Anyone Maintaining Mame4All These Days?

[Dunny]

MAME normally warns you that certain games have badly emulated roms; MAME4ALL it would seem has some bugs in certain games that the equivalent MAME version does not -

Arabian has badly emulated screen
all versions of Enduro Racer cause an immediate CTD.

As for anything else, I'd love more up-to-date emulation of Neo-Geo games (to support the later ROMs) and of course any option to emulate the Final Burn games would be much appreciated (afterburner et al).

D.

 

[goldenegg]

MAME4All is based on Mame 0.37b4 (or is it b11?). You can't compare it to the current release.

Such an old build is used due to the resources (CPU, memory and video) needed in changes contained in later released. It's said that version 0.106 might be a better version to use for mobile devices, as its requirements are still lower than the current release and it supports more ROMs. There is a MAME 0.106 build for Pandora.

http://dl.openhandhelds.org/cgi-bin/pandora.cgi?0,0,0,0,73,79

It's unoptimized and lacks a proper interface, but works well. It's also the only way I know to play CPS2 games on the Pandora.

 

[Blue Protoman]

Unless you use the Wiz version of Final Burn Alpha through Ginge. But then you don't get the higher resolution, so you have to hold your Pandora sideways to play DoDonPachi.

 

[naples39]

Now that you mention, why hasn't there been a FBA port for Pandora? Wasn't that one of the first emus tested on Pandora hardware?

I am pretty satisfied with mame4all though. Most games work great, remembers controls, multiple viewing options, cheat and turbo support if you want it, can use the keyboard to easily pause, bring up menu, etc.... I know there are annoyances that bother some, but I am happy.

 

[goldenegg]

Now that you mention, why hasn't there been a FBA port for Pandora? Wasn't that one of the first emus tested on Pandora hardware?

I am pretty satisfied with mame4all though. Most games work great, remembers controls, multiple viewing options, cheat and turbo support if you want it, can use the keyboard to easily pause, bring up menu, etc.... I know there are annoyances that bother some, but I am happy.

That's a wonderful question. I'm hoping it will get ported.

 

[MooTheKow]

Speaking of Mame4All -- was looking through the sourcecode and it looks like there is suppose for saving/loading savestates in there -- but it is #ifdef'd out (specifically the '#if SAVE_STATE_TEST' check in cpuintrf.cpp -- earlier in the file SAVE_STATE_TEST is defined as 0).

Anyone have any idea why it is commented out or what kind of state the code for the feature is in at this point?

 

[naples39]

I remember asking about save states to Franxis a while back on gp2x and he said implementing save states would be a nightmare.

 

[MooTheKow]

I remember asking about save states to Franxis a while back on gp2x and he said implementing save states would be a nightmare.

Doesn't like like it'd be done from scratch though. It appears to be in the current MAME -- and best I can tell at least some stage of the feature is in the mame4all sourcecode:

http://mamedev.org/devwiki/index.php/FAQ:Features
http://mamedev.org/devwiki/index.php/Save_State_Fundamentals

 

[naples39]

Given that mame4all is emulating so much diverse hardware and doing with a variety of cores, I could see it being a complete mess to implement. Though I usually completely misunderstand these things... :blink:

 

[Dunny]

MAME4All is based on Mame 0.37b4 (or is it b11?). You can't compare it to the current release.

Such an old build is used due to the resources (CPU, memory and video) needed in changes contained in later released. It's said that version 0.106 might be a better version to use for mobile devices, as its requirements are still lower than the current release and it supports more ROMs. There is a MAME 0.106 build for Pandora.

http://dl.openhandhelds.org/cgi-bin/pandora.cgi?0,0,0,0,73,79

It's unoptimized and lacks a proper interface, but works well. It's also the only way I know to play CPS2 games on the Pandora.

Oh, for the non-working games I'm not comparing to the latest MAME - the last version I had was 0.36f, in which build those games were working. Surely we'd not need new Neo-Geo emulation for the later Neo-Geo ROMs; we'd just need MAME to recognise them?

Unless you use the Wiz version of Final Burn Alpha through Ginge. But then you don't get the higher resolution, so you have to hold your Pandora sideways to play DoDonPachi.

Does FBA support the older (Afterburner, Galaxy Force 2, Railchase, ThunderBlade, Outrun etc?) games? I was under the impression that FBA only supported the beat-em-ups? Final Burn was the one that I really wanted to see...

D.

 

[budweiser]

I still would like to see a current build
Would love to play donkey kong 2 (foundry hack)

 

[DaveC]

This appears abandoned. The popping sound kind of sucks in some games but other than that it is good.

Maybe someday someone will figure what causes the audio bugs.

 

[ozzyfreakdude]

Unless you use the Wiz version of Final Burn Alpha through Ginge. But then you don't get the higher resolution, so you have to hold your Pandora sideways to play DoDonPachi.

You were able to get Final Burn Alpha running through Ginge? How did you do it?
For me it boots the game select menu, but when I try to pick a game, it crashes back to the ginge gp2x menu

and I agree with the topic - the existing build of Mame4All flips all of the cave shmups upside down, rendering them unplayable despite them running smoothly

 

[Blue Protoman]

Unless you use the Wiz version of Final Burn Alpha through Ginge. But then you don't get the higher resolution, so you have to hold your Pandora sideways to play DoDonPachi.

You were able to get Final Burn Alpha running through Ginge? How did you do it?
For me it boots the game select menu, but when I try to pick a game, it crashes back to the ginge gp2x menu

and I agree with the topic - the existing build of Mame4All flips all of the cave shmups upside down, rendering them unplayable despite them running smoothly

I didn't. I don't even own one (yet). I didn't even know that you couldn't run FBA in Ginge. That's just a disadvantage of Ginge; you can't use any Pandora-specific features. No 800x480, no nubs, no keyboard...