Beta Mame4All Beta

[jonlad1]

What about the build of FBA that was first shown running on the Pandora? What happened to that?

 

[Cpasjuste]

Hello ! (Yes i'm alive)

I just tried it and it's a good work. I did spot two bugs :
- i have tried the emulator with 2600 roms, it hang.
- i tried dodonpachi and the screen is flipped, i mean inversed. So when you press up it go down etc.

See you

Edit : forget my first bug, it seems to be a minimenu bug, it hang as soon as i try to launch anything now.

 

[cosam]

.. easiest way to set the speed is just to do somethign akin to "system ( "sudo /usr/pandora/scripts/op_cpu_speed.sh ##") (or whatever the path is); its sudo, but is in the sudoers to not need a pass, so should always succeed; extra points for caching the current speed value (if can be done without root by catting the /proc) in the runm-script, and at the end of the runscript restore the previous setting, perhaps? This way it'd handle a mame crash or normal user exit by restoring to user default.)

Yeah, I'm just worried that if I go over 600 it's gonna pop up its little warning dialog "under" the MAME frame buffer so it can't be OK-ed. I can get around it by reseting the FB when a game starts but it ain't gonna look pretty.

Oooooooh, first handheld that can do Super Sprint right! (its a high res game, so usually goes to hell on most!)

Yeah, there was a little snippet of code in there which used to choke the resolution down and I took great pleasure in removing it ;-) Just being able to say "OK, you want a screen that big? Here ya go!" and having the hardware scaler do the rest is bliss!

Hello ! (Yes i'm alive)

We were starting to wonder ;-) Don't suppose you still have the sources for your old 0.106 build? If there's anything special required to get it to compile for Pandora, it'd be good to know.

- i tried dodonpachi and the screen is flipped, i mean inversed. So when you press up it go down etc.

How strange... I've added a game-specific hack to fix that in the next release. Thanks for reporting.

 

[Jumpman]

I tried Popeye last night, and it seems to suffer from the Rush N Attack "fast/slow" problem also.

Chris

 

[cosam]

Be careful with the keys though. I remember from the MAME 106 port that inserting coin and player start was not logical or intuitive at all. I remember having to just keep pressing buttons until something happened. The best option would be to have them configurable. Also there may be conflicts if someone is using rotate mode and uses some keys for fire etc.

Well, the 106 controls were logical if you knew what MAME's defaults were ;-) Intuitive they certainly weren't though. Select and Start are much better, so I will be keeping those as defaults. I've not yet figured out how to combine configurable controls with automatic rotation. Rotating the D-pad is easy enough, but if you've just configured your action buttons for a game you don't want them automatically being changed again. I think it might be a case of setting an appropriate default the first time a game is run, then leaving well alone.

I have been testing and ALLOT of games have this popping/clicking in the sound. Try Q*bert, DonkeyKong jr. for good examples. The popping is a kind of a rhythmic interval too in many of games (evident in the ones I mention). There is like a pop......pop.......pop.......pop....... going in the background it is weird.

Always good to have examples to work from. I can see what's happening, but I've no idea why. These games seemingly don't want to provide audio data as quickly as the actual sound-playing code (SDL) would like. Odd though, that (at least on my system) the popping isn't there right from the start, but only after playing for a while. I've done some experimentation with buffer sizes but it doesn't seem to help.

Another suggestion, is there a way to maybe re-label what the actual Pandora buttons are in the MAME button config menu? If I want to assign the "A" button to something I don't know what to select as they are non obvious PC keyboard names.

Yeah, I was planning on doing this, just need to find where those labels hang out and edit them.

In rotate mode How do you remap buttons? I wanted to switch the , and . keys as the one closer to edge is easier to hit.

At the moment you can only map controls which are specifically catered for in code, which aren't very many. When I get the whole keyboard "recognised" you'll be able to map to anything you like. I make "," do the same as "." in the mean time, if that'd help; it's literally one line of code.

 

[DaveC]

[]
At the moment you can only map controls which are specifically catered for in code, which aren't very many. When I get the whole keyboard "recognised" you'll be able to map to anything you like. I make "," do the same as "." in the mean time, if that'd help; it's literally one line of code.

No don't do that, then games that need more that one button won't work. I can just wait for a button config someday.

 

[Jumpman]

I don't know if this was already requested, but can you add left and right d-pad presses for menu scrolling up and down? Using the shoulder buttons work, but would be a lot easier using the d-pad presses.

Satan's Hollow is another game that is doing the "fast/slow" thing like some of the others.

Thanks again SteveM, I'm playing Mame around the clock. A very wonderful emu.

Chris

 

[cosam]

I don't know if this was already requested, but can you add left and right d-pad presses for menu scrolling up and down? Using the shoulder buttons work, but would be a lot easier using the d-pad presses.

Sure, I already added D-pad left/right for selecting menu options in the second screen, so this should be no trouble. Should be ready for a new release later today with configurable controls (although not for the main menu).

Satan's Hollow is another game that is doing the "fast/slow" thing like some of the others.

Thanks. Looks like Turbo is another, too. Do any of these games have something in common? It's odd because it seems to affect a lot of older games which you wouldn't expect to have any trouble emulating. Maybe the Pandora is too fast ;-p This and auto frame-skip are the next things I want to look at.

 

[Jumpman]

Thanks. Looks like Turbo is another, too. Do any of these games have something in common? It's odd because it seems to affect a lot of older games which you wouldn't expect to have any trouble emulating. Maybe the Pandora is too fast ;-p This and auto frame-skip are the next things I want to look at.

I'm not sure what if anything these games have in common, but they all run perfectly on GP2X/Wiz. If you actually run the Wiz Mame with Ginge, I'm pretty sure these games also run fine on the Pandora that way. So it's for sure some kind of problem with the Pandora's mame code, as I have never experianced this problem anywhere in the past.

Popeye & Satan's Hollow are 2 games that I remember having to adjust the fit, so they would fit the screen. So maybe their native resolution has something to do with it, but that's the only thing I can think of right now, and I'm not sure if all the games that have been brought up, have this in common. Good luck though!

Chris

 

[cosam]

New version (beta 6) on the app store and subject to approval on the archive:

• Default "Normal" video mode tweaked to limit clipping to max 10%. This should give a decent-sized image for pretty much all games now, rotated or not, without it being ridiculously large. (If you get untoward clipping, you can now pan the display using Shift+A/B/X/Y.)
• Full keyboard (hopefully - I may have missed a couple of keys) recognised as input and all controls are configurable via the MAME menu.
• USB joysticks/pads should work, but may do freaky things and/or need explicit configuration.
• D-pad left/right now do the same as L/R in game selector (i.e. Page up/down).
• Updated documentation.
• Some work on configurable ROM/sample/artwork paths (currently disabled as not yet fully working).

About controls:

• The control scheme is now based on the MAME defaults, but with some exceptions to better match the Pandora's layout (A/B/X/Y/L/R, of course, Select for coins, Start for P1 start, etc.). Quit is now Escape (Fn+Q) by default. Hit Tab (or Pandora button, unless you're using Minimenu) to get to the MAME menu in game. P to Pause.
• Buttons 1-4 have both regular and rotated controls assigned as before (i.e. ".", Shift, "Q" and "A" for buttons 1-4 in addition to the regular ones).
• In rotated mode, the d-pad is logically rotated before it gets to MAME itself, so the configuration does not need to be changed.
• Controls can be configured in the MAME menu, globally in "input (general)" and per game in "input (this game)". Scroll through the list and use enter to capture a new key.

If you have trouble with controls not working: Remove the appropriate files under appdata/mame4all/cfg to reset. There's one for each game and "default.cfg" for the global config. Safest is the remove all .cfg files before using the new version (you will not lose your game settings such as video mode, rotation, etc. as these are stored in separate files).

 

[Jumpman]

Thanks SteveM, looks like another great release! I'm loading it up right now.

Any idea if and when the analog nub can be used for analog game controls? I would really love to try it out on Star Wars Arcade.

Chris

 

[cosam]

Any idea if and when the analog nub can be used for analog game controls? I would really love to try it out on Star Wars Arcade.

Had a look at that as it was in the same area as the USB stuff. Just now it looks like axes are mapped to digital controls, so I'll need to write/borrow some code to get real analogue controls working. Hopefully get USB mice and nubs in mouse mode working too eventually. Not sure how long that'll take just yet.

 

[Jumpman]

Any idea if and when the analog nub can be used for analog game controls? I would really love to try it out on Star Wars Arcade.

Had a look at that as it was in the same area as the USB stuff. Just now it looks like axes are mapped to digital controls, so I'll need to write/borrow some code to get real analogue controls working. Hopefully get USB mice and nubs in mouse mode working too eventually. Not sure how long that'll take just yet.

Sounds good SteveM, the work you have done in 1 week is superb. I know certain things take more work and time than others, so I'm sure it will come in time. I look forward to your future builds. The new version rocks. D-pad scrolling, and P for pause have just made this an even better gaming experiance.

Chris

 

[jonlad1]

Thanks so much Steve!

 

[oskarzer0]

WOW!!

This port is really fast!

Thank you very much Steve! You´re the best one.

 

[DaveC]

Popeye & Satan's Hollow are 2 games that I remember having to adjust the fit, so they would fit the screen. So maybe their native resolution has something to do with it, but that's the only thing I can think of right now, and I'm not sure if all the games that have been brought up, have this in common. Good luck though!

Chris

That can't be it as Rush n Attack uses doubled mode for me and it still has the fast/slow issue. As I said if I disable V-sync the fast/slow issue is gone, although the game then runs too fast to be playable. To me it seems like a bug in the V-sync code. Why it doesn't always do that in every game is a mystery.

@ Steve, have you duplicated the sound popping bug or have any idea about the fast-slow thing? Also the normal mode doesn't work as good as it used to. It shrinks almost everything to 1:1. I think it was better before as there were more cases where it could be useable. If it crops it crops. If it is too much than the FIT mode would be used.

 

[jonlad1]

Hey Steve,

I know this is small fries at the moment, but it would be cool if the sound can stop when pausing. It hangs on one note as it is now.

Like I said, no hurry though

 

[Michoko]

Amazing work! Thanks a lot!!

 

[barnesy]

Thanks for this. It's looking very good!

But it seems that ESC drops all the way back to the desktop. Is it supposed to just go back to the games list like L+R+START did in beta 5?

edit - Oops. I tried that a few times before posting, but always with Out Run. It seems other games do go back to the games list with no problems.

 

[cosam]

@ Steve, have you duplicated the sound popping bug or have any idea about the fast-slow thing?

I can reproduce the popping but instead of battling with stuff I don't really understand yet, I'm carrying on with things I can do something about for the time being. I did notice that some games with sound lag (Q*Bert and R-Type) benefit from overclocking the emulated audio processor and/or CPU.

I've only just started looking at the fast/slow thing, but it might be to do with games which originally ran at less than 60 FPS. Green Beret and Rush'n'Attack are supposedly 30 FPS. Mr Goemon uses the same driver but runs at 60 FPS and isn't affected by the problem. So I'm pretty sure the problem is in the video sync code and related to auto frame-skip not working. I have my suspicions as to where this comes from, but need to dive into the code a bit more to be sure.

Also the normal mode doesn't work as good as it used to. It shrinks almost everything to 1:1. I think it was better before as there were more cases where it could be useable. If it crops it crops. If it is too much than the FIT mode would be used.

Can you give some examples of games which end up too small? I tried a fair selection and it seemed to work better than before.

I know this is small fries at the moment, but it would be cool if the sound can stop when pausing. It hangs on one note as it is now.

Yeah... annoying, ain't it? I got the sound to stop, but then there were problems when it restarted, so I just released as-is for now. I know where it comes from so hopefully it'll make the next release.

But it seems that ESC drops all the way back to the desktop. Is it supposed to just go back to the games list like L+R+START did in beta 5?

edit - Oops. I tried that a few times before posting, but always with Out Run. It seems other games do go back to the games list with no problems.

Ah yes, I was just about to ask if it was only some games which did this - this is useful information. I think what's happening is that MAME itself crashes when exiting from some games which prevents the menu from being loaded again (they are two separate executables which call each other).