[Release] Compo4all MAME - ladder/scoreboard competition for classic arcade games :)
- Thread starter skeezix
- Start date
skeezix
Internal Development
I loooove my shmups, so expect me to add more of those
Flying Shark (Sky Shark) is a classic progressive shooter; Tiger Heli and so on.. so many good ones. This is before the 'bullet hell' syndrome took over, which I'm not so much a fan of.
You can get bad ports for various consoles and computers as well.. Genesis, I think Atari ST .. but they're not worth it.
Getting 80s and 90s PCBs for the non-big-name games is getting harder, but hitting up ebay or rgvac newsgroup for boards is still pretty good; you can run it in a supergun say, if you don't want a whole cabinet.
jeff
DrCJBoduma
Active Member
Flying shark - you lot are in trouble. I used to live on this game........
.......although it seems that somehow in the last 20 years the game has got considerably harder and I have got exponentially shitter. B)
So you are not in trouble - I am
CJ
.......although it seems that somehow in the last 20 years the game has got considerably harder and I have got exponentially shitter. B)
So you are not in trouble - I am
CJ
DrCJBoduma
Active Member
Hopefully not too off topic(but really is), Playing flying shark bought back some memories of my local arcade.(lisa's)
behind that garage door were about 8 or so arcade machines (fruit machines were in a separate room, for age restriction reasons I guess)
the mainstays were bubble bobble, wonderboy, double dragon and outrun and then a steady turn around of other games.
No point to the post just got nostalgic :wub:
CJ
behind that garage door were about 8 or so arcade machines (fruit machines were in a separate room, for age restriction reasons I guess)
the mainstays were bubble bobble, wonderboy, double dragon and outrun and then a steady turn around of other games.
No point to the post just got nostalgic :wub:
CJ
skeezix
Internal Development
I started collecting the machines and components and pcboards probably 15 or so years back .. all kinds of stories of where I'd find these poor old machines. Anyway without getting into _those_, .. a lot of operators who used ot run 'routes' of machines, the 80s dried up and they retired; a lot of the guys would sell off all their machines and that was that. Some would store them away.. some would chop them up and keep the pcb's while ditching the cabinets, etc. I tracked down one of the ex operators who ran a route in my area growing up .. he'd gotten rid of most of his machines over the years but had kept a dozen in his garage for old times sake, plus a few hundred PCBoards stuff away in his house. He started selling them off .. this was before ebay took off.. so he had no idea of value (no one did), so started at $5/shot per pcb .. by the time I found the guy .. someone thge day before picked them _all_ up for $x and stareted hawking them again. He had a few things left, so I nabbed the Sky Shark (yay!) machine. I tracked down the dude who bought all the stuff, and he naturally wanted $20/pcb or more (bastard), but I made a bulk offer and bought 50 or 100 boards, and then sold most of them off and kept a dozen.. essentially covered my expenses.
And thats how it starts.. suddenly you've got ap lace with 500 pcbs piled up on every surface, monitor gutts all over, coindoors and wiring harnesses everywhere.. I have some photos of my place somewhere where you couldnt' see anythign except green electronic bits stacked floor to ceiling...
I've driven all over hells acre to find stuff, but I've got a wicked collection
Anyway, one of the cool things is .. by hittinmg this guy up, and tracking down some of the locals or route runnres who ran locally.. I've probably acquired some of the machines and pcboards I grew up playing on; I bet the cola spill damage on this one Forest Wardner/Pyros I have is the drink I spilled on it in a pizza/sub shop I used to game at
Ahh....
And thats how it starts.. suddenly you've got ap lace with 500 pcbs piled up on every surface, monitor gutts all over, coindoors and wiring harnesses everywhere.. I have some photos of my place somewhere where you couldnt' see anythign except green electronic bits stacked floor to ceiling...
I've driven all over hells acre to find stuff, but I've got a wicked collection
Anyway, one of the cool things is .. by hittinmg this guy up, and tracking down some of the locals or route runnres who ran locally.. I've probably acquired some of the machines and pcboards I grew up playing on; I bet the cola spill damage on this one Forest Wardner/Pyros I have is the drink I spilled on it in a pizza/sub shop I used to game at
Ahh....
DrCJBoduma
Active Member
if you have the pics knocking about, would be cool to see them. ebay is good and bad in that regard. people are far more aware of the value of stuff and you can come by some very rare items, but the prices they go for is pretty prohibitive for an amatuer collector.
skeezix
Internal Development
Auctions are still the way to go imho, but harder to come by; they've been dead for a decade, but more so each passing year.
Still, at least around Toronto Canada, there was a monthly auction at one of the bug guys .. it included any coin op or bar related equipment.. so billiards tables (the big slate-top ones!) and so on; not so many arcade games anymore, barring Golden Tee times 10 every auction .. but still some gems. And hey, if you wanted a jukebox or billiards table, that was the place to go.. why pick up some cheap immitation when you could go for a couple of months and score a great deal on real gear.
Anyway back years ago when I was active, it was grea to go on the hottest stickiest damned day.. standing arond in a dusty warehouse on hot as hell days, and most of the folks there were Operators (route guys etc), only interested in the stuff that made a buck.. so current stuff, or the real classics like a MsPac. But a few collectors woudl be there, us chumps, and we'd pick over the leftovers.. and it was fairly common that an operator woudl by a 'lot' of stuff, get himself 5 or 10 machines in a group, and not care about half of them; or they'd want only the pcboard and not the rest, etc. So it paid off big to listen to what people were saying; bring your long power cord for trialing stuff, a few fuses to stick into a machie nthat looked dead, etc.
There was a few times I scored a free cab, with no pcb.. guy just wanted the pcb, and hey, if some other idiot woudl drag the machine out of the yard, all the better But a beat up machine woudl commonly go for $50-$100 .. not at all bad. A good machine.. a MVS machine, with a 2 or 4 slot mobo in and a few games.. that' dhit $300-$500 depending what was in it. But a cheap cabinet could be had, and then you coudl stick any game you wanted in it...
Ahh, those were the days
jeff
I will never forget.. talking to one guy while he burned a pile of machines; his back was to the bonfire, and I was looking at them over his shoulder. One super rare game, a favorite of mine (Space Duel) was on fire behind the guy, while I talked to him. *motherfuckers*
Still, at least around Toronto Canada, there was a monthly auction at one of the bug guys .. it included any coin op or bar related equipment.. so billiards tables (the big slate-top ones!) and so on; not so many arcade games anymore, barring Golden Tee times 10 every auction .. but still some gems. And hey, if you wanted a jukebox or billiards table, that was the place to go.. why pick up some cheap immitation when you could go for a couple of months and score a great deal on real gear.
Anyway back years ago when I was active, it was grea to go on the hottest stickiest damned day.. standing arond in a dusty warehouse on hot as hell days, and most of the folks there were Operators (route guys etc), only interested in the stuff that made a buck.. so current stuff, or the real classics like a MsPac. But a few collectors woudl be there, us chumps, and we'd pick over the leftovers.. and it was fairly common that an operator woudl by a 'lot' of stuff, get himself 5 or 10 machines in a group, and not care about half of them; or they'd want only the pcboard and not the rest, etc. So it paid off big to listen to what people were saying; bring your long power cord for trialing stuff, a few fuses to stick into a machie nthat looked dead, etc.
There was a few times I scored a free cab, with no pcb.. guy just wanted the pcb, and hey, if some other idiot woudl drag the machine out of the yard, all the better
But a beat up machine woudl commonly go for $50-$100 .. not at all bad. A good machine.. a MVS machine, with a 2 or 4 slot mobo in and a few games.. that' dhit $300-$500 depending what was in it. But a cheap cabinet could be had, and then you coudl stick any game you wanted in it...Ahh, those were the days
jeff
I will never forget.. talking to one guy while he burned a pile of machines; his back was to the bonfire, and I was looking at them over his shoulder. One super rare game, a favorite of mine (Space Duel) was on fire behind the guy, while I talked to him. *motherfuckers*
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Link
ithic.com
At regular speed, I can only Billy Mitchell level 1, and sometimes miss a ghost or two on the 2nd level. Things get progressively worse. Only eat dots on the Apple level. Same goes for the 2nd & 3rd Banana. Brown levels really take some getting used to, especially with the Pandora controls. I've only made it to the first stork once, and that level is going to be another learning experience. I think you lose power pellet changes 3 or 4 levels after first baby PacMan. I've pulled scores excessive of 250K on speed hacked tabletops (3 kids, not sure if the intermission ever comes back). I'm clocking a 1GHZ Pandora at 600MHz when playing, but can actually get just of good if not better scores at 1GHz (though this is a bit challenging for Galaxian, haven't tried the others over clocked, but I know Donkey Kong would not be much fun faster).PS Link what is your secret on mspacman - I have been trying and trying and cannot crack the top 10 (because of you)
skeezix
Internal Development
For such old games, I wouldn't think there should be a difference at 600mhz to 1ghz .. but MAEM is not really a highly performant emulator; still.. Pacman? Come on, I ran that full speed on a 50mhz Pentium back in the day (emu writtne mostly in assembly, but still!) (mostly assembly.. had a lot more free time in those days to write assembly )
jeff
)jeff
DrCJBoduma
Active Member
the auctions sound great. I doubt that there is anything like that anywhere near me unfortunately.Auctions are still the way to go imho, but harder to come by; they've been dead for a decade, but more so each passing year.
I will never forget.. talking to one guy while he burned a pile of machines; his back was to the bonfire, and I was looking at them over his shoulder. One super rare game, a favorite of mine (Space Duel) was on fire behind the guy, while I talked to him. *motherfuckers*
An arcade fire
sounds strangely cool - I have tried to collect a few original arcade marquees (for a small games room) and even these have become stupid money (in my mind at least) I would love to have the space for some cabinets.CJ
DrCJBoduma
Active Member
Thanks for the advice. I try and do something v.similar, but get to greedy and try and billy mitchell everything, even when it's blatantly not possible (for me at least). Will keep at it though and that top score shall be mineAt regular speed, I can only Billy Mitchell level 1, and sometimes miss a ghost or two on the 2nd level. Things get progressively worse. Only eat dots on the Apple level. Same goes for the 2nd & 3rd Banana. Brown levels really take some getting used to, especially with the Pandora controls. I've only made it to the first stork once, and that level is going to be another learning experience. I think you lose power pellet changes 3 or 4 levels after first baby PacMan. I've pulled scores excessive of 250K on speed hacked tabletops (3 kids, not sure if the intermission ever comes back). I'm clocking a 1GHZ Pandora at 600MHz when playing, but can actually get just of good if not better scores at 1GHz (though this is a bit challenging for Galaxian, haven't tried the others over clocked, but I know Donkey Kong would not be much fun faster).PS Link what is your secret on mspacman - I have been trying and trying and cannot crack the top 10 (because of you)
CJ
Ian J
Advanced Member
- Joined
- Aug 27, 2010
- Messages
- 1,880
levi
Still fresh, damnit!
Regarding continues (where feeding in money in the game over screen lets you carry on from where you left on) do tend to reset the scores (at least from late 80s stuff on where I'm most familiar), but in most games there's an easy section where you can amass thousands of points for little risk. Experienced players could kill themselves (assuming they're on less than initial lives at the intro to that section) and start a new continue from there, getting a hard to beat score very quickly. Of course, once normal players get to that section they can do that themselves, but it may put people off if a too high score gets submitted too quickly.
Just checked out New Zealand Story, and that has DIP settings to enable/disable continues. It'd be cool if someone could check out DIP settings before games go up for competition, and provided a standardised set for us all to play against.
Regarding getting this thing to run itself, seems to me we need relatively few things before we can get to that point:
- A scrollable list of games in the front end
- Slightly more robust code (or at least code that feeds back any errors) - my system got into a state yesterday where everything worked apart from submitting scores, and until I rebooted I didn't realise the system had stuffed up.
- A system for discovering high scores - either an index.html on the website linking to all high score tables, or client side high scores.
- er, that's about it I think
Once you've got those, you wouldn't need to keep adding games month after month. At the end of ROT2, however long that is, the system could just recognise there are no competition games at the moment, but people can still play against the all-time scores on the ex-competition (and ex-beta) games. Then ROT3 can start up whenever you feel like it.
Just checked out New Zealand Story, and that has DIP settings to enable/disable continues. It'd be cool if someone could check out DIP settings before games go up for competition, and provided a standardised set for us all to play against.
Regarding getting this thing to run itself, seems to me we need relatively few things before we can get to that point:
- A scrollable list of games in the front end
- Slightly more robust code (or at least code that feeds back any errors) - my system got into a state yesterday where everything worked apart from submitting scores, and until I rebooted I didn't realise the system had stuffed up.
- A system for discovering high scores - either an index.html on the website linking to all high score tables, or client side high scores.
- er, that's about it I think
Once you've got those, you wouldn't need to keep adding games month after month. At the end of ROT2, however long that is, the system could just recognise there are no competition games at the moment, but people can still play against the all-time scores on the ex-competition (and ex-beta) games. Then ROT3 can start up whenever you feel like it.
skeezix
Internal Development
I think for actual compo build, I should cut out the dipsettings entirely. (There are still many avenues of cheating; drop another mame build into your appdata with the right name for instance, and you get your savestates and dips back, say; or romhacks, or all sorts of things that are hard to control.) If I had license to dist ROMs, I could build a special emu build that included roms, had encrypted binaries that only unpack into RAM when server says so, server checksumming the results and the binaries, resident anti-cheating tools, etc etc.. and people would still find a way So instead, we just trust everyone
- scrollable list .. by which, you mean more games
- robust .. yeah, I think I need to put up a secondary server (since they're stateless anyway), and have the client clever enough to try and round robin as needed (say); score submitting should have the utmost chance of success. As long as you connection is up, it should have a good chance to work even now of course
- discovering? the current client shows the topmost at least for each game; do you mean some fancy list that shows top across all games? milkshake is workiing on a prettier site that will have some of that.
+ report to spit out the highest-all-time scores as well as the monthlies
Almost need a board-wide 'what are your favorite competition style arcade oldies' poll, and tally up the top-20 games or something. How many do we need? which ones do we do? I can keep doing my favs, but that may get old for you guys (besides, I do not care for centipede one bit!)
So instead, we just trust everyone - scrollable list .. by which, you mean more games
- robust .. yeah, I think I need to put up a secondary server (since they're stateless anyway), and have the client clever enough to try and round robin as needed (say); score submitting should have the utmost chance of success. As long as you connection is up, it should have a good chance to work even now of course
- discovering? the current client shows the topmost at least for each game; do you mean some fancy list that shows top across all games? milkshake is workiing on a prettier site that will have some of that.
+ report to spit out the highest-all-time scores as well as the monthlies
Almost need a board-wide 'what are your favorite competition style arcade oldies' poll, and tally up the top-20 games or something. How many do we need? which ones do we do? I can keep doing my favs, but that may get old for you guys
(besides, I do not care for centipede one bit!)
levi
Still fresh, damnit!
The current client shows what? Hmm, I did an update today, and I'm not seeing any high scores client side.- scrollable list .. by which, you mean more games
- robust .. yeah, I think I need to put up a secondary server (since they're stateless anyway), and have the client clever enough to try and round robin as needed (say); score submitting should have the utmost chance of success. As long as you connection is up, it should have a good chance to work even now of course
- discovering? the current client shows the topmost at least for each game; do you mean some fancy list that shows top across all games? milkshake is workiing on a prettier site that will have some of that.
+ report to spit out the highest-all-time scores as well as the monthlies
I mean some way of getting access to the high score table pages as is - other than your manually updated front of thread post. If the server could spit out a series of links inside a HTML wrapper and make it accessible on a web page, we could bookmark that link and use it to find all current high score tables. Of course, in the future client side high scores would make that largely redundant, but it's something I believe should be possible to knock together in a matter of minutes, and be largely automatable.
As for the scrollable list, I'm thinking that in terms of UI you need something expandable. A series of buttons isn't very future-proof (and you're already about to run out of space for them).
And regarding robustness, two servers would help, but even using a single server it really ought to tell you it can't contact the server and offering to retry or let you abort, rather than hanging. When I was having trouble yesterday, I checked the pndrun log file before and after killing the hung process, and couldn't see anything logged either.
skeezix
Internal Development
All good points and I basicly agree
I updated the pnd file .. Tuesday late at night I think; that is the one that has "Select <gamename>", which when hit updates the right-side panel to show the top-most game scores and a big "Play" button on the bottom right.
It would be pretty trivial to make the left-button-panel scroll up and down if it gets too long; some easy options are..
- moving "Quit" to be middle-right with Play on bottom-right (ie: Quit and Play near each other, but not too close together)
- moving profile stuff like Edit/Delete to pulldown menus or a single 'Manage Profile" button, to minimize their space (since in practice, I doubt anyone will ever use them)
- this leaves nearly the entire left side for the "Select <gamename>" buttons, and it could be scrollable
Further out is .. given enough games, do redo the UI to group them by tags .. shmups, etc. Or rewrite it into SDL so its more graphical oriented.
(The existing one is GTK and at least quite portable .. runs on Windows, OSX, Linux already; can be used to run the emu and all that on a desktop too, but not sure I want to open up desktop versus Pandora. . do I?)
jeff
I updated the pnd file .. Tuesday late at night I think; that is the one that has "Select <gamename>", which when hit updates the right-side panel to show the top-most game scores and a big "Play" button on the bottom right.
It would be pretty trivial to make the left-button-panel scroll up and down if it gets too long; some easy options are..
- moving "Quit" to be middle-right with Play on bottom-right (ie: Quit and Play near each other, but not too close together)
- moving profile stuff like Edit/Delete to pulldown menus or a single 'Manage Profile" button, to minimize their space (since in practice, I doubt anyone will ever use them)
- this leaves nearly the entire left side for the "Select <gamename>" buttons, and it could be scrollable
Further out is .. given enough games, do redo the UI to group them by tags .. shmups, etc. Or rewrite it into SDL so its more graphical oriented.
(The existing one is GTK and at least quite portable .. runs on Windows, OSX, Linux already; can be used to run the emu and all that on a desktop too, but not sure I want to open up desktop versus Pandora. . do I?)
jeff
levi
Still fresh, damnit!
Now that's freaky. I not only did an update earlier today/yesterday, I actually uninstalled it, rebooted, then installed the latest version. It had the updated splash screen, but the actual launcher screen was the old one. How's that possible? Having now rebooted, without touching the installed PND, it's working as expected. I don't understand this PND system sometimes.
I agree with your suggested UI changes. I guess the only reason I never thought of a scrollable window of buttons is that it's unconventional, but there's nothing wrong with it. Although, perhaps to save horizontal space, for longer game names, you could have 'Select game:' at the top, and just the game name on the buttons.
In other news, platformers with 4-way joysticks are a pain to play on the Pandora's d-pad. And also, that hammer tune could really do with hinting that it was coming to an end (re: Donkey Kong, if you hadn't guessed).
I agree with your suggested UI changes. I guess the only reason I never thought of a scrollable window of buttons is that it's unconventional, but there's nothing wrong with it. Although, perhaps to save horizontal space, for longer game names, you could have 'Select game:' at the top, and just the game name on the buttons.
In other news, platformers with 4-way joysticks are a pain to play on the Pandora's d-pad. And also, that hammer tune could really do with hinting that it was coming to an end (re: Donkey Kong, if you hadn't guessed).
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skeezix
Internal Development
Define 'uninstall'; if you left appdata behind, its possible something was cached and not properly picked up as new. The frontend code could do that..
As per mcobits suggestion.. if we're expecting a lot of changes, I could put in an auto-updater, to make it easier (pull down changes from server, without pulling whole 50MB pnd down.) I built that for one of my games a few months back. But its a bit of complexity and I prefer to keep things minimal (less surface area to break) when I don't expect too many future changes..
jeff
As per mcobits suggestion.. if we're expecting a lot of changes, I could put in an auto-updater, to make it easier (pull down changes from server, without pulling whole 50MB pnd down.) I built that for one of my games a few months back. But its a bit of complexity and I prefer to keep things minimal (less surface area to break) when I don't expect too many future changes..
jeff
levi
Still fresh, damnit!
Yes, I have been leaving my appdata there. That was the next thing to investigate, but as a reboot sorted things out I didn't get that far. That's the thing I don't understand - it appeared that pre-reboot it was using the new graphics, but all the old binaries. The splash screen was too wide for the image it was displaying, for example, and the binary was syncing scores at app exit, rather than emulator exit.
The fact a reboot sorted it suggests the system was caching the old binaries in RAM for some reason. I could believe a write-caching transparent mount could somehow fail to spot updates to the source filesystem - is that how PNDs are mounted? I guess next time I should see what's mounted and unmount pretty much everything, and see if that fixes things. When I was looking at the PNDrun log file, it was filled with 'unmount failed' messages, although shortly after it appeared to indicate success.
The fact a reboot sorted it suggests the system was caching the old binaries in RAM for some reason. I could believe a write-caching transparent mount could somehow fail to spot updates to the source filesystem - is that how PNDs are mounted? I guess next time I should see what's mounted and unmount pretty much everything, and see if that fixes things. When I was looking at the PNDrun log file, it was filled with 'unmount failed' messages, although shortly after it appeared to indicate success.
