New Retropie user with questions about MAME!

sleve_mcdichael

@xionyus if it helps, it's not just you, this title isn't working for me either in 2003 (I don't have 2003+ but I do have 2003 on my system. I got the same "game does not work" screen, and a pop-up warning: "there are known problems emulating this game.")

It seems to be working just fine in 2010 though (you'll need a different download. There's one linked from the same place you got this one, if I'm looking at the same thing. Remember what I said about full non-merged sets. You don't need the whole giant pack. You can take just the single 9ballsht.zip file from the 2010 pack and run it in lr-mame2010. This title doesn't have any samples or additional data [chd's -- Compressed Hunks of Data, like the laserdisc in Dragon's Lair, or the HDD in Killer Instinct]. Samples exist because some games used sound effects that are difficult to emulate so they just playback .wav recordings of the noises.)

...aaaand, another one's added to my set :)

mitu

Looking at 9ballsht in Mame2003Plus's dat file shows it's a clone of coolpool, so check if you have the parent rom in the same folder.

The other 2 variants are not supported by Mame2003plus, that's why they don't work. They may be working with other arcade emulators, as @sleve_mcdichael mentioned.

barbudreadmon

@sleve_mcdichael said in New Retropie user with questions about MAME!:

It seems to be working just fine in 2010 though (you'll need a different download

This dump was incomplete and corrupt until MAME 0.133 (2009?). As i said above, the older the emulator, the more likely you'll encounter those bad dumps issues or other emulation problems. As @mitu said, you might have more chances with coolpool, this one had a proper dump back in 2003, although it supposedly had emulation issues at that time but maybe the fixes for those were backported to mame2003+.

xionyus

@mitu I did have the coolpool rom in there as well. Not sure why it didn't want to work with mame2003+ at all. But I did happen to get it working by using MAME2010.

Thanks @sleve_mcdichael :)

Also in this pack I downloaded, it has 9ballsht2 and 3. Can I get rid of those?

And if anyone recommends any other games let me know :D Trying to add a bit at a time from the ground up and skyscraper can take awhile.

sleve_mcdichael

@xionyus

Also in this pack I downloaded, it has 9ballsht2 and 3. Can I get rid of those?

Yes, you can get rid of those if you don't want to play those variants (whatever they are; for example one might use trackball controls, or face the opponents in a different order or something. These are just examples, I don't know what the actual differences are.)

mahoneyt944

You may try to use these compatibility tables to see which games are working or not. These lists are not always 100% accurate but usually give you an idea where a game stands before trying to run one.
https://buildbot.libretro.com/compatibility_lists/

barbudreadmon

@mahoneyt944 said in New Retropie user with questions about MAME!:

These lists are not always 100% accurate

For that matter, i said it a few times already : for accuracy's sake you should flag dkong as having wrong (or maybe imperfect ?) colors in mame2003 & mame2003+

xionyus

@mahoneyt944 This is a cool list. Bookmarked it. Thanks!

mahoneyt944

@barbudreadmon honestly, those games are close enough that the average user would not notice, this list isn't about starting a witch hunt... it's just a general reference to whether a game is expected to play or not.

I don't know if you've ever worked on actual hardware like I have, but I can tell you that colors from one cabinet to another are often slightly different due to the judgement of the person adjusting the knobs in the back. This is also due to the fact that companies often used different CRT brands for the same game. Not to mention that an authentic cabinet will almost always have a degree of screen burn if it's actually in use for a period of time. I won't even get into the array of dithering techniques companies used to push more colors and better graphics out CGA monitors such as the electrohome G07, used in many cabinets like Bally Midway games such as Tron.

These things really raise the question of what is the perfect picture? If you've ever walked into a department store with TVs on display all scrolling through the same recording, you can see just how different the same color can be.

barbudreadmon

@mahoneyt944 Correct 1st level color should be magenta while older mame was vermilion, they don't seem that close to me, and there are differences on other colors.

This isn't about monitor settings or it would affect other redish colors the same way (see hiscore letters at the top), this is about resnet (resistance-based color calculation) not being properly emulated in older mame.

Sure, if you removed/replaced the resistors on the cabinet, the colors would be different, and would be even more different if you played around with the crt's colorimetry, but i believe the point here is to inform the user about the differences from an original unmodified cabinet.

I'm not telling you to fix that emulation since some players like it that way, but i think it should be properly documented, your list will never be accurate if you don't try to fix it.

mahoneyt944

@barbudreadmon just for reference in what we are talking about for anyone else who may be interested in this topic, here's a screenshot from fbneo and one from mame2003-plus. Yes the colors are slightly different but I don't see it as a reason for concern personally.... certainly more important things to focus on.

As far as the lists being accurate, it's a self generated webpage built from the source code's dat. So anyone who wants to submit a PR is welcome to do so, including for this concern. I designed these lists to be, for the most part, self sustaining so it doesn't require a devs tribal knowledge to maintain them. It's probably the most accurate representation of the cores current state there ever was. It's not perfect because the source code is not perfect which requires the community to participate 🙂.

barbudreadmon

@mahoneyt944 said in New Retropie user with questions about MAME!:

requires the community to participate

PR sent, i remember fixing resnet issues on a few other games so i might send other PR later when i'll remember their names.

mahoneyt944

@barbudreadmon surely 👍. check your PR though, build issues.