Too Close for Comfort 2012?

[1up]

I've been spoiled by nice christmas surprises the last couple of years and expect more.

2010: ketsui, ddp:doj, espgaluda works in MAME
2011: SH-3 emulation works and slowpoke edition is the shit
2012: ?

It's been awfully quiet.

Bring IT!

[trap15]

Raiden II

[Cagar]

mjclark returns with SDOJ fully emulated

[IseeThings]

2012 got you BeeStorm and Demon Front (if you like Run'Gun style shooters)

not really sure what you were expecting..

Personally I don't anticipate Raiden 2 will work (properly) by Christmas, there's still an awful lot to do and understand.

Proper sound on the remaining Toaplan games isn't going to happen either, because the Decap guy is basically inactive, and would probably want the full rate to look at weird chips like those as any kind of priority.

I keep hearing rumours of people working on recompilers and multi-core acceleration for MAME's Naomi emulation, but it will still be slower than the other emulators even if that happens, and it's not like you can't just use those now.

MAME isn't going to emulate all the PC based stuff (Deathsmiles 2 etc.) at any reasonable speed in the near future.

For 'minor'* 2012 achivements so far:
Wyvern Wings got preliminary sound...
Diet Family was dumped emulated...
Silver Millennium dumped + emulated...
SunA's Star Fighter has been emulated

* in terms of importance, not difficulty to get done!

If you're willing to break the mould further then you've got the chase view 'Sky Destroyer' from Taito and 'Cyber Tank' from Coreland, both which involve heavy amounts of shooting, and if you're into your more old-school stuff there is 'Fantastic' the Brazilian unofficial rewrite / rip-off of Galaga, made by Brazilian division of Taito(!)

I wouldn't say it's been quiet at all, especially considering how little there is left, and how difficult it is to source any of it.

[Ed Oscuro]

Also 7Z has been supported for a while (?) but it got an important fix recently - and at least one MAME set source has started supporting it. At the moment my MAME ROM space has ballooned to ~1.5 times what it was during the ZIP-only era, but eventually that should be a noteworthy space savings when I ditch most of the old set. Hoorah!

If Raiden II comes in less than three years from now, I'll consider us all lucky. That "we're on the final stretch, hurry up" mentality is silly when we've been patient so long. No reason to spoil ourselves with anticipation.

If there is something on my MAME wishlist, it's to keep up consistency between releases (147 was, I understand, VERY aggressive, but I don't see any of the worries about apocalyptic game breakage having materialized) and to start to go back and fix some games that haven't seemed to share in the progress (Fighting Hawk is terrible still).

[KAI]

Pinksweets & MMP without slowdowns
DFK/SDOJ/AK
En-Eins (Y2) emulated

[DrTrouserPlank]

I've been spoiled by nice christmas surprises the last couple of years and expect more.

2010: ketsui, ddp:doj, espgaluda works in MAME
2011: SH-3 emulation works and slowpoke edition is the shit
2012: ?

It's been awfully quiet.

Bring IT!

Xmas 2012 will feature new and improved DrTrouserPlank.

[Drachenherz]

I've been spoiled by nice christmas surprises the last couple of years and expect more.

2010: ketsui, ddp:doj, espgaluda works in MAME
2011: SH-3 emulation works and slowpoke edition is the shit
2012: ?

It's been awfully quiet.

Bring IT!

Xmas 2012 will feature new and improved DrTrouserPlank.

Now with even more whining...

[CStarFlare]

I like to think Akai Katana Limited roms will drop sometime.

[BPzeBanshee]

I was going to ask what kind of MAME coverage we had this year, thanks Haze. Do you think you'll do another one of those 'what we did this year' blog coverage posts next January?

[IseeThings]

Yes, you'll probably get a yearly summary in Jan.

It's a shame Guru is still playing silly games with Wyvern F-0, that would have been a nice one to add to the list.

[Bananamatic]

2013 will bring bikini pictures because sdoj too hard

[shmuppyLove]

I'd like to see some of the systems that are well-emulated-but-not-perfect fixed up. Like G-Net, F3, ZN-2, ST-V.

[Hagane]

It doesn't have to do with shooters, but I'd love to be able to play The Gladiator (and Oriental Legend 2, and Knights of Valour 3), which is too close for comfort I guess.

[moozooh]

I'd like to see some of the systems that are well-emulated-but-not-perfect fixed up. Like G-Net, F3, ZN-2, ST-V.

Good point. Most of the recent games are either too resource-hungry to faithfully emulate, or still protected by developers/publishers, or available on other platforms anyway. I'd rather have late 90s and early 00s fully covered as right now those are the "lost generation" as far as availability goes.

[Tokyo-J]

Arcades are close to dead. Not more they can emulate or port these days.

Perfection would be nice in Emulation.

[shmuppyLove]

Are the PC-based systems going to make it into MESS at some point? I think they make more sense there than in MAME. Things like the Type-X and Lindbergh ...

[guigui]

Jeez, why cant I even understand what the subject of "too close for comfort" topics is ?

[shmuppyLove]

Jeez, why cant I even understand what the subject of "too close for comfort" topics is ?

Emulation

[DMC]

Someone expressed the phrase when the more recent CAVE releases began to be properly emulated. So it was okay to emulate games that were made in the distant past, because those games didn't make any more money for the owners. But games like Ketsui, which was just recently released on XBOX360, were "too close for comfort".

[Tokyo-J]

It can also be incorporated into shower scenes where one drops the soap and nothing happens.

Too Close For Comfort.

[gct]

Are the PC-based systems going to make it into MESS at some point? I think they make more sense there than in MAME. Things like the Type-X and Lindbergh ...

I don't know if it had been brought up in this forum yet, but I think there were hacker dudes somewhere making progress on playing Lindy stuff without having the security dongles attached and/or setting up multiboots. Still on original Lindy hardware though.

I'd be happy just having the security broken, if it means being able to play on a custom-built Linux box with close-to-spec parts.

[IseeThings]

Are the PC-based systems going to make it into MESS at some point? I think they make more sense there than in MAME. Things like the Type-X and Lindbergh ...

Well a bigger problem is that MAME / MESS can't currently emulate even a 486 66mhz at more than about 30% speed when you hit protected mode. Considering these things ran on P4 2-3Ghz spec with 3D cards you can see it's not really the most pressing question at the moment. Just because people have managed to hack some of them to run on a regular PC doesn't mean a thing for emulation (and if anything makes sourcing the original unhacked versions harder)

Anyway, in a word, no.

While it's on record that I disagree there should even be a MAME / MESS split in the first place (hence me releasing / promoting UME, the combined version) the simple 'rule' remains, if it had a coin slot it goes in MAME, it it didn't, it goes in MESS.

There are plenty of existing things in MAME which run on home hardware, even some PC based stuff, the divide comes down entirely to that reasoning of having / not having a coin slot.

This means that the limited version of AK which IIRC doesn't accept coins will probably end up in MESS if it gets dumped (despite being on an identical SH3 board to any of the other games) just like the CPSChanger boards are only enabled in MESS because it was packaged as a home system and doesn't accept coins despite the actual hardware inside being identical to the CPS arcade units.

As I said, I think it's a silly divide, there is so much overlap between the projects, so many shared base systems, shared chips etc. that it really should just be distributed as a single project. From 0.147 the sources *are* distributed as a single project, but the binaries remain separate unless you get / compile the UME builds I offer.

http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/2012/10/08/ume-0-147u1/

Personally I like it this way, it gives you access to the whole of the project in one piece of software, and while the console emulation from the MESS side might not be up to the standalones in quite a few cases it's certainly good enough for a large number of other ones. With UME you have at your fingertips the ability to run the original arcades, the ports, and anything else you can think of, I'm not sure why anybody wouldn't want that ability when it costs nothing to have. If you're improving the emulation shared components / systems you have the ability to test all your use cases from a single binary which is also good for development.

Anyway, that's drifting off-topic, I'm glad to see things have moved towards being a single source distribution, but I do still hope that one day the *primary* version becomes all-inclusive with secondary stripped down versions because right now a lot of the project, and potential of the project is going to waste because 99% of people have never heard of MESS / UME. Until then rules are rules, so anything without a coin slot only gets turned on in MESS / UME, not MAME and anything with a coin slot ends up in MAME.

[Friendly]

How complete is the 70s/80s/90s MAME ROMset? I assume it's nearing completion?

[Ex-Cyber]

How complete is the 70s/80s/90s MAME ROMset? I assume it's nearing completion?

Define "completion". There are probably dozens, if not hundreds, of bootleg sets (not to mention rare prototypes, exhibition versions, location test builds, etc.) that are already lost forever.

[IseeThings]

Yeah, there are always surprises.

Of course *most* things are dumped at this point, chances are if you saw something in the wild it's dumped and emulated, although there are exceptions of course, things like Data East's Manhattan which due to being on the fragile cassette system hasn't been located and dumped yet (there are almost as many undumped cassettes as dumped ones, although a lot are Mahjong games nobody has seen since the 80s)

Some people of course got to play location test games, especially if they frequented arcades used for testing, it's entirely possible some of those games simply no longer exist in any form tho.

Also there are a lot of popular games which have a rom dump, but that rom dump is incomplete, either because the originals used undumped protection MCUs which are simulated (or in some cases are still really needed to further the emulation, for example the Toaplan sound MCUs) There are a LOT of games this applies to, many you wouldn't notice because the protections are trivial and simulated, but if you're talking how complete the ROMset is (your original question) I guess it needs factoring in.

Even relatively popular games like Gradius we don't currently emulate the original Bubble System release (we have no real way to dump the Bubble Memory, an MCU is doing most of the hard work, error correction, transfer of data to memory etc.) the versions we emulate are the ROM conversions Konami issued way back in 1985 because even they decided the system was too unreliable and prone to memory corruption back then 27 years ago, so you can imagine what the situation is like now... Chances are data is the same just loaded differently, but you never know, they might have used an earlier program revision on them.

Korea still has a lot of undumped stuff, I imagine several of the other minor markets do too, assuming it wasn't all just scraped.

A lot of Japanese collectors are also rather determined not to let some of the remaining games leave Japan, we're finding time and time again people wanting extortionate prices for things.

The video (and non-video) gamblers are also an area for concern, most get destroyed / recycled due to regulation changes, I know we have thousands of UK ones, but we're quite lucky in that sense that people collected them from the old BBS sites, but even then many lack sound roms (because you didn't have to change them when upgrading the machines to new revisions etc.) and many of the video quiz games lack question roms for the same reasons, also anything with a HDD probably ended up being recycled (rather amazingly we recently got hold of a Rise of the Robots proto video game including working HDD made by one of the UK gambling companies, how that didn't just end up recycled I don't know) Most of you probably don't care for a lot of that stuff, and a good majority of it is complete shit, but it remains part of our heritage.

A lot of Windows based things are missing, dance machines, random one-offs. Building arcade games based on Win95 / 98 was always going to mean they had limited life spans, there were XP based 'online' games too (global highscores are good mmmk) I wonder how many of those were destroyed by the automated virus attacks.

But yes, I'm talking in non-specifics here, because we very often don't have the full details until we find things, just random screenshots, flyers, reports of things people played.

Focusing on the completeness of the romset alone is a fairly meaningless metric tho, ROMs don't emulate themselves.

MAME still has a long way to go in emulating a lot of the systems too, there's room for improvement in virtually everything MAME emulates, MESS pretty much shows this, the systems with the lowest compatibility are often ones inherited directly from MAME, they might run arcade games perfectly, but they're not of the exact standard needed to run an entire abusive software library, the thing is when you're working with only arcades you don't notice. The ones build from the ground up for MESS then adapted to run arcade games in MAME conversely often have the higher levels of compatibility because they needed to be developed to a higher standard in the first place. But yeah, having a 'complete romset' no way means the project is complete, and not ALL the hangups are because of undumped devices we have no method of dumping, MAME still does a terrible job of some things like Sega Model 2 when ElSemi's emulator has been running them for years, that's not a technical problem, that's a 'nobody has done it' problem.

[BIL]

mjclark returns with SDOJ fully emulated

Checked in with MJ when I popped into McD's for dinner tonight, he said he's a bit too busy going for that XII Stag Western record. Doubt he was kidding either, that left forearm looked like a prize aubergine when he handed me my fries.

[shmuppyLove]

mjclark returns with SDOJ fully emulated

Checked in with MJ when I popped into McD's for dinner tonight, he said he's a bit too busy going for that XII Stag Western record. Doubt he was kidding either, that left forearm looked like a prize aubergine when he handed me my fries.

This thread just got

[DMC]

mjclark returns with SDOJ fully emulated

Checked in with MJ when I popped into McD's for dinner tonight, he said he's a bit too busy going for that XII Stag Western record. Doubt he was kidding either, that left forearm looked like a prize aubergine when he handed me my fries.

I bet he's sharing pirate SDOJs in happy meals.

But, BIL, you know they'll delete/lock any MJ conspiracy talk as soon as they get a chance.

So to be constructive and contribute to the topic, I'd like to say that I agree with shmuppylove.
+1

[Ed Oscuro]

MJ-12