Another Toaplan/ThunderMAME question.

[Benway]

Hi. I hope I'm posting this in the appropriate part of the forums. My apologies if not.

I've been using ThunderMAME32UI+ to run my Toaplan shooters with sound for some time now. They all have worked just perfectly fine, except for the only stubbornly remaining straggler which is the game Ghox. I know that Ghox is one of the games that ThunderMAME needs the sound samples in order to run it with sound. I did in fact download those awhile back, but even with the appropriate wav files zipped and in the samples folder, for some strange reason Ghox still won't run with sound for me. I even tried to leave the sound files unzipped just for the hell of it (Vimana for me doesn't seem to need its sound sample files zipped in order to run with perfectly working sound), but it just doesn't work either way.

I know that plenty of people on shooter/arcade forums have gotten Ghox running with sound through this means, but for some strange reason its just not working for me with that one particular game. Anyone here by any chance have any suggestions on what else I could possibly do to get mine working in a similar fashion?

[Ixmucane2]

Obvious possibilities:

• MAME looks for samples in folder X, samples are in folder Y. Don't make assumptions.
• Sound is disabled. There might be per-game settings.
• Your particular MAME revision is broken.
• Your samples are corrupted (or empty placeholders). Audition them.

[Benway]

Obvious possibilities:

• Sound is disabled. There might be per-game settings.

I had checked the sound settings already, but this prompted me to recheck them again for the hell of it to see if I missed something. Turns out I did: all the appropriate boxes are checked, but the problem is that the "use samples" option, while checked, is greyed out (its not with all my other games that are using samples). Clearly this has to be the problem, but I've no idea why its greyed out only for this one game nor how I could go about fixing that. Any thoughts?

[Xyga]

Wrong parent rom maybe ?

[Benway]

Wrong parent rom maybe ?

I'll be damned.

So. In most versions of MAME there are only two versions of Ghox: one that uses the spinner, the other uses the more standard 8 way joystick (the spinner version being the parent rom). Turns out that in ThunderMAME however, there's a THIRD version which it lists as "Ghox (for sample)". You don't even need another alternate/clone rom for it: it runs on the parent rom apparently. All you have to do is audit it and boom: it plays the game with the sound samples perfectly. Until Xyga mentioned looking at the parent rom, I hadn't even noticed this.

Since it's working off the parent rom, it too uses spinner controls making it effectively identical (other than the fact that one can play the samples and the other can't); so I have no idea why ThunderMAME has this listed as a separate clone, even though its technically not, or why the parent rom by itself can't simply run the game with samples like all the other Toaplan games do with no problem and instead needs this seemingly superfluous alternate "clone" listing to do it. This could also be either my bad memory or my ignorance talking, but I can't even think of any other instances off the top of my head of any version of MAME where a clone in MAME's game listing runs off the parent rom without the need for downloading another rom.

Interestingly, it even actually lists an alternate rom name for it as "ghoxs", which apparently does not exist in downloadable zip form in any capacity (to the best of my googling ability and in all MAME rom listings that I could think to look at) since its not actually a real clone rom, so this is evidently for all practical purposes just for the benefit of giving it its own snapshot folder, at least as far as I can tell.

*Shakes head* Whatever. It works just fine now. So many thanks to both Ixmucane2 and Xyga for more or less leading me in the right direction, albeit somewhat sideways.

[Xyga]

You're welcome. ^^

[BPzeBanshee]

The guy chose to make the sample system work based on clone set just for ease of use. That way in the driver the code that drives the sample playing is only enabled if the driver is started with rom name "ghoxs" or so forth. It is actually possible with a bit more effort (at least in current MAME versions now) to tie the sample switch in mame.ini to whether it loads, that's what I do with RaidenMAME. Most of the official MAME drivers that use samples do an #ifdef for loading sample-specific stuff though.

Note that ThunderMAME doesn't only allow for running Toaplan games with samples, there's a lot of framebuffer hacks similar if not exact to nimitz's work in ShmupMAME but configurable as a dipswitch so you don't *have* to run it.

[Xyga]

By the way what are other - frequently updated - builds supporting samples ?

Only ThunderMAME32UI+ is based on a relatively recent version (0.153)

[BPzeBanshee]

Only emulator I'm aware of that's been updated recently at all apart from ThunderMAME is Final Burn Alpha which now has support for the games and for the sample hacks to them. I plan on updating RaidenMAME once MAME Plus 0.155 comes out but that is exclusively RF1/2/JET...for now.

[Xyga]

Great ! A build combining all the shmups goodness.