My Gp32 Flu Screen Has A Smear Underneath, Should I Open It Up?

[slaanesh]

Great! Thanks for volunteering.

I haven't done much with it in the last few days but will get back on track now. Just need to clean up some file handling. A few file types are not quite supported yet. When I say file types, I mean the different types of files that MAME supprts. This includes ROMS, SAMPLES, HISCORES, CFG, NVRAM, ARTWORK, etc. CFG is one of these not quite working yet. For some reason internal MAME CFGs are not currently being read - though they appear to be written, so I'll have to see why.

Once this is done, a few more modules and make sure SAMPLE support is good and I will release a private test version.

 

[christo930]

Like Davec said if it isnt too bad leave it cuz of the light diffuser. But if you feal the need you should open it up and take it apart in a bathroom after you or some one has taken a shower. That way you will have minimum problems with dust getting in.

Take a pump bottle filled with water or even use lysol or whatever and spray all around from as high as you can reach, do this just before you take it apart (have the screws loose already) then open it, clean it real quick and get it back together again real quick. turn it on and see if there is any dust, if not tighten the screws down. If there is, try blowing a little compressed air on it (from a distance so you don't damage the difuser). This will most likely not let any dust in the system. You might also consider doing it outside on a calm day. There is much more dust inside than outside. I think you can do this without too much worry. Dust (in a pet free house) is almost exclusively human skin cells, human hair and human scalp cells. If you have pets, do it in a room they never go in (like the bathroom).

Chris

 

[ralp99]

any news on when to expect a release of this mame project? there's a ton of games i'd like to try and give a whirl in there...

thanks for your work!

 

[slaanesh]

I haven't actually done alot for the last 3 weeks or so. Been busy playing games rather than programming but I got back into it today.
Fixed some long standing bugs reading plain files. Yes, it seems like a pretty bad bug to have for this long but it was only for reading from plain files and MAME does most of it's reading from zipped files.
With that fixed, plain file handling now works and configuration reading and writing works. Which is really nice. The core is almost fully functional now.

Most of the remaining work is creating the modules required for the GP32 version. The GP2X has the luxury of 64MB of RAM which is enough to build a massive executable (~10MB) and still leave enough RAM to load all but the very biggest ROMS.

The GP32 has only 8MB of RAM not enough to even load the equivalent of full GP2X-sized executable. So, I have to create modules which contain a few (100 or so) games in each. This will mean there will be around 10 modules - as I would imagine that is all that is needed. Some games won't (ever?) be supported on the GP32 as there simply isn't enough RAM or CPU power to run the games adequately.

I'm on the third module at the moment - "Classics".

I just played Space Invaders - lovely! Though it's surprisingly a little slow. Age of the game is not always an indication that it will play "fullspeed". The reason Space Invaders is a little slow is that the game uses bitmap graphics instead of character graphics. It runs alright with the GP32 clocked at 166Mhz though.

I still don't have a release schedule for this and I've recently committed to porting "Temper" to the GP32 as well. But that won't start until Exophase releases the next version for the GP2X.

The GP32 isn't dead yet.

 

[ralp99]

sounds great - ! Yeah (obviously) take your time, the GP32 scene had always been all about long, lonnnnng waits. I remember the amount of time between the first pics posted on this site of any kind of MAME emu and an actual release, was no less than two years.. likewise for many other big projects.. you just take it all in stride!

I have always felt it was sort of a shame that the larger GP32 scene sort of dried up right as it was truly hitting it's stride. In the last year of aggressive development, we saw quite competent/impressive emulation of MAME, Snes, Genesis, among other things.. just as the GP2X came out and sort of put the kibosh on all the GP32 enthusiasm. Not a shock, it made sense (2X sort of cleared out a lot of basic problems that help GP32 back) but I'd always wished there was at least another full year to see what else devs could wring out of the thing. Case in point, yoyo (+ company's) Snes emulator, one of the holy grails on GP32. Finally got a nice-playing (speedwise) emulator for that console, with high compatibility, lots of bells and whistles (save states and all that stuff) - horribly unfortunate that it had such a busted-unfinished interface to keep it from feeling really tight. That's the breaks! In spite of that, I still get a lot of good times out of it..

yeah, one day I will soften up and just lay out for a 2X after all, I suppose.

 

[slaanesh]

I'm still working on the GP32 MAME4ALL port. Have done quite a bit on it in the last two weeks. Most games that will play at a reasonable speed are now in. I estimate around 800 games so far.
Obviously many games are not going to work due to RAM restrictions or CPU restrictions.

CPS1 is not going to happen. They are *just* too big.
Other games that you may have thought would be no problem also are no good.
Zookeeper is a nice example; it's old (1982) but has 4 CPUs to emulate. It's too much for the poor GP32. It really crawls along at 133Mhz. It's a lot better at 200Mhz but I'm sure there aren't many GP32s that can do this.
Many games will run fine at 133Mhz but I think you will want a unit that can do 150Mhz and really 166Mhz is nice.
I've got a couple more modules to go which are mainly the M68000 games - but this won't be too big as there aren't too many that will work that well anyway. And want to add a couple things to the frontend game selector.

Anyway, there should be an initial test release soon now.

 

[trooper]

Awesome slaanesh, Thank you very much for the update.

Trooper

 

[slaanesh]

The BETA of GP32 MAME4ALL has been out for a while. I think i'll put out one more version (v1.0) of this beastie incorporating some of the updates made to the GP2X version of MAME4ALL (before the Pandora and Wiz come out). These are mostly speed-ups and efficiencies in the sound cores.