Which Mame is suggested for the a Pi 4 with 4GB of Ram?

Jiryn

Setting up my Pi 4 with 4GB of ram.
Which Mame is suggested for the a Pi 4 with 4GB of Ram?

Just want to make sure I have the correct file set to play.
(Since Mame 2003/.78 seemed to have a lot of incompatibilities)

Clyde

Incompatibilites with what exactly? Every MAME version has its own romset that it is most compatible with. Other version's romsets are more or less incompatible with it. That applies to MAME 2003/0.78 as well as the newest MAME versions 0.2xx.

That said, most MAME versions in Retropie are marked as "experimental" and may cause problems because of that. Thus, regardless of the Pi in question, I would recommend to stick to the well-tested MAME 2003 as well as its enhanced fork MAME 2003 Plus and FinalBurn Neo, another arcade emulator under heavy development.

Others here prefer AdvanceMAME, about which I can't say much. I prefer MAME and FB Neo for their integration in RetroArch and its centralised configuration.

Jiryn

I thought I had a .78 romset, but there were a bunch of games that ran with some major oddities like Alien Storm and Batman Forever Arcade.
I was gonna give 2010 a run, it just seems like the new Pi could handle it without issue.

(Though looking back, the I do have a .78 zip, the only folder I have unzipped is labeled 0.37b5.... so I might have mistakenly put the wrong set on)

barbudreadmon

@Jiryn

mame2003-plus won't run alien storm fine ? i think @arcadez2003 backported some system18 improvements from mame2010
batman forever is a STV (sega saturn arcade) game, you are expecting too much from your pi4

Jiryn

@barbudreadmon
The issues were on a Pi3 and Pi3+
Though, as I said, I may have had the wrong image set installed.. since the folder on my PC is labeled .37b, while the .78 is still zipped.

sirhenrythe5th

@barbudreadmon said in Which Mame is suggested for the a Pi 4 with 4GB of Ram?:

@Jiryn

batman forever is a STV (sega saturn arcade) game, you are expecting too much from your pi4

Well, speaking of STV-Performance on a Pi3B+ using AdvancMame 3.9: it is not that far away from being playable!

I really had the hope that the extra CPU-Power of the Pi4 would be enough to get them running near perfectly, but if i read your statement i really have the idea of skipping the Pi4 and wait for the Pi5 :D
My main interest are Arcade-Games using a CRT - and what i read atm is: issues with CRT and no remarkable performance boost in arcade-emulation :/

barbudreadmon

@sirhenrythe5th said in Which Mame is suggested for the a Pi 4 with 4GB of Ram?:

Well, speaking of STV-Performance on a Pi3B+ using AdvancMame 3.9: it is not that far away from being playable!

The thing is that the "major oddities" mentioned by the OP are caused by the inaccurate emulation. Accurate emulation of stv on a single threaded & software rendered emulator like MAME will require a beast. Speedwise the pi4 is already struggling with lr-yabasanshiro, a multi-threaded saturn emulator solely optimized for arm boards, which is still far from being an accurate saturn emulator.

I played a few STV titles on MAME so i can say it : it's bad, even on recent versions (can't speak for the last 2 years though, my last try was probably around 2018), you'll be lucky if you even manage to finish the game without crashing.

barbudreadmon

@Jiryn said in Which Mame is suggested for the a Pi 4 with 4GB of Ram?:

@barbudreadmon
The issues were on a Pi3 and Pi3+
Though, as I said, I may have had the wrong image set installed.. since the folder on my PC is labeled .37b, while the .78 is still zipped.

You're talking about mame2003-plus ? not mame2003 ? right ?
Well, if mame2003-plus doesn't emulate this game properly, i guess it's worth using mame2010 specifically for sega system18 games, but i wouldn't recommend using mame2010 globally.

Darksavior

I recommend, in this order: fb-neo, mame2016, mame2003plus. I tried cotton 2 a while back on advmame on my pi4, and ran at around full speed. The other stv games not so much. System32 runs fine on mame2016. I wish the pi4 was powerful enough to run the cave games..

https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/FinalBurn-Neo
https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/MAME

Clyde

@Jiryn In the case you don't know that already: If you put your roms in the directory .../roms/arcade instead of .../roms/mame-libretro, you can choose more different emulators for all or single roms via the Runcommand menu. That way, you can put roms from different romsets in the same directory and set their emulators accordingly.

barbudreadmon

@Darksavior I wouldn't recommend FBNeo for system18 games though, i know our current system18 driver have issues that will need a major rewriting. System18 is marked as being properly emulated from MAME 0.123 onward, so mame2010 (aka 0.139) should be ok.

janderclander14

@Darksavior Shouldn't mame2010 be preferable to 2016? From a brief testing, 2016 seemed to me significantly slower than 2010, and the latter barely runs some namco psx-based games. 2016 has the advantage of 'almost' running cave sh3 games but, other than this, are there other benefits over 2010?

Finally, I usually give mame2003-plus preference thanks to its excellent support of different control types (4way, analog, dual joy, etc) over retropad and the possibility of fine tune analog controls. 2010, unfortunately, crahses when manually mapping controls via the tab menu.

arcadez2003

Only the bootleg version of Alien Storm works in MAME2003 as the FD encryption that most of these Sega 16-bit games used had not been cracked yet.
with earlier games the FD was just used to pass commands between the main and sub CPU's without those the games would not boot, by the time the
System 18 games came around they also piped Sega VDP graphics via the FD also.

It's not a emulation problem per say as funny enough the Alien Storm bootleg just looked that bad, it's missing some enemies and has no backgrounds on some levels
as the bootleggers just ripped out Sega's VDP graphical chip rather than attempting to crack it then sold as many as they could to arcade operators by offering up
cheaper boards than the Sega originals.

Some of the Sega bootleg's were not all bad but the system18 ones are especially crappy i guess it all depended on how skilled the bootleggers actually were.
check the bootleg of DD Crew in current MAME which has all the VDP Gfx ripped out and laugh at how terrible it looks, you can imagine the arcade owner who bought one
of those back in the day thinking it not laughing matter whatsoever, you get what you pay for i guess :)

arcadez2003

On the subject of bootleggers some of them were really talented and if you played a bootleg then the original version they copied you'd never notice the difference
some of them actually perform better if you play the technos version of Renegade vs the bootleg you'll notice the latter to be better as the original uses a MCU for the inputs
and many game routines like enemy attacks and movements etc etc.

This causes a delay which you'll notice as slowdown in game, the bootleggers simply dumped the contents of the MCU and set the main CPU to deal with the
the game protection routines instead which is actually less of a resource and memory hog so the bootleg is a more streamlined version of the game and plays
way better as a result.

As mentioned above some bootleggers were plain hopeless or just rip off artists, but i always found it amusing that quite alot of them after stealing someone
else's game they actually protected their bootleg so no one could steal their game, kinda like a thief robbing your house and then locking the door or window again on
the way out :)

RedMarsBlueMoon

I could not get many of the old 70s/early 80s classics to run on lr-mame2003/Pi4/RP4.6 so last night tried lr-mame2010. The first couple of rom's have been running ok although Iv'e had to turn off the crt shaders as thing were getting stuttery.
Playing R-Type still didn't seem that smooth I would have expected it to run super smooth being an old game. Not sure if its there's a faster mame that works well on the Pi4?

mitu

@RedMarsBlueMoon said in Which Mame is suggested for the a Pi 4 with 4GB of Ram?:

I could not get many of the old 70s/early 80s classics to run on lr-mame2003/Pi4/RP4.6 so last night tried lr-mame2010

Looks like you're not using the right ROM set for Mame2003.

Not sure if its there's a faster mame that works well on the Pi4?

Yes, there is - please start with https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Arcade/ to understand what options you have and how to start with arcade emulation.

Darksavior

@janderclander14 I forgot who told me that 2010 has shoddy joystick support since it's a hack or something.
I'd rather use 2003 plus if a game: is not supported on fbn or not emulated well, or it doesn't run well on 2016. 2003 does have to deal with bootleg rom sets sometimes and I'm trying to not use those anymore.

Namco psx arcade games won't even run on 2003 so don't bother. Maybe advmame might run them. I use the ps1 versions.

RedMarsBlueMoon

@mitu I'm using the 0.78 romset and I also tried all the failing roms on my PCs retroarch mame2003 and they ran perfectly there.
I inspected the roms using a 2003 dat and romcenter and it all checked out (we'll there was maybe one rom that was missing something, but still worked on the pc)

mitu

@RedMarsBlueMoon You should open a new topic and provide the info about your system, as detailed in https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first.
An detailed emulator log should tell us more on what's the error with your ROMs.

sirhenrythe5th

to summarize the topic: there is no advantage in buying a Pi4 instead of a Pi3 concerning MAME atm, right?
When i read that games from the 70 & 80s run stuttery (w/ shaders) than you could even say: it got worse :)
All the games that did not run before with a Pi3 (Cave SH3, Sega Titan, 3D-Games,...) dont get any boost with the Pi4, so it seems that we have to wait for a fork like "MAME2019++++, super-optimized for the Pi4" or something like that :)