No MAME sound support for SDF Macross (Banpresto)?

[greg]

I've had the Macross arcade shmup on my hacked Xbox for all these years and sound won't work on it. I thought it was a problem with the emulator, so I copied it to my RetroPie and tried it there. It still won't play sound, saying that it does not have the sound driver. I found a roms for mame website (I guess I can't provide the link for it) which states that the rom works perfectly for MAME64ui. I'm not familiar with that emulator. I downloaded the rom again from that website, thinking it might be a problem with the rom, but still there's no sound.

Any suggestions? Or is that site mistaken about the game "working perfectly"?

[trap15]

It works on latest MAME (as of like 5 years ago), you are probably using very old versions.

[Bassa-Bassa]

Hey, trap15, in your opinion, how's the accuracy in Mame for the NMK games you work on (and specially those you had a PCB to compare), all aspects considered (slowdowns, latency...)?

[trap15]

Close enough I guess, I didn't look into it much and especially did not compare against hardware other than sound. I just fixed a few big issues with technical problems and solutions.

Slowdown might be a bit too little because the sprite DMA is supposed to halt the CPU. Thankfully NMK games are well-made so they don't rely on slowdown for balancing.

Input lag is way worse because MAME/emulation (normally 3f on hardware, iirc), but the synchronization is correct (that is, there's a correct amount of sprite buffering to keep the objects attached to the backgrounds like the PCBs).

Sound is kind of fucked because the OPN series core kind of sucks, it's especially noticeable in the earlier music by HIDE-KAZ which saturates some operators (Thunder Dragon 1 does this a lot). Sounds a lot more nasty in MAME than on hardware.

[greg]

It's been a while, but this evening I finally got around to using my RetroPie again. I updated the software on my RetroPie and the sound still won't work. For the record, I am using the Mame4All emulator and this is the Macross Banpresto shmup. Not Macross II or Macross Plus. It's the one based on the DYRL movie.

[tomwhite2004]

Mame4All is based on a 20 year old version of MAME, use one of the other available cores that isn't as outdated (and hope they can run anything full speed on a Pi's CPU).

https://retropie.org.uk/docs/MAME/

[BareKnuckleRoo]

The Raspberry Pi is not generally considered a competent platform as far as emulation accuracy. I've got a friend who used to have a cab with a Raspberry Pi MAME setup and it had no end of issues with games that have had zero issues in standard builds of MAME (as trap15 says a lot of these games were fixed ages ago, the Raspberry Pi seems to be using ancient emulators). Fortunately I've got my friend setup now with a competent PC in his cab and emulation is no longer an issue. There appear to be more recent MAME builds but they come with a disclaimer about the Raspberry Pi being unable to run many of the games at full speed (hence why the default versions installed are ancient):

lr-mame2016 (MAME 2016)

Visit mame2016-libretro on github Note: This emulator is considered 'experimental' in RetroPie and has limited functionality. It requires more processing power than earlier MAME versions and will not run as many games at full speed on rPi hardware.

The lesson here is don't use a Raspberry Pi for arcade emulation. Sorry.

[MameHaze]

yeah, worst thing you can do with emulation is think that a 10+ year old PC is suitable, or one of those low powered devices such as a Pi, console or netbook / low end laptop.

The Pi4 barely scrapes by at the very bottom end for a MAME experience, but then you face the problem of LibRetro / Retroarch prioritizing old releases such as the abomination that is 2003 Plus, especially on 64-bit platforms, so even if your device might be able to run some of the current emulations you're being pulled astray.

Do yourself a favour, ditch the Pi, invest in something decent, and use a proper version of MAME. Compared to what most things cost even a mid-range PC isn't that expensive these days and the missing sound thing you're talking about is just one of many, many hundreds of things that have been improved in the time since those versions were released.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

For what it's worth greg, MameHaze is a long-serving MAME dev who has contributed greatly to the project, for which we the community are eternally grateful. If they're saying the Raspberry Pi is inappropriate for MAME emulation, you're hearing it right from the people responsible for MAME.

The Pi might be serviceable for other systems that don't require the same level of processing power to emulate such as NES or SNES? But it's not considered suitable for arcade games.

[null1024]

I like the Pi and I do all kind of absurdly high-spec things that have no business being done on the thing, but when it comes down to it, the emphasis people have given it in terms of running emulators has been absurd.
It's really goofy seeing articles galore encouraging people to get a Pi to use as an emulation box despite said people almost certainly having a machine right in front of them that has upwards of 10x or even 20x the performance of the Pi 4.
The Pi 4 is an absurd amount better than previous models [we're talking like 3-5x the speed vs a Pi 3], but it's still not actually that fast.

On your regular computer, try loading up a recent MAME version to play the game. You might need to update your ROM set if you have one for an older version.
Throw the zip file into the roms/ folder, run mame64, click available in the left-hand menu, and then select the game. Play. Enjoy.
Just gave it a shot in MAME 0.222 on my laptop, works a-okay.

[WelshMegalodon]

I get that people want a low-powered console-like machine to keep by their TV, but the Pi is still a vastly overrated option. The only reason it's as popular as it is is because all those random tech sites featured the same RetroPie tutorial a few years back. At some point in the past five or six years, RetroArch decided they wanted to be emulation's cheap-ass menu-stuffed ambassador to the world, and they succeeded because the Raspberry Pi only cost $35.

The Pi might be serviceable for other systems that don't require the same level of processing power to emulate such as NES or SNES? But it's not considered suitable for arcade games.

There was a point in which the Pi couldn't even run current versions of Snes9x. Pi users were stuck with releases from when it was still a dead project riddled with bugs.

[greg]

Thanks for the feedback. This Pi3 I have is a hand-me-down from a friend of mine. He bought several because they were cheap. I installed Ubuntu Mate (ARM version) on an SD card to play around with. Firefox works on it, but the Pi will freeze if I dare have a Youtube tab open and try to open another tab to pull up some other web page. The most use the Pi gets is my daughter using it to watch Minecraft videos on YouTube on the TV so she wouldn't have to kick me off my computer in the hobby room.

FWIW, the "experimental" emulator for the Sharp X68000 works swell on RetroPie. It was a hassle to get the right BIOS files for it since the ones I found were no good for some reason. I can play Chou Ren Sha, Gradius I&II, Salamander, Space Harrier, and so many other games on it.

I figured it should have no problem running a ROM of the old Macross shmup, since that arcade game came out in 1992 or something like that. E.S.P. Rade works fine on it from what I could tell, and that's a more recent game. Dragon Blaze works somewhat alright on it, whereas it wouldn't run on the Mame emulator on my old hacked Xbox.

My desktop is about 6-7 years old. When Win7 ceased support, I migrated to Linux Mint Mate in February. I was sick of Microsoft, and that was before all this New World Order and spirit cooking nonsense from Gates and MS these past few months. I just checked the software manager and there is a Mame emulator for Linux. I'll give that a shot.

[WelshMegalodon]

MAME is really not optimized for ARM. I'd save myself the hassle of compiling and just get a used PC.

[greg]

Nearly a year later, I've come back to this issue and resolved it. I was on the RetroPie Reddit and received assistance there. I've downloaded the full Final Burn Neo romset and it works.

I have RetroPie Emustation installed on my Linux desktop and it works fine. I'll have to add it to my RetroPie for my Raspberry Pi 3 to get it to work there. The last I checked, Dragon Blaze ran a bit slow on my RasPi3 on Mame but works fine on my desktop. The problem with Macross I learned is that many roms are interdependent, so you'll need the full set of roms to get them to work properly. In the case of Macross, apparently it depended on some other random rom for its sound drivers. Problem solved.