Mame Running On Pandora. Video(s) Inside.

[dinglebery]

to touch on something said earlyer , FWIW cps3 emulating in mame is pretty cpu intensive .. not sure how well it would preform with the pandora but i think i saw someone mention a port of ElSemi's emu .. not sure what the diferences are but for cps3 i get between 20%-40%ish beter preformance on my cab with his emu..
that being said it still be a nice addition to see it in mame for pandora

as far as mame versions after 64/65 (cant remember witch ) mames focus kind of changed and it starts to get exponentialy slower with some games/drivers.. while others are better .. ALOT of enthusiests keep several versions of mame and coresponding difs ,roms around just for that reason .. off the top of my head the major landmark versions were 35 37 65 94 102 .. those were either big preformance changes or majorly anticipated games became playable.. think the latest version is now a "landmark" too for the laser disk emulation geting better preformance than previously. programing wise thier interpretation of landmarks is quite different since drivers and core changes happened to be thier focus. if your realy interested in all that history theres a huge thread over at byoac with all the major gamefreindly versions and related dif files. and arcade nation keeps data for useing clrmame to do rollbacks for your curent set to those versions .. can find most of the related info at the byoac wiki if ya want to dig deeper.

and you can use maws to track what versions had major driver rewrites if your the technical type.

 

[Joshwaan2k]

Love to see a one of the Mortal Kombat games playing

 

[slaanesh]

ALOT of enthusiests keep several versions of mame and coresponding difs ,roms around just for that reason .. off the top of my head the major landmark versions were 35 37 65 94 102 .. those were either big preformance changes or majorly anticipated games became playable..

What are the landmark events? Here are some that I see:

* 0.37b16 last of the really good fast versions. Fairly complete. This is a really good candidate for Pandora I think.

* 0.53 introduced 16-bit internal bitmaps for rendering. Before this, games could be stored as 8-bit bitmaps. This was a fair slow down as it was twice as much memory to shift around.

* 0.61 removal of dirty bitmap code. Games which were mostly "static" benefited mostly from this, but even scrolling games could benefit.

*0.107 introducted 24-bit internal bitmaps and color usage. Another big speed drop.

Whilst Pandora is going to be fast, I still think it's going to struggle with games from later versions of MAME.

When Zodttd gets the latest MAME compile here are a couple games to try:


* Donkey Kong or Asteroids: Which now includes full discrete sound and would otherwise be dog-slow on GP2X.
* Viper Phase 1: Great follow up shooter to Raiden. Uses 25Mhz I386 + 7Mhz Z80 + 16Mhz sound chip.
* Pacman. It's the default test game that hasn't changed much. See this graph.

 

[dinglebery]

What are the landmark events? Here are some that I see:

* 0.37b16 last of the really good fast versions. Fairly complete. This is a really good candidate for Pandora I think.

* 0.53 introduced 16-bit internal bitmaps for rendering. Before this, games could be stored as 8-bit bitmaps. This was a fair slow down as it was twice as much memory to shift around.

* 0.61 removal of dirty bitmap code. Games which were mostly "static" benefited mostly from this, but even scrolling games could benefit.

*0.107 introducted 24-bit internal bitmaps and color usage. Another big speed drop.

Whilst Pandora is going to be fast, I still think it's going to struggle with games from later versions of MAME.

Agreed .. but i think there might be some hope from the graphics cpu and other areas im interested to see how MAME and FB and a few other emus compare on the pandora to whats on my rig ..


as far as landmarks stroll around zoraphs .. byoac emuholics ect ect you quickly find out that depends on the speaker :> on the technical side youve got the idea , thou theres others the comunity frowns on like .126 breaking cps2 games (fixed in .127) or then theres .100-101 for the rerwite of the memory system (it had issues) so .102 is were every one seems to land that even thou it was realy fixed in 101u5, for other folks its 99 for the aditions of the golden tees , alot boiles down to when "your " perfect game list becomes playable ..(since as even your link shows as versions progress mame gets slower in general(but not for all games) for alot that was 94 for the fighters , .67 for the complete "classics" collection that still plays on the comp you got tossed in your closet ) .78,85,94,99,102,118,119,and then the rest of the early adopters .. seam to be what folks use most of the later versions but im not sure of the signifigance of some of those

and atm its all purely speculation till someone knows exactly what the pandoras hardware is capable of.

im looking forward to seeing .128 ported but im also betting that since the preformance might be substandard in some areas we may also see a port of 67 or 94, and then theres the system specific emu's that might get ported for anything that dosnt play well under that umbrella.

and as gets mentioned in numerous forums i really dont care about the benchmarks as long as the games hit 60 fps or standard speeds :> then thats the perfect version

 

[slaanesh]

One thing I am really looking forward to is playing some of the older games that use discrete sound (which currently use samples). Games such as Canyon bomber, Asteroids, Donkey Kong and even Galaga use samples in 0.37b5.

I experimented with this on the GP2X and GP32 and found that with discrete sound drivers added in, there were major slow downs in these games. The GP32 has no hope of using discrete sound so I optimistically thought the GP2X would fair better. I was quite disappointed to find that Canyon Bomber didn't even run at the full 60FPS when clocked at 266Mhz.

So I am hoping that the Pandora will manage this - and it should.

The later versions of MAME have some nice discrete sound support for some of these classics, so I'd like to see these run.

Other than that, what's the big advantage going to these later versions of MAME? I'd like to hear other people's reason other than suggesting it's the 'latest' version.

 

[dinglebery]

Other than that, what's the big advantage going to these later versions of MAME? I'd like to hear other people's reason other than suggesting it's the 'latest' version.



well .102 on was for both the better memory managment and drivers for some later systems started showing up .. makeing previously "supported " but in reality unplayable games playable .. (alot of the later fighters and sony based hardware fell in this catagory)

 

[Prometheus]

If memory serves, .107u3 finally supported the correct behaviour of the non-bootleg Bubble Bobble's custom MCU (you can read more detail on that here). Prior to that, only "Bubble Bobble (bootleg with 68705)" had close-to-correct gameplay.

 

[jonlad1]

Personally, I'd just like to have the most ROMs that could possibly by available that can run at 60fps.

Dont know much about the different releases but want everything to run as it should, if that means not having the latest version, so be it.

Awesome work BTW guys, everyday I'm more and more pleased I ordered one

 

[Joshwaan2k]

Do you guys think with the extra memory that pandora has will Mortal Kombat 3 load.

Any midway games that used DCS I think it was called for the sound would be a good test.

 

[gaterooze]

I still use 0.60 on PC

 

[slaanesh]

Do you guys think with the extra memory that pandora has will Mortal Kombat 3 load.

Any midway games that used DCS I think it was called for the sound would be a good test.

MK3 is ~24Mb. This will expand somewhat once it's loaded as the ROMS contain the GFX is a nice tight format, but for speed MAME expands them considerably. So even if the entire thing doubles it's ~48Mb.

So probably okay, assuming that the 0.128 mame.exe is is less that 50-60Mb - which it isn't on the PC/Mac.

 

[ngchol]

Tempest!

 

[Kyo]

This reminds me of the picture slideshow we saw a few months ago. So much has happened since then, this project is really coming together nicely

 

[naples39]

The most recent MAME would blow away my Pandora expectations. I haven't been one of the guys calling for it, but doesn't change how impressive that would be.

I really like the idea of true sound for games like Donkey Kong, but I have no interest in just about any game added post .106 (CPS3 would be an exception). The most recently updated game I'd be interested in is probably Turbo Outrun, which was fine by .106 and playable earlier than that.

 

[Uukrul]

I would be surprised if the CPS3 MAME driver could run at more than 7/8 fps on the Pandora.

 

[DrDerekDoctors]

I would be surprised if the CPS3 MAME driver could run at more than 7/8 fps on the Pandora.

Is that more an indictment of the CPS3 MAME driver or the Pandora?

 

[PolloLoco]

I would be surprised if the CPS3 MAME driver could run at more than 7/8 fps on the Pandora.

Is that more an indictment of the CPS3 MAME driver or the Pandora?


Can't be an indictment of the Pandora. I've run a version of finalburn on my wm pda phone - and I can get 30+ frames per second on Street Fighter 3 using Finalburn. I imagine a good port of finalburn could easily outdo that for Pandora - which has better specs than my phone. My phone is an HTC 6700 overclocked to 624mhz with only 44 megs of usable RAM.

 

[fusion_power]

* Pacman. It's the default test game that hasn't changed much. See this graph.


Interesting graph. FPS drop from 362 to 213 into the last versions. It looks like we can forget to use the newest MAME Versions onto the Pandora.
I've found a site with "optimized mame builds" ( http://redump.emubase.de/mame.php ), maybe there is a way to optimize the Pandora-MAME for Speed instead of accuracy?

I also noticed that PC MAME often kills ROM-Compatibilities from Version to version, the overall Working of ROMS and of course the speed, especialy with my fav games (mostly CPS2 and NEO GEO) ...somehow the MAME Team likes to always touch NeoGeo and CPS 2, they never stop to fiddle into these Drivers. Booh! There are sooooo many MAME Games/Drivers, they better should manipulate all these stupid Mahjong Games or so and leave my beloved NeoGeo and CPS 2 alone (in a fast and working status of course )

 

[MonkeyChops]

I'd like to hear other people's reason other than suggesting it's the 'latest' version.[/color]

For savestate if nothing else

BTW great work zod and its awesome to see you (slaanesh) will be helping him with this project. Truly makes the pandora beyond-description-cool.

 

[dinglebery]

* Pacman. It's the default test game that hasn't changed much. See this graph.


Interesting graph. FPS drop from 362 to 213 into the last versions. It looks like we can forget to use the newest MAME Versions onto the Pandora.
I've found a site with "optimized mame builds" ( http://redump.emubase.de/mame.php ), maybe there is a way to optimize the Pandora-MAME for Speed instead of accuracy?

I also noticed that PC MAME often kills ROM-Compatibilities from Version to version, the overall Working of ROMS and of course the speed, especialy with my fav games (mostly CPS2 and NEO GEO) ...somehow the MAME Team likes to always touch NeoGeo and CPS 2, they never stop to fiddle into these Drivers. Booh! There are sooooo many MAME Games/Drivers, they better should manipulate all these stupid Mahjong Games or so and leave my beloved NeoGeo and CPS 2 alone (in a fast and working status of course )




well there were at one time alot of unoficial compiles based on speed .. power mame comes to mind .. but the mame devs dont look to kindly on them and they dont live long(witch is why theres still a massive use for emus like final burn witch are geared twards gameplay) . and keep in mind that pacman is used as a ref because the drivers dont change much were as drivers for other systems change drasticly between major jumps. some games get better .. some get worse each version.

as far as breaking compatability, while outwardly yes your old roms dont work with each new driver you can usualy use clrmame to fix things up in a few clicks unless the actual source data changes witch isnt as often as yould think.

weather we like it or not mames focus is NOT about letting us play the games anymore thats just a happy little side benifit, and threre is no use beating a dead horse in that area .. if 128 drags on the pandora folks will have to either live with an earlyer version port, make unofficial optimization and speed up changes to the code , or suplement mame with ports of other emus like finalburn ect ect .


and for the folks interested in hi scores and save states there are difs for anything after 94 i think for .hi files on the byoac forum witch could be ajusted for any port of a later version . and i think save states started after the .101 branch but i could be wrong .. and new games get added every version (but 102 is better than anything in 100) the best features of the savestates thou IMHO is for the fighters that "unlocked" special players or levels after the machines been on for so many days ) :>