two questions about M.A.M.E.

lewisit · Post by **lewisit** » Mon Sep 01, 2008 9:06 am

i am totally new to the whole emulation-stuff and there are some things that i don't get...

till yesterday i had MameUI 0.126 running on my Windows-PC and then i downloaded MamePlus 0.127

two observations so far:

1. the game 1941 that works flawlessly in 0.126 wouldn't work in 0.127 because it is all of a sudden "missing some parts and cannot be run"

how can this be? even on my old iMac with MacMame 0.103 there's no problem running these romsets...

2. in 0.126 the game Lode Runner - The Dig Fight was in japanese and switching it to english only worked as long as the game was not powered off - now in 0.127 it's in english from the start!

what does the Mame-version have to do with the language-settings? how can i change things like that by myself that are then saved? (as i said before: switching Lode Runner to english was not saveable for me in 0.126...)

do i really need to run different Mame-versions for different needs/games?

TalkingOctopus · Post by **TalkingOctopus** » Mon Sep 01, 2008 9:25 am

They update the emulation of certain games with each release, potentially making your roms out of date. The version of your rom needs to match the version of your emulator. There is little reason to constantly update unless they add support for a new game you're interested in. I run 0.66 on one of my arcades and .85 on another.

MAME is meant to accurately emulate the games and is not too friendly about saving data. If the arcade board saved its settings and data when powered off, then MAME will. Otherwise, you'll have to reset it each time.

Ex-Cyber · Post by **Ex-Cyber** » Mon Sep 01, 2008 3:30 pm

Yeah, what you see in MAME revisions are accuracy/correctness updates for the most part, although there are some regressions too. Sometimes ROM dumps are thought to be correct until someone discovers a problem and they are redumped or fixed (separating or deinterleaving combined images, discovering that a set thought to be original is actually a bootleg, etc.), changing the hash, size, and/or name. MAME as a project is far pickier about this stuff than the emulation scene in general; it's especially pickier than the console emulation scene, where a single memory image as viewed from the CPU is often considered a "perfect" dump; MAME typically has the individual chips dumped into separate files with filenames identifying the specific chip or PCB location the data came from.

In the case of The Dig Fight, there was an emulation fix regarding the region jumper on the PCB between 0.126 and 0.127 (specifically, in 0.126u4).

edit: it looks like the reason for the set change in 1941 is that they decided to have images of some programmable logic devices rather than hardcode the associated logic in the driver code. Something similar happened years ago on a much wider scale: MAME used to contain palette data in the driver code, and they decided to dump and interpret the actual palette ROMs instead.

lewisit · Post by **lewisit** » Mon Sep 01, 2008 3:56 pm

TalkingOctopus wrote:MAME is meant to accurately emulate the games and is not too friendly about saving data. If the arcade board saved its settings and data when powered off, then MAME will.

thanx for clearing this up - i can live with that

Ex-Cyber wrote:Yeah, what you see in MAME revisions are accuracy/correctness updates for the most part, although there are some regressions too.

ALL of the CPS1-games ceased to funktion in 0.127 - what kind of a *@%#! update is this ?! imo an update should provide more features, more stability, etc. and not less...

from now on i'll keep my hands off of updates or someday i'll be stuck with just one working - but "100% accurate" - game

[edit to respond to ex-cyber's edit]

sorry that's too technical for me to grasp

Ex-Cyber · Post by **Ex-Cyber** » Mon Sep 01, 2008 4:07 pm

In a practical sense, what they are doing is promoting the preservation of data needed to fix broken arcade boards.

emphatic · Post by **emphatic** » Mon Sep 01, 2008 6:38 pm

lewisit: Then you have the wrong romsets for 0.126's CPS1 games. Just revert back to 0.126 and you'll be fine. Or update your roms.

Emph

lewisit · Post by **lewisit** » Mon Sep 01, 2008 6:56 pm

emphatic wrote:... update your roms.

tell me how it's easily done and i glady do that

but if it involves this process i'll have to pass...

spongdangly · Post by **spongdangly** » Mon Sep 01, 2008 9:00 pm

lewisit wrote:
emphatic wrote:... update your roms.
tell me how it's easily done and i glady do that

but if it involves this process i'll have to pass...

I update MAME with every full release (i.e. 0.125, 0.126 not 0.126u4). I've tried using clrmamepro before and wasn't a fan since it took awhile to setup.

All I do when a new release comes out is just download it to the same directory as my roms. This way it only downloads/updates the files that have been changed/added. So instead of downloading 16 gigs everytime a new release comes out, it's only downloading 1 gig or so depending on the changes.

Fudoh · Post by **Fudoh** » Mon Sep 01, 2008 9:12 pm

All I do when a new release comes out is just download it to the same directory as my roms. This way it only downloads/updates the files that have been changed/added.

definitely the way the go. I've tried CLrMamePro a dozen times and just can't get anything out of it. Ok, you're probably a few MB more when doing it this way (just downloading the new files into the old directory), but it's still a lot easier than going through this ridiculous process above.

lewisit · Post by **lewisit** » Mon Sep 01, 2008 10:18 pm

i think i slowly begin to sense what you guys are talking about...

you download a complete set of roms (16GB) when there's a new/updated one - right?

whereas i only picked some roms i really wanted and this way i did not get the newest versions so it seems

not having 16GB of free space to download a whole set and not wanting to mess with ClrMamePro i'll have to run 2 Mame-versions (one for nonCPS1-games and an old one for CPS1-games) i guess

thanx for enlighten me - never thought things would be that complicated though...

elvis · Post by **elvis** » Mon Sep 01, 2008 11:26 pm

lewisit wrote:you download a complete set of roms (16GB) when there's a new/updated one - right?

No. I TorrentZip my ROMs once, and then connect to a torrent tracker with all the latest ROMs.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/trrntzip

When the new version is out, I stop the old torrent and delete the tracker file, get the new one, and connect. Because my ROMs are torrentzipped, all the unchanged ROMs are considered "good". The changed ROMs are considered "bad", deleted and re-downloaded.

Between versions of MAME I download at the least a few MB and at the most about 100MB, depending on the release. No need to download the entire 16GB set every time, because 99% of the file set doesn't change between releases.

The beauty of BitTorrent is it's "self-healing" nature. It's designed to break files down into chunks and do checks on each part. It was initially put in to stop people inserting bad files (trojans, viruses, and other nasties) into torrents, but the side effect is when you have a massive volume of data broken up into small files (like the MAME ROMs), it means that dealing with regular differential updates is a piece of cake.

poodude · Post by **poodude** » Wed Sep 03, 2008 1:44 am

ClrMamePro isn't that complicated...

1. Download the latest version of MAME
2. Click on the create button in ClrMamePro and point it to the MAME exe.
3. Create the MAME profile (scans the exe for the rom names)
4. Point to your rom directory and scan them.

elvis · Post by **elvis** » Wed Sep 03, 2008 4:59 am

poodude wrote:ClrMamePro isn't that complicated...

I consider it a bit of a litmus test, really.

lewisit · Post by **lewisit** » Wed Sep 03, 2008 7:01 am

poodude wrote:ClrMamePro isn't that complicated...

for someone totally new (since about 3 weeks) to the MS-world it is...

i'm still terribly insecure about what i am supposed to do and what things i better leave alone in windows

Fudoh · Post by **Fudoh** » Wed Sep 03, 2008 9:55 am

@lewisit: on a side note - I've updated to .127 recently and all CPS1 games work just fine. It was my first update since .112 and I basically updated for the CPS3 games plus Wyvern Wings. No problems whatsoever.