Mame 106 Any Thoughts?

[craigix]

I love that. People forget the CPS games were wide screen.

They "forget" because they werent. They were 4:3 with rectangular CRT pixels.

Look at any image of the real arcade cabinet, 4:3.

So you don't play these games then? Since it's impossible to play them with the right aspect ratio?

Any emulator ever made for those games will play them in widescreen and it looks great.

 

[seurrep]

Any requests?

How well do the metal slug games run?

 

[DaveC]

I love that. People forget the CPS games were wide screen.

They "forget" because they werent. They were 4:3 with rectangular CRT pixels.

Look at any image of the real arcade cabinet, 4:3.

So you don't play these games then? Since it's impossible to play them with the right aspect ratio?

Any emulator ever made for those games will play them in widescreen and it looks great.

I never said that I couldn't play them without the correct aspect. I just said they were never widescreen as you claimed.

They look OK, cerainly playable, but everything looks kind of squashed.

 

[Sarlix]

Any requests?

How well do the metal slug games run?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJvJadUAgRQ

 

[Oscaruzzo]

Just out of curiosity, why Mame 106 and not a more recent release?

 

[fusion_power]

They "forget" because they werent. They were 4:3 with rectangular CRT pixels.

Look at any image of the real arcade cabinet, 4:3.

My words...somehow.

So you don't play these games then? Since it's impossible to play them with the right aspect ratio?

Any emulator ever made for those games will play them in widescreen and it looks great.

Huh? They look very well in 4:3 and I play these Games in 4:3 since I play them in MAME. PC Mame has options for correct aspect ratio. I prefer that even onto my widescreen TFT. Spicing it with some Scanlines and it looks perfect.
I also plan to play CPS(2) 4:3 onto the Pandora. Tastes are different.

 

[silver]

Just out of curiosity, why Mame 106 and not a more recent release?

Probably looking for a "sweet spot" in terms of performance. There was a thread about this - ooh, 1.5 years ago - where I think 106 was mentioned due to some backend video rewrite in Mame 107. It's also was used for an Xbox version I think.

There is also an argument that the huge majority of popular, older, arcade games have been working for a long time in Mame - and using recent versions just let you run modern 3D games that will never ever work on the Pandora, although there will be exceptions.

Choosing 1 versions is a good idea though, so it can be a consistent romset, and any speedhacks would not need to be repeated.

Mame does not steadily drop in performance with each version - it's actually has long periods of stable performance with major drops at certain versions.

So what we are really looking for is a 'sweet-spot' in terms of performance vs features/supported games for the Pandora. I'd suggest that the aim should be to use the newest version that runs most games well on the standard pandora cpu clock. Then older versions can be used for a particular games which it struggles with (and a frontend could make this choice seamlessly).

A brief summary of Aarons blog:

10% drop with 0.53 (dropped support for 8-bit palette modes)

6% drop with 0.61 (removed dirty bitmap support)

8% drop with 0.63 (newer GCC compiler?)

30% drop with 0.107 (Windows code now always chooses 32-bit video mode)

15% increase in 0.110 (not sure why)

However, it's worth pointing out a few things:

1) The above is solely based on pacman. Aaron points out that a 32-bit colour game like Rastan (pacman is 8-bit colour) would NOT have dropped performance in 0.53, 0.61 or 0.106.

2) The results are for the windows binary using directdraw. Not sure what the current quick and dirty port of mame is using, or if similar performances hits for 32-bit modes exist in SDLMame.

3) Seeing as it appears it's not a 'huge' job porting mame (& and mixing in ASM cpu cores) the only way to really test this is on a pandora, when all the software rotation etc..etc.. is removed. Then we can test current mame vs 106 vs 63 etc...

It's probably a case of compile and see. Mame 106 looks like a good starting point to see how mame does at pandora default clocks. Using Cyclone (68000) and Z80 ARM ASM cores will give a huge bump to a lot of games - and not effect others at all. It 106 is too much, drop to 0.62 etc...

There is absolutely no point keeping up with the latest and greastest mame versions - no benefit, just slow downs and hassle. We just need to find the sweet spot.

However, lots of games will not have the same performance drops as pacman. Ideally need to test and see.

Also a few things have changed since the above post: SDLMame has not been integrated into Mame itself, Mame is now C++ which I believe has improved performance slightly. I have no idea if the huge CPU Context switching rewrite in mame (to improve performance on cycle-accurate games).

It probably makes sense to try a recent version and see what works. Once a good version is chosen, drop in ASM cores which are readily available - 68000 and Z80 probably. And go from there. It's quite possble Neogeo and CPS1/2 games could be handled in performance-oriented emulators already. I stumbled across this page where the NEC V33 CPU had been ARM ASM'd for Finalburn Alpha - http://sites.google.com/site/oopsware/fbalpha/armnec.

 

[kin]

I would be happy if afterburnerII and ChaseHQ works.

 

[x68000]

I love that. People forget the CPS games were wide screen.

They "forget" because they werent. They were 4:3 with rectangular CRT pixels.

Look at any image of the real arcade cabinet, 4:3.

So you don't play these games then? Since it's impossible to play them with the right aspect ratio?

Any emulator ever made for those games will play them in widescreen and it looks great.

I never said that I couldn't play them without the correct aspect. I just said they were never widescreen as you claimed.

They look OK, cerainly playable, but everything looks kind of squashed.

They do look good, but the aspect is certainly not correct as it is, displayed using 2x scaling.

I'm sure this will be remedied shortly so they play as intended

 

[cosam]

stevem -- going to work on pollish of the emu by chance?

(Or even some easy wrapper changes; make the sh-script detect an error return, or perhaps a really short runtime after invoking the emu (like 2s), and pop up /tmp/pndrun<foo>.out so the user can see whats up?

(And save keyboard mappings

Or just did a build and hell with it?

(did you just change the makefile and good to go, or..?)

jeff

Further polishing depends on what's happening with MAME4ALL. If that's on it's way any time soon, it might not be worth putting too much effort into it. I can definitely look at putting some better wrappers together - these were just quick scripts to get something running that folk could play with in the mean time. A better script should get keymaps saving too, as that worked at one point. Rotation could also be done with a script as the executable already supports this.

I didn't compile this version though, we have Cpasjuste to thank for that. I have however been messing with a slightly later version of SDLMAME which builds easy enough. It just needed makefile changes and an implementation of the inline osd_yield_processor() function which had no ARM equivalent. Oh, and the helper programs it uses during building need to be compiled separately so they'll run on the build host. It runs but doesn't actually do anything yet other than sit there spinning.

 

[x68000]

I would be happy if afterburnerII and ChaseHQ works.

Chase HQ plays brilliantly, but Afterburner has some huge bottleneck with this release. As does Space Harrier, Outrun, Thunderblade, Super Monaco GP etc

They all run at 5-10 fps

 

[astro]

thats all i ever needed to hear chase hq

 

[silver]

I would be happy if afterburnerII and ChaseHQ works.

Chase HQ plays brilliantly, but Afterburner has some huge bottleneck with this release. As does Space Harrier, Outrun, Thunderblade, Super Monaco GP etc

Perfect example of why generalising about performance changes in Mame (like I did above) is a bad idea.

Sega Xboard driver unchanged from 0.37 to 0.90, where it was completely rewritten to be clearer and a lot more accurate.

So in this case, Mame 0.89 and below would prob be a lot faster.

However, this is 2x68000 and a Z80 (and more) hardware. So:

Using ASM cores (68000 and Z80 are available) is going to have a huge impact.

More recent versions of mame may be better if CPU context switching is significant.


The more I think about this the more likely the best solution is a frontend combining multiple versions of Mame. A pain Romwise but probably the best results.

 

[dak]

Does anyone know a torrent or a way to get the .106 set?

 

[SomeGuy99]

I never said that I couldn't play them without the correct aspect. I just said they were never widescreen as you claimed.

They look OK, cerainly playable, but everything looks kind of squashed.

Yep, they're in super sexy 4:3 and look lovely on my old telly.

 

[Prometheus]

Does anyone know a torrent or a way to get the .106 set?

Check the fourth bullet-point in the list here, please.

 

[SomeGuy99]

Does anyone know a torrent or a way to get the .106 set?

Spoiler

 

[DaveC]

They do look good, but the aspect is certainly not correct as it is, displayed using 2x scaling.

I'm sure this will be remedied shortly so they play as intended

Yeah it is a tradeoff. Playing widescreen at 2X means the pixels will all be even sizes and that looks better with pixel art, but it is a bit squashed and circles will be ellipses. If you do some fractional scale to get the aspect right then it will be ugly as fractional scaled pixel art looks terrible.

If I had to pick I would probably just use the 2X version with the widescreen aspect. It would fill the screen more and the pixels would be cleaner.

 

[fuji99]

Very impressed to see these screens, especially considering nothing is optimized as of yet. The prospect of everything running much more smoothly by the time I get my hands on a Pandora is extremely exciting.

 

[socket]

Just back from taking a vacation from the Internet for a few days. These are looking great. Can't wait to try Assault with dual nubs.

Still don't have my Pandora. Please arrive soon....