What Am I Not Doing Correctly?

[Dave Bonds]

Hello!

This marks the first post for me here. I just purchased a minty GP2X F100 mk2 from ebay. It's so new (down to all of the original packaging and screen protector film) that I almost feel like I'm bastardizing it by installing anything on it. Like putting aftermarket parts on a survivor classic car that was untouched, or something. I'll be nice to it, though.

Anyway, After peering this forum for some time and wrapping my head around as much as I could without physically having one of these in front of me at the time, I'm still learning. Here is my problem;

The first thing that I did after looking around on the factory settings was try to run MAME4ALL on the root of a new SD card, with the 3.0 GPH NAND. It booted and immediately started MAME4ALL as expected and told me that there were no games found. Fair enough. So I go through the readme files and install a couple of ROMs that were supported in the list. I put the SD card back in again with MAME4ALL on the root still, no problems, brings up the menu for the games and I try playing Mappy. It seems to work fine. I can mess with it to experement what mhz to use, etc, no problem.

I try starting Mortal Kombat and it failed twice. So I try playing around with the settings and I finally get it to load, but it is very dodgey. Super slow and likes to freeze, even on the highest mhz setting that I could get it to load on.

After that I tried Final Fight, as I later discovered that MK has issues. Same thing. Ultra slow, even moreso than MK. I tried a hand full of other ROM files that were on the supported list with no luck, only to have MAME4ALL tell me that it couldn't find a hand full of files on each one. Fair enough, I could chalk it up to bad ROM sets. I'll deal with that later and work with the ones I know will boot.

Then, at that point, I remembered that I didn't check the SD format. I notice it's only FAT, so I pull the files and reformat it for FAT32, reload files to the FAT32 format SD, try playing Final Fight again, same slow problem even on 250mhz and with the sound turned off.

I bite the bullet and install Open2x(best thing I could have possibly done) and it works beautifully, but I still have the same problem with the Final Fight ROM. I load MAMEGP2X in a folder, along side MAME4ALL in their own file directories on the SD card root, transferred the ROMs from MAME4ALL into MAMEGP2X ROM folder and try to boot Final Fight again, no problems at all. Plays great, no speed in video or audio speed at 250mhz. I haven't yet tried it at a lower mhz with this MAME.

I would really like to use MAME4ALL, as I couldn't get MK to boot on the older one at all, but I don't want to use it if it's going to be slow. I have a feeling that I am not doing something right with MAME4ALL that I should be.

I'm new to cmpro and I haven't even begun to use it, so I don't quite know which versions of the ROMS I am running, but it seems to me that if Final Fight is running on MAMEGP2X perfectly, the same ROM file should be working on MAME4ALL with the same settings. Am I missing something? What am I not doing in MAME4ALL that I should be?

Any advice is appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[senquack]

I am not really a MAME expert but I helped write a lot of Open2X and have used MAME and other emu's a little bit.

First thing you should know is that the latest verison of Mame for GP2X (2.5 I think) seems to have an incompatibility problem with Open2X (or vice versa, haven't gotten a chance to look at it quite yet). You need to create a link for Mame like you probably already have using the GMenu2X menu system included with Open2X. Then, go to the link's settings in the menu by pressing Select. As a temporary work-around you can enable the option "Force full MMUhack". It will cause some screen artifacts in the menu but many games will now run full-speed.

Your problems don't seem to be related to this (especially not if you are using an older version of MAME) but it is still something to note. Anyways, I am not sure about this but I would be VERY surprised if the GP2X was capable of running an arcade version of Mortal Kombat. The GP2X doesn't really have the speed to run an arcade game of that era. It, however, can run a lot of that era video games if they are Capcom CPS or CPS2 games because you can use a faster emulator to play them: FBA2X Final Fight is, I think, a CPS2 or CPS game so FBA2X would play it much better.

Also if you have more problems you can do a search of these forums using Google by adding "site:gp32x.de" to your search terms in google and it will limit its searching to here. It is a better way of finding info in my experience. A lot of problems might have alrady been solved but don't take that to mean I am saying your question is bad, just trying to help you out since you are new here and will likely have more questions.

 

[Dave Bonds]

Great job on the OS/Menu. It's leaps and bounds nicer to work with than the original. I saw the interview with EvilDragon on the Pandora on youtube a few days ago. He mentioned that he worked on this OS/Menu for the GP2X and said something about using it exclusively. I figured that anyone who was developing on that team would know what they were doing.

I did read what you explained about the arcade ROM of MK on this system, prior, so I sort of gave up on it. I think I'll just play it on a Sega emulator or something.

Final Fight plays perfectly on the older MAMEGP2X player, but I think I'll try the other one you suggested on some other Capcom games. I'd really like to play SFII on it. I have a feeling that I'm going to be doing a lot more reading!

Thanks again for the pointers.

Dave

 

[senquack]

Great job on the OS/Menu. It's leaps and bounds nicer to work with than the original. I saw the interview with EvilDragon on the Pandora on youtube a few days ago. He mentioned that he worked on this OS/Menu for the GP2X and said something about using it exclusively. I figured that anyone who was developing on that team would know what they were doing.

I did read what you explained about the arcade ROM of MK on this system, prior, so I sort of gave up on it. I think I'll just play it on a Sega emulator or something.

Final Fight plays perfectly on the older MAMEGP2X player, but I think I'll try the other one you suggested on some other Capcom games. I'd really like to play SFII on it. I have a feeling that I'm going to be doing a lot more reading!

Thanks again for the pointers.

Dave

Glad you like it but I cannot claim credit for GMenu2X, that was actually the fine work of our Italian member Massimiliano Torromeo who goes by Ryo on these forums. It started life as a 3rd party launcher that people would run off their SD cards and we in Open2X decided to use it for the default menu system in our firmware. I simply added some features onto it with the help of PokeParadox. EvilDragon is an admin here and helps handle and pay for the GP2X/Wiz/Pandora file archive and forums hosting (I think he helps with the forum hosting at least) and so he deserves a lot of credit in that regard but he is not a programmer. He also donated a Wiz to me so I could eventually port Open2X to that platform so he is quite a guy.

The full credits for developing Open2X are available in the About Open2X link under the Settings tab, in alphabetical order.