Very Specific Fmame - Rom Compatibility Question

[bast525]

I see one possible problem with Fmame... hard to explain but... as anyone who uses Mame regularly knows, that it gets updated often, and when it does, many times the roms must also be updated to work on the new Mame. Now I understand that Ryleh is probably using a much older version of Mame to base his port on... the problem is, what do to with the Roms as many Mame roms you find on the net or wherever, now, wont work on this older version of mame.

A program like ClrMame can fix some of them, at least... but if the rom needs to be changed a LOT, Clrmame wont be able to fix it and make it work. Since we're now in version .9x of Mame, and assuming Ryleh would be using a .3x era mame... I wonder how he will adress this problem or how we will have to get around it?

Just wanted to open a topic on this and see what people think or if Ryleh might himself adress this issue here.

 

[rlyeh]

last mame i ported was 0.74
i will port the latest one (currently 0.92) before releasing it so dont worry about your romsets

greetings

 

[bast525]

well there it is there


LOL unfortunately for me I'm still using v.74 romsets... haven't bothered upgrading as nothing new has been gotten working that I"m interested in. No biggy it's still good news as v.91 roms can be found easily, also since fmame will be playing only older (and hence, smaller) roms, they will all be quick downloads

 

[skeezix]

<rant>

This is somtihng that *really* annoys me. The whole MAME approach to breaking up romsets to separate files out, renaming the zip file or renaming the roms.. is just a total disaster. (It could at least look up historical names if it cannot find current name...)

ie: Having to rename dozens of ROMs every few months is rediculous, from a preservationist standpoint. Having split up a romset so that half of the roms are i one file and half in another, is an awful mess for preservationists..

Mostly, its just a mess for everyone, that people have to run clrmame at all. ie: I've written my own emus for the most part, so I'm happy with them; I run MAME once every 6mo, and it often doesn't work with the things I try, since they've changed some of them since last run. And since we all burn roms to CDs for safe keeping, its a right pain in the rear. I know I don't keep a lot of roms on hard drive, since drives fail.. I keep them on dozens of backed up CDs. Furthermore, I've backed up roms from all my systems, and its too much disk space to spare to just keep them all lieing around on drives

Gargs.

(I rip my own roms from my arcade boards; renaming them is just retarded. They should alwyas be named by their chip grid locaton on the board.. easy, and thats how we know where to burn them back when the chip goes bad on the board!)

*sigh*

</rant>

jeff

 

[Quiest]

Yeah thats really stupid, it took me ages figuring out why Metal Slug stopped working when I downloaded a new Mame version, cause I didn`t know of that back then...

 

[DaveC]

<rant>

This is somtihng that *really* annoys me. The whole MAME approach to breaking up romsets to separate files out, renaming the zip file or renaming the roms.. is just a total disaster. (It could at least look up historical names if it cannot find current name...)

ie: Having to rename dozens of ROMs every few months is rediculous, from a preservationist standpoint. Having split up a romset so that half of the roms are i one file and half in another, is an awful mess for preservationists..

Mostly, its just a mess for everyone, that people have to run clrmame at all. ie: I've written my own emus for the most part, so I'm happy with them; I run MAME once every 6mo, and it often doesn't work with the things I try, since they've changed some of them since last run. And since we all burn roms to CDs for safe keeping, its a right pain in the rear. I know I don't keep a lot of roms on hard drive, since drives fail.. I keep them on dozens of backed up CDs. Furthermore, I've backed up roms from all my systems, and its too much disk space to spare to just keep them all lieing around on drives

Gargs.

(I rip my own roms from my arcade boards; renaming them is just retarded. They should alwyas be named by their chip grid locaton on the board.. easy, and thats how we know where to burn them back when the chip goes bad on the board!)

*sigh*

</rant>

jeff

​

I agree 100% who ever the moron was that had the stupid idea of renaming and messing with ROM sets every release should be tarred and feathered and strung up by their nads.

I am totally confused of how to know which version of ROMs works with what MAME it is a TOTAL MESS. Expext these boards to EXPLODE with questions like "I can't get my games to load with fMAME what do I do?" I may be one of those that ask that too.

 

[DaveC]

last mame i ported was 0.74
i will port the latest one (currently 0.92) before releasing it so dont worry about your romsets

greetings

​

A stupid question from a non coder but won't the newer more bloated versions of MAME be much slower on the GP32 then if you ported an older version meant to run on slower computers?

 

[wildo2ne]

even with the latest version of mame the old games will work fine on a older and slower computer....its the new games that will not......mame works on a driver system, as long as the game you wish to play does not make use of one of those newer drivers you should be ok.......atleast that is the way I understand it

B) wildo2ne

 

[Hwrd]

I could be totally wrong, but my understanding of MAME is that the timings became more accurate with the newer builds of MAME also (and therefore requiring more processing power for a previously full speed title). I may have this wrong, and it may have been a relevant point only a long time ago.

 

[rlyeh]

A stupid question from a non coder but won't the newer more bloated versions of MAME be much slower on the GP32 then if you ported an older version meant to run on slower computers?

​

you're totally right

 

[DaveC]

A stupid question from a non coder but won't the newer more bloated versions of MAME be much slower on the GP32 then if you ported an older version meant to run on slower computers?

​

you're totally right

​

Ok, then another dumb question, howcome an older version is not used to get more speed out of the slower GP32? Isn't it kind of silly to support the newest MAME version that will run newer games that are unplayably slow on the GP32 anyway? Is it just so we can say oooh look Bionic Commando on my GP32, It is unplayably slow and choppy with no sound but hey the game screen comes up! If that is the reason it may not be worth the sacrifice of all games just for that. That is my opinion.

Wouldn't it make more sense to port a version that only supports drivers that would run well on the GP32? This way we can actually have sound in some of the older games and still be at a playable speed. Many of us would like to be able to play with sound ON I think.

Or have another version that just plays the older classics with sound at a decent playable speed. It would be a sort of "MiniMAME".

Just an idea.

 

[bast525]

um... he's got a point. The whole reason I was thinking Ryleh'd be using an older version was because this would work better/faster on the GP. But the whole driver thing makes sense as well... seems older games should work the same regardless of which version you use. So Ryleh why'd you decide to use the latest version and how would it affect your port to run a much older version of mame?


And I DO agree 100% that it f'ing SUX :angry: that with every mame update roms get changed and changed and lots of stuff stops working... very annoying.

 

[shinneri]

I'm sure Rlyeh knows what he's doing.

 

[ralp99]

ahh the mame debates, they come and go like the ebb and flow of the tides

...

i am sure, too that rlyeh knows what he's doing. and really, wouldn't it be so much cooler if he always typed it rlyeH with a big H? It would just look fucked up and weird but really cool. Or maybe i will just shutup now. Anyway, bullshit aside, perhaps it is easier for him to port a newer version for whatever reason. Like HUGELY less amounts of work easier. I mean, I am no coder, I ain't saying I know shit from shinola, but obviously there's gotta be a reason.

as for the renaming of romsets, or whatever, I am sure there's some reason for that too.. I mean, it's such an arbitrary thing otherwise. Besides the neo geo games, I don't recall there being large amounts of romsets needing to get renamed/redownloaded/etc. ot that I have kept a sharp eye on that scene anymore (in the last couple years) but if it's just a handful of relatively obscure games, then it's a small enough sacrifice. Sure, from a preservationist standpoint it sucks, but how long will it be (5, 8 years?) till we can have some kind of uber-zipfile thing with every version of every mame rom supported included in it, and you'll be able to download it in a second anyway? Pain in the ass now, irrelevant later. Sounds ludicrous perhaps, btu then, so did the concept of downloading old arcade games over a worldwide network and playing them quite faiithfully on one's home computer...

or GP32...

also if there's not a good reason for it, then well - mame is free, it's the product of the hard work by tons of talented dumpers/coders/archivists, many of whom've never even met I'm sure, of course there's gonna be some fucked up indescrepencies in there somewhere. at least it still mostly works, haha


oooo. ranting is fun.

 

[aapje89]

??

 

[Prophet]

MAME has very good reasons to constantly update the romsets. They range from including new more accurate dumps, adding PROMs, matching rom names for historical purposes etc.

Remember - MAME's purpose is to document and accurately emulate arcade hardware. Not simply to get the games running - that's what makes MAME somewhat different and also misunderstood compared to most emulators. It's not just just a talking point, I've known some MAMEdevs pretty well for a long time and they really do take the whole documentation/accuracy thing seriously. And that's why the romsets and the drivers evolve over time.

As for fMAME32 - let's trust rlyeh. He knows his stuff, and I'm sure he knows what he's doing.

 

[bast525]

it wasn't an issue of trust or whatever that made me post this, just curiosity.

 

[DaveC]

MAME has very good reasons to constantly update the romsets. They range from including new more accurate dumps, adding PROMs, matching rom names for historical purposes etc.

Remember - MAME's purpose is to document and accurately emulate arcade hardware. Not simply to get the games running - that's what makes MAME somewhat different and also misunderstood compared to most emulators. It's not just just a talking point, I've known some MAMEdevs pretty well for a long time and they really do take the whole documentation/accuracy thing seriously. And that's why the romsets and the drivers evolve over time.

As for fMAME32 - let's trust rlyeh. He knows his stuff, and I'm sure he knows what he's doing.

​

But even he mentioned that he was using the slower version so I was wondering the wisdom in that, maybe there is a good reason that we don't know.

I still say it is not worth sacrificing speed and sound on the playable older games just to support the unplayable on GP32 newer ones.