MAME development: lr-mame2003 Updates

caver01

@darknior said in MAME development: lr-mame2003 Updates:

If nobody do it, we will never have all the good Arcade games on our PI.

I disagree. I think we have a great combination of working arcade emulators on the Pi for all of the "good Arcade games", and with emulator overlap, we actually choices for many of the classics. This lets us get away with smaller boards like the Zero.

Imagine if the recent effort poured into lr-mame2003 was misdirected to mame4all. I think we have a good balance of performance and romset coverage with 2003 and it was the right place to focus on features and enhancements.

Let's not forget AdvanceMAME which takes up some slack too, especially with vector games (which also work in 2003, they just look better in AdvMAME). You also get a bump in the romset to .106.

Riverstorm

@darknior said in MAME development: lr-mame2003 Updates:

If nobody do it, we will never have all the good Arcade games on our PI.

He's just plugging the emulator he uses frequently and looking toward the future which is ok or maybe specific games he would like to see working like Gal's Panic (games_fan said they have been playable in FBA for a while now...I saw that post). ;)

I wouldn't say intentions are bad by any means and the emulation scene isn't quite that dire either. You might think several of these old platforms would be on life-support but the force of nostalgia is strong. Most are quite healthy and prospering.

I saw your other post in another forum about either poor explanation or lack of motivation to show interest to merge the two projects. People due to time restraints, family, resources, etc. do what they can when they can. Someone seems to tweak them eventually for the most popular games and a few others if they are feeling it.

It basically looks like MAME port to the XBOX based on 0.84 with a few extra games? That's a tough sell when mame2003 is sitting so close. Each successive version does add more games but between 0.78 and 0.84 are they main stream quality games of significance or just additional clones and niche games.

My other thought is what is the goal? It seems like the target demographic is entirely different. Basically XBOX (x86) vs. Pi (ARM). I think the majority of users here are Pi based but not all. I don't think it's a lack of motivation at all as stated on the other forum.

I do think you make a good point here.

To update MAME 2003 it is not a real coder work. Like write @gamesfan he copy and past drivers. And with the time he become stronger to do it and update MAME more and more.

The groups that program these drivers from scratch I would imagine are a pretty small circle and the rest are cutting, pasting or tweaking from that code. Kind of like a hacker vs. a script kiddie or skiddie. If it was easy then this conversation wouldn't even exist. Talking and understanding "theory" vs. actual implementation are two different things entirely!

Imagine if the recent effort poured into lr-mame2003 was misdirected to mame4all.

I wouldn't call it a total misdirect or even a TKO...yet...sometimes active development dictates direction. I do prefer the shaders and analog stick support but prefer mame4all's input configuration. I can't think of any "deal breaker" mainstream games that are supported in 0.78 vs. 0.37b5 but if I remember I think I had to move a few significant games to AdvMAME that 0.78 broke when phasing out mame4all-pi. All the golden age era games where implemented early in the MAME development cycle in addition.

darknior

@dankcushions said in MAME development: lr-mame2003 Updates:

but not you? hmm.

Yes i think if one day i have free time, i will try ... i think i can do it. I will not code new drivers like write @Riverstorm ... i will use them and adapt them. But for the moment i'm already in a project with friends, tons of games to try, many Xtra to release (Covers, videos, title) a new skin ... i can't do all my self lol
And i don't speak of my wife and my children :p
I know for Iq_132, but he always help coders on xBox on MAME & FBA, it is a cool guy if we have questions.

@caver01 I don't try AdvanceMAME ... is it really better for Vector games ? Or others ?
I must try some good vector games and search if we can use the background images on MAME.

@Riverstorm you are real, all the quality games where add on MAME v0.78 & 0.84. No many more after that ... but some ... AND some fix, and there are really interesting to make some games working better.
@gamesfan add many fix to make games playable.

Gal's Panic S & S2 don't work on the PI version of FBA ... so strange ... on x86 they works fine.
But we made new tests, with the good ROMSET and the last MAME 2003 compiled from source and now they are working fine :)
We will try on the FULL SET one by one !

@riverstorm said in MAME development: lr-mame2003 Updates:

I saw your other post in another forum about either poor explanation or lack of motivation to show interest to merge the two projects. People due to time restraints, family, resources, etc. do what they can when they can. Someone seems to tweak them eventually for the most popular games and a few others if they are feeling it.

I'm ok with you, same problem for me. It's why search some coders to help. And only to add great games, no crappy clones. It's what @gamesfan do. Or fixing bugs, speed and controls.

I don't know AdvMAME or the set to use with it. It is not a LR emulator with all the cool LR options ... but if you write me it works fine, i can try it for some games.

arcadez2003

@darknior said in MAME development: lr-mame2003 Updates:

@gamesfan is agree with me :) It can be really fantastic on PI to make same work on MAME than on xBox.

Well im not sure that i agree with ya buddy not knowing the in's and out's of MAME Emulation on the PI, from reading the posts it's maybe time you let up on this :)

BTW your after some Kaneko Supernova games Gals Panic Series right..?? did you know that in currant FBA dink has added some speedhacks to the
driver which are hooked to the SH-2 CPU core this should give the games a significant performance boost.

Im not sure what version of FBA the currant PI port is based from but check the dip switch options where the speedhacks can be enabled or better yet ask
one of the FBA PI dev's to enable them by default in the driver.

Edit seems like i jumped the gun i assumed wrongly you were having trouble around the performance of the Supernova games i see now from your last post these
games actually dont work in PI FBA for some reason on ARM based hardware i know the RA boys have similar problems with their FBA port.

Regards!!

Riverstorm

@darknior said in MAME development: lr-mame2003 Updates:

I don't know AdvMAME or the set to use with it.

It uses MAME 0.106. Follow this guide for tweaking AdvMAME to vector game nirvana! Vector games look better on AdvMAME than any other emulator so far due to vector specific features exclusive to AdvMAME and @caver01 has written an excellent guide to achieve those results. Look at the link to see a few screenshots! :)

Im not sure what version of FBA the currant PI port is based from

lr-fbalpha - v0.2.97.42
lr-fbalpha2012 - v0.2.97.30
PiFBA - v0.2.96.71

Here's a link to the FBA Pi documentation. The lr- prefixed to the name signifies it's a Libretro core that uses Retroarch as a front-end in contrast to PiFBA which is standalone. They all use Emulationstation as the graphical user interface & RetroPie to further unify the settings and added functionality under one GUI.

The number of emulators and ports supported is incredible. Even the standalone emulators many times can be tweaked to mimic Retroarch inputs so as to function the same such as adding credits and exiting emulators. This helps make GUI interface integration seamless. The links should help explain.

Main RetroPie documentation page. The "Arcade" link on the left side is where you'll locate the MAME documentation for the different emulators and the corresponding ROM set versions used.

Also there's specific sections as they pertain to RetroPie in regards to Retroarch & Emulationstation. The documentation for RetroPie is extremely useful if you want to learn about it.

Yes i think if one day i have free time, i will try ... i think i can do it.

That would be wonderful! ;)

darknior

@riverstorm Thanks very much for all your informations :)
I know most of them but not all, it's cool :)

ward614

I don't know if this is the appropriate place to post a request for a software change, but here I go.

I would like to request that changes be made to how game pad input is read for games like Pac-man and Donkey Kong which traditionally used 4-way joysticks.

Right now using any controller other than a specific 4-way joystick makes it easy to miss turns as diagonal inputs are treated as blank. I think it would be great if these games could instead take the most recently pressed cardinal direction as the way to move. This would greatly improve performance of a number of widely popular classic games.

I don't know if you want to take this up or not, but here it is regardless.

caver01

@ward614 Nobody would disagree with your logic from a playability standpoint, but think about this carefully. The emulator is software attempting to perfectly mimic the original game hardware. Nothing in the original game hardware is aware of modern d-pads, or all of the options we future users might try to use for controllers.

To put it another way, if you are using real arcade hardware to control the emulator, the answer to this problem is easy--place a restrictor plate around your joystick so only the cardinal directions are available. In essence, do exactly what was done on the original arcade cabinet.

Now, I realize, this is the smart-ass answer, as it does not address the fact that most of us want more universal playability--we want to play PacMan one minute, and then Street Fighter the next--on the same joystick.

Simply said, it's not the job of an accurate emulator to accommodate the wrong hardware. Having said that, there are potential ways around this. One has to do with drivers. If you use a gamepad, you can apparently configure the xbox driver to work like a 4-way joystick. I understand this works surprisingly well, and it may be exactly what you are asking for. I cannot use it because I use a keyboard interface which I guess is a problem with this driver. However, that layer is better suited to address this.

I wish there was a better answer than this, but I know we all share your pain in this regard.

ward614

@caver01 Thank you for your well crafted response. I was definitely only thinking along the lines of playability with my idea and had not considered the implications for emulation accuracy.

I will also need to take a closer look at using xboxdrv as I seem to recall that the 4-way configuration was a "always on" or "always off" alteration which leaves much the same issue of being able to freely switch games.

Any thoughts on something like a toggle in the options menu that would allow it to be turned on and off? That way playability could be increased without sacrificing the ability to precisely emulated each game.

caver01

@ward614 You will have to find the thread, but much has been written about per-game xboxdrv configurations, and with pre/post launch scripts now, we can do just about anything with respect to toggling something on or off.

arcadez2003

From what i understand certain Midway T-unit games can lack performance when using rp1 / 2, this may be of some help in that regard a Williams sound core from MAME61
which includes two speedhacks which will significantly boost the fps in the following games..........

High Impact Football
Judge Dredd
Mortal Kombat : Y-Unit and T-Unit Versions
Narc
NBA JAM
NBA JAM TE
Smash TV
Terminator 2
Total Carnage

I've stripped out the DCS code from this to avoid compile conflicts with dcs.c, apart from that all the code should match up with MAME78 and as a result should just drop into
the MAME2003 libretro sources, obviously when using older code in a newer src some testing will be needed for all the affected games these drivers are linked to Williams sound....

mcr68.c
midtunit.c
midyunit.c
williams.c

Williams sound with speedhacks
[url]https://www.sendspace.com/file/qrngln[/url]

darknior

@gamez-fan Woaw thanks to share your work on PI :)

MrJordaaany

Hey is anyone else having issues with mame2003 not running some games after a handful of updates from a stock 4.3 image?

I have about 150 handpicked mame games running on mame2003 and in the last update or 2 I've had about 8 games that don't work anymore and I keep discovering more.

I've raised a thread here:
https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/14529/help-retropie-4-3-some-mame2003-roms-not-working-after-update/14

And @gamez-fan does seem to think it might be something he did when working on updates for mame, but I want to know if anyone else has had issue? I haven't seen alot of posts or threads about it yet is all.

pjft

@mrjordaaany I suppose part of it is that not everyone updates their setup that often, since if something isn't broken why chance making it break? :)

As such, don't take the silence as "it's only you" but rather "not that many people have updated yet, and on top of that tried out the same ROMs as you".

MrJordaaany

@pjft It's more a pain I can't roll back easy. I going to have to do a fresh 4.3 install. But I agree, shit ain't broke so should have stayed with it :)

arcadez2003

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