Mame Running On Pandora. Video(s) Inside.

[peteredge]

sorry, havent messed with mame emulation much in the past, so im really sorry if this is a stupid question:
will this be able to run shooters like house of the dead?

 

[cranker]

Please check the forum do's and dont's, you're not allowed to ask where to find roms, I would suggest a google search.


ok.

 

[dinglebery]

sorry, havent messed with mame emulation much in the past, so im really sorry if this is a stupid question:
will this be able to run shooters like house of the dead?

without a lightgun shooters in mame are pretty hit or miss and most of the later era ones need a real beast of a comp to even play at a decent frame rate ... so my guess would be yea but i wouldnt bet the experience would be the best..

 

[gaterooze]

without a lightgun shooters in mame are pretty hit or miss

With a touchscreen, playability should improve.

[written by someone who duct taped a plastic Uzi to a joystick (and switched its up/down inputs) to improve the Op Wolf "experience" on a C64...]

 

[dinglebery]

without a lightgun shooters in mame are pretty hit or miss

With a touchscreen, playability should improve.

[written by someone who duct taped a plastic Uzi to a joystick (and switched its up/down inputs) to improve the Op Wolf "experience" on a C64...]


grin i actually have a big touch screen on my cab while its better there can be some response lag not sure if thats mame or the hardware thou .. that being said my preferred method before i got my guns was to use a modded happs trackball .. my other deciding factor was with a big touchscreen like that it never fails one a your pissed up Friends/family starts wailing away on the screen after the fighting gets intense and sorry for as much $$$ as ive got invested in my baby thats a nono :>

 

[Joshwaan2k]

Slaanesh where can I get .37 version for Windows mate can't find it.

Would not mind trying MK games also

Zodttd, please if you can mate post Mk2 or NBA JAM video when you get them working.
Also I'd say the games look very sharp on the Pandora's screen less blurry due to smaller size correct?

 

[x68000]

@josh http://mamedev.org/oldrel.html

 

[cools]

Not sure about using the latest MAME sources (or at least, porting them to Pandora). It might be a better idea to develop using multiple versions as a reference. A while ago, the MAME team removed all the tricks used to get decent framerates, with the goal of "documenting" the hardware rather than games being playable.

As a result, sound samples were abandoned in favour of emulation - caused a huge FPS hit in a lot of games, with no real noticeable benefit to the player. Stuff like the Voodoo hardware emulation is purely software, as allowing your PC's 3D hardware to take the brunt of the work was frowned upon. As Slaanesh says, there were a number of other issues which caused some awful slowdowns (but increased accuracy in a small number of cases).

If we're given a decent framebuffer to write to, then SDLMAME should be relatively easy to port and run quickly. The killers for performance are the artwork, overlays and any scaling done. Spitting the output into an 1:1 resolution without processing it in any way massively improves performance.

About 2-3% of the games in MAME used sound samples.

Newer 3D/3D capable hardware emulation in MAME isn't going to work well on the Pandora, but I reckon the rest should be just fine. This is based on tests I've done with oldish P2/P3 CPUs.

 

[mcobit]

QUOTE
Spitting the output into an 1:1 resolution without processing it in any way massively improves performance.


I think Pandora could display a resolution of for example 320x240 pixels directly send to the screen in fullscreen mode, but the aspect ratio would be messed up. Like this is the case when you output a 4:3 resolution on a 16:10 screen. Is there a way to output it without scaling and give the right aspectratio, so the screen would ignore the rest of it?

 

[geise69]

Some MAME drivers I would like to see running on MAME for Pandora is the Taito F3 driver games. (mame 0.37b11 I believe) Layer Section/Gunlock would be a dream on Pandora, however it's a very cpu intensive driver like the Namco System 2 driver for Philios, Ordyne, and Valkyrie etc. Also the Konami GX Mystic Warrior hardware driver would be another one, but those were not emulated till later versions of MAME.

 

[Joshwaan2k]

Thanks X68000 for the link.

Francis the xbox version of MAME is quite a fast with Virtual Memory enabled, will this be needed with the Pandora?

So as they go up in version some games get slower hey?

I thought it be the other way around people would tweak driver set to make things faster.

 

[x68000]

No problem!

The main reason for emulation becoming slower or just more resource hungry in newer versions is down to the MAME Dev Team deciding to change their focus from most playable emulation to making it more historically accurate, even if speed is compromised.

 

[Dunny]

So as they go up in version some games get slower hey?

I thought it be the other way around people would tweak driver set to make things faster.

Unfortunately that's not the case for most emulators, and MAME is probably the worst for it of them all. In general, as emulators progress they get more accurate - accuracy is probably more important than speed in environments where CPU power isn't much of a factor. As accuracy improves, the core usually gets slower. I recall in the days of JPP where a spectrum emulation would run in a few mhz (slowest I've seen is 14mhz) but that was with very poor emulation - nowadays you need a minimum of about 200 - 300mhz to emulate a Speccy at all well. Most games will play in a bog-standard "runs on a 486" emulator, but most demoscene productions will fail hard.

Mame's object is not to play games - that's a nice side effect. The aim is to document hardware that may otherwise fall out of use, and never be seen again. Because of this, accuracy is paramount, and so the emulation gets slower and slower as accuracy improves.

Where CPU speed is a factor, on platforms such as the GP2X, then accuracy may be compromised at the expense of speed - or as another example, accuracy is first achieved and then optimisation is worked on - which often lowers accuracy to the point that games still run as intended, but shortcuts taken mean that hardcore test programs might fail. This isn't a problem - you're not intending to develop software for the emulated machine on a '2X, just play the games. Hence we get the situations with ZodTTD's PSX emulator, and Exophase's GBA emulator where optimisation is the priority - if the games work and have decent speed, then that's enough.

Mame of course isn't about speed, so they care not one whit that it's unplayable on all but the most advanced PC hardware. However, it's open-source, so when it's ported the authors of the port can take the shortcuts and work on speed by utilising hardware loop-detection, dynarecs and hardware assistance etc.

D.

 

[slaanesh]

So as they go up in version some games get slower hey?

I thought it be the other way around people would tweak driver set to make things faster.

Unfortunately that's not the case for most emulators, and MAME is probably the worst for it of them all.


Exactly! This is why going to the latest version of MAME is in my opinion not really desirable. The focus on total accuracy was not as strict in the earlier days of MAME development. This is evident in the source code as there are plenty of hacks/shortcuts/speedups. I just think we need to find the suitable version of MAME for Pandora. I will starting doing some speed tests of various versions.

 

[PoisonedV]

So as they go up in version some games get slower hey?

I thought it be the other way around people would tweak driver set to make things faster.

Unfortunately that's not the case for most emulators, and MAME is probably the worst for it of them all.


Exactly! This is why going to the latest version of MAME is in my opinion not really desirable. The focus on total accuracy was not as strict in the earlier days of MAME development. This is evident in the source code as there are plenty of hacks/shortcuts/speedups. I just think we need to find the suitable version of MAME for Pandora. I will starting doing some speed tests of various versions.

http://benchmark.mameworld.net/
its a bit of excessive information to push through, but still useful.

 

[naples39]

I just think we need to find the suitable version of MAME for Pandora. I will starting doing some speed tests of various versions.

Go for it! Unless the Pandora is much more powerful than I thought, it sounds like going for the most recent version would be a waste.

 

[slaanesh]

http://benchmark.mameworld.net/
its a bit of excessive information to push through, but still useful.


This is interesting but unfortunately uses an inconsistent means of running the tests. ie. Because they are use submitted results, the hardware and environment that was used to conduct the tests will vary enormously.

It's possibly useful for seeing if a particular game is playable for a particular version of MAME assuming that you have similar spec hardware to whoever did the original test.

I'm going to setup a more rigorous test where I use several versions of MAME running games on the same hardware.

 

[jonlad1]

Gods speed Slaanesh.....

We'll be rooting for you!

 

[Joshwaan2k]

Sounds good mate look forward to that

mk 0.108 AMD Duron 1200 91.07 FPS
mk 0.53 AMD Duron 1200 146 FPS


.53 looks like a good version to use

 

[silver]

.53 looks like a good version to use

If you are using 0.53, you may as well use 0.62... newer and very similar performance...