MAME 0.260

https://www.mamedev.org/?p=530

by chungy • 3 years ago

159 94 3 years ago

mamedev.org

ur-whale• 3 years ago

MAME 0.260

How large is a full ROM set these days, I wonder?

chongli• 3 years ago

Huge, if you include all the laserdisc games!

m463• 3 years ago

Looks like > 1tb

a full set for 0.258 is 1073gb (CHDs + ROMs + Extras):

https://archive.org/details/mame-chds-roms-extras-complete

photonerd9• 3 years ago

It’s 2.5tb for the software archive alone.

But for games 1tb is roughly correct. Assuming no deduplication

ShadowBanThis014• 3 years ago

What are ROMs vs. CHDs vs. extras?

LeoPanthera8• 3 years ago

Compressed (and so sizes are approximate):

74GiB for the arcade ROMs

83GiB for the software ROMs (which used to be for MESS)

937GiB for the arcade hard disk images

2.6TiB for the software hard disk images

BitTorrent makes distribution less painful these days, since you can point your client at your existing roms folder and it won't bother to re-download things you already have. Only a small percentage of the set changes with each version.

plugin-baby• 3 years ago

What’s the difference between arcade ROMs and arcade hard disk images? Do these cover different games?

amlib• 3 years ago

Using bit torrent to do partial downloads is nice but it will not remove deleted or renamed files. Over the years, specially if you update each release, you will end up with lots of files that shouldn't be there. You can of course have some kind of script that checks file lists for each set and delete anything not in there.

TheRealDunkirk• 3 years ago

They should break it up by year. I've had it all downloaded and installed and working in several ways over the years, but I only really care about stuff released before, say, 2000.

ShadowBanThis014• 3 years ago

I'm looking at the torrents but I don't know what I need to just have the complete arcade collection and the software to run it.

Right now I'm downloading the ROMs torrent, which does add up to 74 GB. But what else do I need for arcade emulation only? Thanks for any insight!

rebolek2• 3 years ago

MAME supports Casio CZ-101? My favourite synth? I thought MAME is for arcade emulation.

Anyway, I need to try it, I love it'đ sound, I wonder how close it is to original.

LeoPanthera8• 3 years ago

MAME absorbed MESS and became a more generic multi-system emulator. It aims for 100% accuracy in emulation, even at the expense of speed, and so it is quite resource hungry for a lot of things.

rbanffy• 3 years ago

I remember I have started using MESS (because I care more about computers than games) before the merge. One thing I notice in many drivers (the "plugboards" where various emulator parts are connected) is that they could, with some work, be compiled to some HDL.

Would be quite a thing.

codetrotter• 3 years ago

Speaking of which, see also Bintracker. A Chiptune Audio Workstation that uses MAME as emulation backend.

https://bintracker.org/

Recently discussed on HN about 49 days ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37377529

chungy3• 3 years ago

MAME stopped being "just arcade" long ago. It's basically an "emulate every hardware thing ever made" project :)

anthk• 3 years ago

Even Tamagotchis, plus Casio assistants, even that one which was made for girls.

G3rn0ti2• 3 years ago

It also emulate home consoles. It’s got the best Sega Genesis emulator to my knowledge. Usually, emulators have issues with its sound hardware. But not MAME.

photonerd9• 3 years ago

It’s usually got the “best” everything emulator. As long as by best you mean most accurate.

It may not be the fastest (usually never is) and may not be the most compatible (because it may not be complete vs hacks in other emulators) but what it does emulate is usually pretty close to perfect & will converge on that at least.

It’s Genesis emulator is a great example of that: about as perfect as non-hardware can get… but definitely not the fastest or most fancy

mahrain• 3 years ago

I was surprised to learn it is the most capable emulator for SGI machines: https://sgi.neocities.org/

I guess the hardware is similar enough.

mepian• 3 years ago

Apparently SGI emulation is very slow. I'm not familiar enough with MAME, so I wonder if this is expected performance for such a complex system in MAME or it can be significantly improved in the future.

MarcusE1W• 3 years ago

I am running Mame as a SGI Indigo on a Pinebook Pro (an ARM based laptop) It is slow. But it a SGI Indigo on my $200 laptop. I was so thrilled to see that’s possible :-D

ajxs• 3 years ago

I'm super impressed that someone has emulated the CZ-101's sound generation LSI!

Lots of people use MAME as an emulator to help reverse-engineering vintage synthesisers. I only recently discovered this too. Since most 80s synths were built mostly out of 'off the shelf' components, it's not too difficult to build a MAME driver which is capable of running the synth's firmware. The actual sound generation is another story though.

I wrote a MAME driver for the Yamaha DX9 while working on this project: https://github.com/ajxs/yamaha_dx97

I wrote a little bit about the project here in case anyone is interested: https://ajxs.me/blog/Hacking_the_Yamaha_DX9_To_Turn_It_Into_...

nyanpasu64• 3 years ago

Haha the pitch modulation noise sounds like LFSR white noise from an 8-bit console...

rebolek2• 3 years ago

I wrote my own CZ-101-like synth (it's not an emulation, more like "based on", as it has some unique features), I've tried various CZ-like VSTs but nothing beats the original. So I'm really interested what MAME has to offer. Even if the synth is digital, its waveforms do not look like anything you would expect from some simple digital emulation, so emulating CZ properly isn't that easy as it would sound. Thanks for the links, I'm definitely going to check your DX9 emulation. As a proud owner of FB-01 I really dig that 4-op sound.

dfxm122• 3 years ago

At some point, MAME combined with MESS (Multi Emulator Super System), so now MAME is just a multi purpose emulation framework & it doesn't focus solely on arcade emulation.

mdtrooper2• 3 years ago

I wonder that I am only one enjoy with reading of changelog files. Hahaha.

For example: whith mame, for years ago I have the same bunch of favorite games (that run fine from years ago) but it is a party for me each new version of mame because there is new changelog.

rere-2525• 3 years ago

Out of curiosity what are your favorites games ?

mdtrooper2• 3 years ago

About this, I have a old frontend for mame in python2 (and old pygame):

https://gitlab.com/tres-14159/pyretro

More or less in 2011 we made a arcade cabinet for a public social center and I was looking for a frontend for mame for public spaces (not home or private spaces), unsupervised. I did not find one. Well I thought "I am going make a new mame frontend" and yes, I made it (but now it need a lot of work for update to python3 an pygame3).

PyRetro has the next features:

- the users can not the config of frontend by the joystick or buttons. For example, in others frontends a naughty boys (or adult person) can delete games of the list or change something.

- you can manage the frontend (and other things of GNU/Linux) by webpanel. For example, there is a bad boy (or adult person) greedy playing and he does not let another person play to the arcade. You can force exit the game and return to frontend or restart all cabinet.

- it has as screensaver mode when nobody plays it.

Tajnymag• 3 years ago

Firstly, kudos for the project.

If I may ask, as python3 came out in 2008, why did you choose python2 for the frontend in 2011?

EDevil• 3 years ago

It took a long time for projects to begin using Python 3 due to it being backwards incompatible. Django 1.5 for example, the first version that had Python 3 support, came out in 2013.

ynik• 3 years ago

python3 in 2008 was practically unusable. It was incompatible, none of the libraries on pypi supported it; and it was extremely hard to write a code base that was compatible with both python2.6 and python3.0 at the same time, so almost none of the library authors bothered to add python3 support.

In 2010, python2.7 was released, backporting a bunch of python3 features. In 2012, python3.3 was released, fixing a bunch of needless incompatibilities. This finally made it viable to support both 2.7 and 3.3 in the same code base. For the most part, the migration of the Python library ecosystem only started in/after 2012.

python3 wasn't really a viable choice for application development until most libraries were ported (2014? 2015?).

nperez• 3 years ago

Is the versioning scheme only in .001 increments? I know version numbers aren't indicative of progress, but I still find it fascinating that a 26 year old project is just releasing 0.260

LeoPanthera8• 3 years ago

Yes. Although some numbers were skipped. 0.32, and 0.38 through 0.52 don't exist.

sumtechguy5• 3 years ago

ah yes they skipped because there were a ton of releases from .38 to .52 that where basically .39 v6 (fixes something). So they figured out how many then added it.

photonerd9• 3 years ago

Their idea is that v1 is when all machines they support are perfectly emulated.

So… it’s asymptoticly approaching v1 you could say.

Of course they keep adding more machines… so…

MegaDeKay• 3 years ago

Yep. In fact, the first releases of MAME had 0.01 increments. Not sure when they went to finer steps, but it is pretty much a given that they'll do it again when the current revision gets too close to 1.

sylware2• 3 years ago

I remember the good old times when I could compile mame with a simple C compiler...

TheMogMiner6• 3 years ago

Huh, it doesn't compile with GCC anymore? That's weird, as someone contributing for the past 20 years, I could swear I just compiled it yesterday with GCC.

sylware2• 3 years ago

simple C compiler, not gcc and its languages.

Did you try to compile mame with cproc/qbe, simple-cc/qbe or even tcc?

dean2432• 3 years ago

only 74 years left before MAME 1.0 releases with the current versioning

chungy3• 3 years ago

Who says 0.999 won't be followed by 0.1000?

beebeepka2• 3 years ago

Is there a modern name fronted for Linux?

Even after all these years I still get back to my territory outdated version of mame32++ wine.

It's not a perfect setup but the alternatives, that I am aware of, suck even more.

jandrese2• 3 years ago

It comes with a mostly text but technically graphical ROM selector. It's not the most pretty, but it is quite functional. Given the size of the project it is almost inevitable that the interface feels like a database front end.

beebeepka2• 3 years ago

It's only been an year since I've tried it. There have been massive improvements over the years but I still prefer dealing with the above setup.

They do have autofire, saves, art, snapshots, etc. but I got tired of having to configure my joypad cfg after every restart. Maybe time to give it another try

cpill• 3 years ago

could someone explain to me why the ROM set changes with every release? it makes me think the developer is an idiot.

TheMogMiner6• 3 years ago

Sure: They don't, and the people who imply that they do are the idiots.

A full set of ROMsets consists of tens of thousands of archives, each containing a set of files where one file holds the contents of one programmable device: a ROM chip, a GAL/PAL, a microcontroller with internal firmware, and others.

99.9% of these individual sets do not change from version to version.

When a given set does change, it's because a previously incorrectly-dumped chip's data has been replaced by a newer - correct - dump, or a chip that was never dumped previously has now been dumped, or (rarely) the set was renamed.

What you're probably doing is finding full-set torrents per version, posted by some independent group, and assuming that that somehow means that every one of tens of thousands of individual sets within that larger set has changed.

So, hopefully this clarifies which individual is an idiot here.

HelloNurse• 3 years ago

Just to state the obvious, in addition to correcting old rom sets every MAME release also adds new rom sets for newly supported games (either variations of known games like hacks, prototypes, foreign versions, special editions or completely new work). Typically, there are enough changes to actually disrupt a very large portion of the segments of any full set torrent.

netol• 3 years ago

As requested by users, you can finally use delta CHD files for clone systems and software items. This allows for major disk space savings in some cases when you have multiple versions of a system or software item.

FWIW, this is commit https://github.com/mamedev/mame/commit/d1172bf710f2a7b1777ed...

MAME 0.260

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