You Panda's Never Disappoint Me!


SunDevilDog

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Hello all. I am loving my Pandy 1Ghz! I may even pick up another one soon just to support the cause! So, I am not complaining by any means.

I absolutely love the SNES, SEGA 32X and N64 emulation. However, I am somewhat disappointed with what I have experienced with MAME so far.

Please let me explain:

I am a HUGE Donkey Kong fan. That is probably my number one game of all time even though I suck at it (just like everyone else, lol!). Well, the only version that has all of the four original levels, as far as I know, is the Japan Set 2. That does not work on any of the MAME versions I have tried for my Pandy. Further, the only version I have gotten to work is the US Set 1, which only has two levels, but the sound does not work any where near properly.

So, unfortunately, that means that I must hold onto my PSP Go for now, because that version of MAME4ALL works great for Donkey Kong, and it has a bonus level on it. I was looking forward to just having one portable device for all of my emulation needs.

Any suggestions fellow Pandas?
 
MAME is notoriously picky with roms and versions... I just got a proper rom of Donkey Kong Japan Set 2 to work for MAME4ALL.  I think you're probably either missing all of the files (it may require several files) or you may have the wrong versions, possibly both.  I think you want to get MAME roms for version 0.37b5 for the best compatibility.

EDIT: Just to be clear, I have Donkey Kong Japan Set 2 working on my 1ghz Pandora in MAME4ALL.
 
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Thanks NearTao. I had used RomCenter to clean my roms to version 0.106. I will try to version 0.37b5 as you suggested to see if that helps.
 
All of the arcade versions have all DK levels. The only difference between the sets, is the order in which the levels are presented. The US set adds one new level per run through, as an added difficulty over the Japan sets. 

So an example would be, you play the first stage, then you play the rivet board. The next three boards will be girder, elevator, and rivet. On the next play you will get girder, elevator, cement factory, and rivet. This order will continue through to the kill screen at level 25 I believe. US set 1 does have all levels, just a different order.

Chris

Edit: as for sound, you'll need the sample file in the sample folder for the sound effects to work properly. 
 
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That did the trick NearTao! I used RomCenter to clean to 0.37b5 and I can now play Japan Set 2! Sound is not 100%, but I can live with that! Thanks man!

All of the arcade versions have all DK levels. The only difference between the sets, is the order in which the levels are presented. The US set adds one new level per run through, as an added difficulty over the Japan sets. 

So an example would be, you play the first stage, then you play the rivet board. The next three boards will be girder, elevator, and rivet. On the next play you will get girder, elevator, cement factory, and rivet. This order will continue through to the kill screen at level 25 I believe. US set 1 does have all levels, just a different order.

Chris

Edit: as for sound, you'll need the sample file in the sample folder for the sound effects to work properly. 

All of the arcade versions have all DK levels. The only difference between the sets, is the order in which the levels are presented. The US set adds one new level per run through, as an added difficulty over the Japan sets. 

So an example would be, you play the first stage, then you play the rivet board. The next three boards will be girder, elevator, and rivet. On the next play you will get girder, elevator, cement factory, and rivet. This order will continue through to the kill screen at level 25 I believe. US set 1 does have all levels, just a different order.

Chris

Edit: as for sound, you'll need the sample file in the sample folder for the sound effects to work properly. 
I suck so bad, that I guess I never knew this. Thanks Chris! I will also try the sample trick.
 
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Man, you guys have made me very happy today! I cleaned my roms as per NearTao's suggestion and I added the sound files as per Chris' suggestion and I can now dump my PSP Go! I have Donkey Kong working 100%!!!
 
Man, you guys have made me very happy today! I cleaned my roms as per NearTao's suggestion and I added the sound files as per Chris' suggestion and I can now dump my PSP Go! I have Donkey Kong working 100%!!!
Glad to be of service. Donkey Kong is my personal favorite classic coin-op also, and I actually have a decent amount of knowledge in regards to certain areas of that game.

If you where able to use RomCenter, there should be nothing here which you can't do, as I have never been able to work that properly(I never spent much time, but it still confuses me to even look at it) :lol:

Chris
 
RomCenter is not very straightforward, no doubt.

Have you seen that movie The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters yet Chris? I am going to try and make time to watch it this weekend.
 
MAME is one of the projects that don't have a developer working on it. They ported it two years ago and didn't really care about the polish.
 
How do we recruit a developer to continue on MAME development? I am really wanting to play Donkey Kong II, Jumpman Returns on a handheld!
 
Don't forget that if you intend to play the Comp4all Mame linked above, it uses the same Rom set (106) as PanMame (Not Mame4all which is older - 037b5), so use PanMame to check you have a rom that will work in Comp4all Mame.

You can run variants that are supported ('clones') in PanMame, the primary rom has to be present, then if you press F12 it will also list any supported alternatives in your roms folder, so for example you can play the US/English version of Pole position by having polepos.zip AND polepos1.zip files present, selecting pole position and pressing F12 so the US variant appears below it in the list. No DKII though ;)
 
Hell, I'd like to play Pole Position.  Did not know you could, I had the devil's own time trying.
Pole Position works fine in MAME4ALL as well... Didn't try PanMAME yet.


Controls could be better... But I am sure a decent mapping could be worked out.
 
MAME is one of the projects that don't have a developer working on it. They ported it two years ago and didn't really care about the polish.
Somebody you could probably checkout the source to work on it more. Between mame4all, PanMAME and FBA I can usually find something that works well enough. That and I am too lazy to look further.
 
If you haven't seen this yet, it may excite you (though only partially on topic regarding that romset):Compo4all online scoring.. play your DK scores against our community :) http://c4a.openpandora.org/#/dkongjeff
I know you are starting to dig through hi score files... Would it be any use to you for me to try and find the Hyperspin project's similar program for the same thing? If I remember correctly they were using Perl regexes... Maybe I should just look and see if I can find it as I believe the Hyperspin project was using MAME 106 as well. I'll need to boot up my arcade to check.

Need more research... This is C# code, but might be helpful... http://www.hyperspin-fe.com/forum/showthread.php?1525-HiToText-(Hi-score-support)
 
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I'd never heard of HyperSpin until you PMed me.

Why didn't they think of syncing the scores .. they've been fiddling around a this for what.. 4 years or more :eek:

6min for the 300MB download to complete, crummy bandwidth there; once it finishes, I'll take a look. If it just happens to be simple to use (doubt it, but you never know), then it woudl almost suck to drop in support for a hundred games all at once; more fun to drool them out bit by bit. But coudl also be fun if, someday, we have 50 or 100 games supported, to have each month have a random highlighted few...

I'll let you know once I've taken a peek; thanks for the link.

Should check license.. sounds like they dont' want peopel doing anything with the data (funny, for submitted data), but I can appreciate they don't want stuff ripped off; still, to try to clamp down on stuf that is i) submitted, and ii) based around open source work, seems silly. I shoudl drop them a line to tip the ol' hat, looks like they got a similar idea to me, years before I did :) Just a shame they never did the score sync bit.. I mean, took me only a couple days to ahck a basic working system, together.

jeff

Crikey, HiToText is pretty interesting; I fiddled around a bit and got it to build (C#, bleh, but the mono projects mcs compiler did the trick) and can run it on my server; I wrapped it up with a quick service as a test and seems to sort of work. I need to fiddle more than 20mins, but looks like I may well be able to leverage that beast... not that I actually tried it yet. But if I can leverage it, I can still add game-by-game (gotta test it, and so on), but that would trivialize a lot of the work if it in fact works.

Also, no license questions.. I could use it more or less unmodified, just running on the server. And license I think is more about HyperSpin, and not HiToText which is a spinoff (see what I did there.)

Cool find :)
 
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