mame2003-plus exits to its own interface!

barbudreadmon

@grant2258 said in mame2003-plus exits to its own interface!:

no drama here at all apart form you making it one

That's rich coming from the guy whose most posts are whining about RA/libretro, if i make a summary of your 2 posts above :

don't try to fix issues with RA => i seriously doubt it was an issue with RA in the first place if the OP was using default settings, a look at glxinfo would have been useful, having the kernel module loaded doesn't mean Xorg is using it
you are better using LB for standalone emulators, blahblahblah RA => ES allows that too...
don't use libretro arcade cores on a barcade => not bored after saying it for years ? iirc @dankcushions will love this too
don't use libretro computer cores either, standalone are better => not familiar with this one, but it just seems like your expected and usual ranting

Could you stop making of everything an opportunity to trash talk about RA/libretro ? It's boring, you were banned, it was well deserved, get over it.

grant2258

I suggest you get over it. The user got his issue fixed before i replied to him. Then you take it as another opportunity to attack me. I know you dont like me but i suggest you get over that lol.

mitu

@grant2258 please stop personal attacks here.

grant2258

I havent made any personal attacks at all. If I did you can point them out and ill address it if needs be. :). I have a long history with with mr b but i have no interest in being banned from here or any personal attacks here on anyone.

mitu

@grant2258 Your previous reply looks like a jab at the other participant, but I maybe have not expressed myself correctly.

I noticed the gradual rise in your talking down against RetroArch (or the libretro team in other places like Reddit). I have no quarrel with you and I appreciate your help in the forum (or contributions to Mame2003-plus), but I'll not allow this forum to be your personal soap box for you to vent your disagreements with other projects/people. Thank you.

grant2258

@mitu reddit has nothing to do with here and yes there is a lot of toxicity there. From there side as well. I wont spill over here and I have no issues with anyone here either. I hope this applies both ways as well.

It wont spill over here im comfortable enough in my own skin not to do that. The computers thing ill explain the retropad binding and hotkeys can make full keyboard access an issues for people new to it.

barbudreadmon

@mitu said in mame2003-plus exits to its own interface!:

Your previous reply looks like a jab at the other participant

It clearly is, he made 3 arguments against libretro in the same post, with the final one being clearly targeted at my work on default mappings in lr-fbneo.

@grant2258 said in mame2003-plus exits to its own interface!:

I know you dont like me

While i can't deny after everything you said and did over the last 2 years, especially this last year after you got banned for defaming the guy who kept saying to the other libretro mods "don't ban him, he isn't that bad" (happy to know you are confortable in your own skin after doing that, personally i wouldn't), at the very least i don't remember ever talking down any of the things you are involved with (afaik, the input layer in mame2003+ & the sdl port of fbneo, if anything i helped by explaining a few things about the codebase with the later), on the other side you made a habit of "talking down" everything related to RA/LR.

Again, i think i'm being fair by just asking to leave us alone, not that i expect you would ever listen, otherwise your relations with the libretro guys wouldn't have deteriorated that much.

Riverstorm

@Scerion said in mame2003-plus exits to its own interface!:

I guess what would make Retropie a little more approachable would be if you could specify "use THIS emulator for THIS directory", rather than making the user pick the emulator and controls for each and every game. The real issue was the performance though.

I missed all the goodness here as we are up to our ears in COVID-19 and I now have a govt "get-your-ass-to-work-everyday-free-pass" along with my wife who works at the federal level and receives her marching orders from Uncle Sam. Now are best household hope is not to catch it for the next year until a vaccine arrives but it's better than the alternative of unemployment. If Trump doesn't blow us up he'll get us with his poor management of this virus! ;)

I'm not quite sure of your goal. Every emulator already has a dedicated directory if that helps.

If you're trying to consolidate ROMs as the arcade folder allows. There's really no need for folders.

As an example if you want to consolidate mame2003, m3plus, fbneo & advmame you would usually pick one emulator as your main. Each emulator is built for a specific ROM set. Then basically you would go through that set and pull out all the ROMs you wish to add to your personal game set.

Many of the ROM sets have overlap so you wouldn't need to grab the same ROM from every set but focus on specific games other than what's in your list. Be careful as some have equal hashes with different names or different names with equal hashes.

Maybe one emulator doesn't have a specific game you wish to play, or better performance or a corrected color palette, etc. The list goes on and on for which emulator you choose to run which game. When you're done it's basically "1G1R" because you can't have duplicate ROMs and really don't need them in most cases.

Once you have all your games together I usually dump the core games into the arcade folder. Run any game and it will prompt you to pick an emulator once on first run. That will become your default emulator for the arcade folder and all games will attempt to launch using it.

Now for the other games you can use the menu for a few games but for many I like to modify the emulators.cfg file and add them manually. It looks something similar to below and is much quicker. You wouldn't need to add any m3plus entries because that IS the default emulator.

arcade_starwars = "advmame"
arcade_mslug = "lr-fbneo"

Now all the games will run with the correct/best emulator but appear as one list of games. Incredibly handy. My override game list is only about 75 games or so. With the shareware tools on the internet you could modify that .cfg file for thousands or entries if needed. I see you wrote you programmed a GLSL shader so this should be a snap-done job for you.

As for input I have no idea why it would be necessary to configure every game. If I had a layout similar to below most games would be fine.

123
456

I can play Donkey Kong, Galaga, Galaxian, Pac-Man, Frogger, Burger Time, Bump 'n' Jump, Double Dragon, Berzerk, Dig Dug, Qix, Joust, Elevator Action, Mario Bros., 1942, etc. etc. etc. just fine out of the box.

You should really only need to override the odd controls or odd button layouts. The defaults if done correctly will cover most games.

I'm not talking special control setups for After Burner or Zaxxon or duel stick games Smash TV or Robotron. Most already know they need to go the extra mile for those types of games.

Another example is pinball games. For the flippers, most of the time they are configured for the A-B buttons which frankly is a less than optimal layout. When building a box I usually put the L-R and L2-R2 buttons on the sides. Then I configure the flippers to use the L-R buttons (located on either side for a more realistic feel).

With that thought maybe your L-R buttons are on the top or front of the box. No one can guess your layout to pre-configure every game for you. One word--conjecture! ;)

The point being the starting defaults have been thought out and are pretty well done. MAME has had 23 years to perfect it and most of those defaults made their way to RP. The rest is up to you to tweak!

I used to try and configure every game immediately but now I just wait until I play it, if ever, which only takes a few seconds and I make backups frequently. Now that all the work is done I can do a new SD card setup with the default image from scratch in minutes.

an i5, 4ghz, 32GB RAM, old GTX1060, SSD

That's not a bad server. I have to say I am a bit surprised you're running a GTX 1060 in a server. For most of our servers we just use the integrated chipset. Neither SQL, Exchange nor any in house programming need many GPU cycles. We do run top heavy on clients such as 911 dispatch which use 6 display layouts at each call station, a little less for the Sheriff's office or Jail.

For servers we are running a Cisco UCS chassis with blade servers running VMWare. The interface cards are 10G dual cross connections to a switch fabric that has a 40G backplane for redundancy. Conceptually the UCS box is flexible but way overly complicated. During our next hardware refresh cycle we are fork lift upgrading and dumping the entire setup.

Basically server GPU's are a bottom priority, not even CPU cycles are of concern but RAM is always in short supply. With VMWare we run hundreds of GIGs on each blade but still it's never enough when your spinning up VM's a dime a dozen. For storage we use Netapp and carve out what we need for each server. Some thin and some thick provisioned.

It sounds like you've indulged with MAME for enough years and have enough experience and programming to know 10 FPS on a GTX 1060 has to be a serious setup snafu! ;)

I do run two full towers at home but I love the Pi world and think it's tiny foot print is amazing. All that gaming goodness stuffed in that teeny tiny box! :)

Anyway if your happy with your setup and it's running the games to your satisfaction that's all that matters. It's all about the games.

There is no such thing as "a newer PC is faster than an older PC", it's all about specs.

I do agree specs are important and needed in some cases but a generalized statement of a "newer PC is faster than older PC" isn't totally wrong. An older Sandy Bridge vs. a newer Haswell (22nm vs 32nm) at the same clock speed is more than likely going to be slower simply because of the architecture it's built upon. Heck you can have the older PC running at a higher clock speed at it will still be slower. IPC is key and usually brings many architecture improvements with each new generation (like 45, 22 and 14nm). Generally speaking newer PC's are faster than older PC's! I'm just throwing that out there so don't take it to serious at all! :)

grant2258

@mitu dont quite know what to do here ill ignore him for now.

Scerion

@Riverstorm Just thought I'd reply to say thanks for the detailed response to my post! There's a lot of information there, but the combination of LaunchBox and BigBox is a great fit for me. I just grabbed the latest version of MAME, matching ROM set (actually the same as the ones I tried with RP), pointed LB at the ROMs and left it to pull in all the associated imagery, videos, marquees, information etc etc. Took it about 8 hours, but the setup is working really well with minimal effort, honestly. I'm mostly a hardware engineer (PCB and FPGA design, but also MCU programming in C/C++ and ASM) and don't have as much time for tinkering as I'd like at the moment - quarantine hasn't lessened my workload!

Yes that old server originally had 3 GTX1060s installed as it was used by me mostly for CUDA and machine learning development. I was training some models on it, and the GPUs obviously are hugely faster than an i5 - or any CPU - for that type of processing. Those GPUs had never even been plugged into a monitor before now :) I took 2 out as there's no point having 3 to run MAME - especially as they are not SLI capable! My main server is used mostly for storage and some command line tool development, and has a more standard spec - just lots of RAID disk space and memory!

Thanks again, and have a nice day!

Oh, yes the box was initially using the NVidia drivers, and I did use glxinfo, and was actually using the Nvidia desktop config tool. As said, it was weird, but I didn't spend too much time on it.