The last proper arcade stuff I did at the turn of the year was fixing up some shmup stuff even (title screen / water effect on Ultra X Weapons)

Yet my main feeling about the arcade scene is one of toxicity, if you can't see that from the posts here I don't know what to say.
Last edited by MameHaze on Fri May 03, 2019 6:43 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Reasoning for MAME not having proper autofire

Post by Ghegs »

SynthRicardo and Xyga: Cool your jets. No personal attacks. EDIT: Fuck it, you're both banned for a week (for adding in more attacks while I was making this post).

And SynthRicardo, his answers about the Lua plugin are spot-on. Lua is not some esoteric thing only two people in the world understand, it's a common programming language that probably many people in this forum are at least somewhat familiar with. Start a new thread if you want to try to find somebody to help with the project, or look into learning the language yourself.
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Re: Reasoning for MAME not having proper autofire

Post by BareKnuckleRoo »

Xyga wrote:etc etc, mamedev are engineers, developers, talented, and doing something useful if you look ONLY at the preservation side, but they're... very removed from the reality of video games and the people that play them.
There's a huge number of different arcade genres to support and it's not inconceivable for the main devs, who we should be fortunate are more focused on emulation accuracy than anything else, to be unaware of how different players use the emulator or what features in offshoot builds get the most attention. It's unfortunate the primary MAME build has not had the MAMEPlus implementation of autofire and custom buttons (perhaps MAMEPlus's most defining/important feature) implemented in it, but it's understandable that the usefulness of it in certain games and the widespread demand for it by the people actively playing them might have been missed or underestimated by the devs. There's plenty of games that don't require autofire to be enjoyable after all, and shmups are not exactly the most well understood genre in the mainstream.
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Re: Reasoning for MAME not having proper autofire

Post by Shepardus »

I'm not going to bother reading through this mess but I see that BareKnuckleRoo has already linked to the autofire patch that I ported over from MAMEPlus. I think the diff in there doesn't apply perfectly to the current source but it's pretty close (IIRC the merge conflict was just due to some formatting/comment changes), and I can upload an updated version if there's interest. Bottom line is that if you care about it enough, nothing's stopping you from taking matters into your own hands and implementing the change you want to see. And in this case someone's already done that.
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