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General Emulation Thread

I'm Rick Jones, bitch

13:16 / 24.08.05

So, Stu's not happy with the state of MAME:

The most disturbing aspect of the new regime, though, was the open contempt in which MAME's users were now evidently held. Major upheavals in the game's interface went undocumented, and requests for information rudely refused. Anyone who wasn't capable of interpreting the source code themselves, it appeared, was no longer welcome to use the emulator. "Remember," ran several condescending responses on the official forum, "MAME is a historical artefact, not a games machine."

Predictably, it all kicks off.

This is really, really Sad. I'm sympathetic to some of the MameDev's viewpoints but they really are a pack of arseholes and Stu's been carrying the emulation torch ever since it became a prospect. Grim.

All Acting Regiment

11:48 / 30.08.05

Before we go any further, what is MAME?

12:19 / 30.08.05

It's an emulator - lets you play old (and not so old, depending on the technology being used) arcade games on your PC, provided that you have access to the game ROMs.

To be honest, I'm not sure what the big fuss is about. As the article points out, there are better emulators out there nowadays - Final Burn does the the Capcom CPS2 games better, Kawaks does the Neo Geo games better - and if you're determined to stick with MAME, then just don't delete the previous versions off your machine. There will always be sites or individuals offering older versions, just as there will always be sites or individuals offering the ROMs to run on them. Emulation isn't going to go away now, regardless of what happens to MAME.

Admittedly, I may be blinded to the relevance of this because of my dislike of Campbell - a guy long since swallowed whole by his own grotesquely inflated ego - and his slavish fanbase. This smells of somebody desperately trying to boost his profile again.

There's a nice, if not entirely perfect symmetry in the more fatbeardy members of a scene built on running games through dubious legal means, presumably often against the rights-holders wishes, now complaining about the software that allows them to do so being altered by the owners of that software against the scene's wishes. You'd think they'd paid money for it.

I'm Rick Jones, bitch

16:22 / 30.08.05

"You didn't pay money for it" isn't a valid defense man, come on. People can both legitimately criticise the actions of others according to reason or have cause to react if there's an emotional investment.

"You didn't pay for it" certianly doesn't stand when you consider 7 anal fatbeards are acting like wankers, shitting on their fanbase/userbase and adopting positions of superiority. I'd support them, if only they were calm, polite and reasonable about their reasons for the changes. They aren't. They're being snotty, elitist and unplesant.

I don't aways agree with Stu (see his archived review of Thunder Force 4 on his site - it's one of the best games ever you flat-topped heathen!) but he's honest and straightforward, which I like.

16:33 / 30.08.05

I'm not mounting a defense. I'm simply pointing out how the "they fiddled with my MAME! Now I can't play all those games I downloaded in dubious legal circumstances!" moaning is bordering on hypocrisy.

I'm Rick Jones, bitch

16:38 / 30.08.05

I just don't see how it is, really - he's making a valid criticisim at the very least, if not a legitimate one. The legality of the situation hasn't come into it.

Just installing KAWAKS. 1.54 is latest, yeah?

16:39 / 30.08.05

Which isn't to say that I don't use MAME in exactly the way that it's officially not supposd to be used - that is, as a means of playing games that I don't legally own copies of - just that I think I'm on shaky enough ground by doing so as it is without trying to claim that I've somehow been wronged by the current MAME team altering the program in whatever way they see fit.

I'm Rick Jones, bitch

16:52 / 30.08.05

So you're not allowed to complain if someone sells you a pill consisting of brick dust and rat poison?

Anyway

and all that. Kawaks seems ace. CPS2 seems nice enough to make this my new Emu of choice, although MAME's good for stuff like R - (legend) Type which didn't come out on a muliboard type hardware setup.

Let's make this the general emulation thread, shall we?

18:14 / 30.08.05

I see it more as photocopying a book that you've borrowed from the library on a broken machine, then complaining to the photocopier manufacturer about how the copy is illegible. It's their fault that the machine doesn't work properly, but you've not been caused any hardship because of it - you've lost nothing other than the time it took to obtain the copy, which is something you shouldn't really have been doing first place.

It's a while since I downloaded Kawaks, so I'm probably running an out-of-date version. Tbh, emulation on a PC doesn't do a huge amount for me, so I'm not all that fussed about getting the latest releases - these games weren't meant to be played hunched over a PC keyboard and they don't feel right to me experienced that way.

I'm also a bit of a sucker for the gumph that goes with official releases - artwork, manuals and so on - so tend to hold out for proper rereleases on newer machines or try and grab the conversions on the older consoles I own. I'd sooner have the satisfaction of having a solid-state copy, something I can hold in my hands, with all the associated paraphernalia, and sit down to play that on the telly from the comfort of the sofa. Emulation is more of a try-before-you-buy thing for me.

ONLY NICE THINGS

18:16 / 30.08.05

So you're not allowed to complain if someone sells you a pill consisting of brick dust and rat poison?

I think the situation is rather than if a former purveyor of pills becomes a purveyor of brick dust, then if you obtain that brick dust then it is possibly unfair to complain of the effort involved in turning it into a pill made of MDMA.

I'm Rick Jones, bitch

18:19 / 30.08.05

Still, that isn't true - if there was a new photocopier every month, and that photocopier relied on user input and users submitting bits and peices to make it better then ANY user would have a stake in it, and would justly have the right to complain when someone makes the copy button smaller and the prints too blurry. If that person then told the user to fuck off, they'd have a right to complain.

MAME is community software and the analogy does not hold.

ONLY NICE THINGS

20:01 / 30.08.05

But... the thrust of that entire article is that the MAME development community is at fault for applying the letter of its mission statement. If you mean that MAME is software that is used by a community, so is almost all other software not built and employed by an individual without sharing. It seems that your complaint here is precisely with the MAME development community. I suppose that, to move into the world of gaming for a second, this might be comparable to the Star Wars: Galaxies playing community getting angry that Rage of the Wookies changed the combat system, as it ruined their enjoyment of how much more primacy SWG gave to crafters and role-players. Assuming for a moment that nobody actually had the copyright to use the characters and settings of Star Wars.

That being assumed, what is to stop a group from breaking off, taking advantage of the dubious legality of the enterprise in the first place and retroengineering the code to the point where they are comfortable, and setting up their own community, as various other people have done when MAME was not serving their emulation needs? Or, as Stuart Campbell himself plans to do, not downloading and installing later versions of the software that do things he doesn't want it to do?

I realise that gamer entitlement is a powerful emotion, but I'm not sure exactly why either side in this debate is less "nerdy" - just nerdy about achieving different ends.

I'm Rick Jones, bitch

20:24 / 30.08.05

Well, MAME relies on the goodwill of the community - drivers for games are added as they develop, people offer to dump and redump the information to emulate and preserve new games, or correct old ones. One person couldn't emulate 3000 games alone - the cost and manpower that would take would be astonishing.

So, MAME is an engine that runs on public goodwill.

Right now the guys in charge hate the public. They're stripping away a lot of the nice stuff (highscore.dat, graphic fliters) without really explaining why. They're changing MAME without telling people how to use it correctly. What was once a tremendous conservation project and educational tool is at risk of becoming insular and static. If people get pissed off, they won't play it and bug reports won't get sent in. Drivers will stay broken. If people who own boards get alienated then they might not dump them, and games will be lost to bitrot. People will break away from MAME instead of submitting drivers, and the arcade emulator scene becomes unpleasantly balkanised.

If they were nice and explained things to the public (like Steve Snake, who makes the awesome Kega Fusion uber-Mega Drive emulator and a great guy to boot) this wouldn't be an issue. But they aren't, and so it is an issue.

Put it this way - would you rather the written word was only preserved by monks?

ONLY NICE THINGS

20:49 / 30.08.05

OK, thanks - that makes far clearer why this should be a matter of concern. So, what's the solution? If the entire MAME coommunity except MAMEDEV is unhappy with what MAMEDEV is doing, what might it do through concerted action? I guess question one on that is how much MAME code is open, and thus whether you could retroengineer a MAME-equivalent that started from, say, MAME 0.99 and then carriies on down a different development path. Possible?

I'm Rick Jones, bitch

21:19 / 30.08.05

Oh, completely. You can grab the 0.99 source here, if you want to try.

Someone suggested MAGE - Multiple Arcade GAME Emulator at the World of Stu forums. The idea being to leave MAMEdev to chip-mapping and work on making the games playable. That's a good idea.

15:05 / 10.09.05

Tried Raine yet? It's pretty good - I just downloaded it last night and I'm extremely chuffed that, unlike MAME, it lets my PC run things that it previously groaned at. Cave shooters, in other words - Dodonpachi, Guwange, Dangun Feverun, ESP Ra.De., that sort of thing. Maybe I'm just misremembering, but I'm sure that trying to play them through MAME on my machine just led to horrific amounts of slowdown.

Not perfect, by any means. I'm finding that there are a lot of incompatible ROMs - Outrun (I suspect that means all Super Scaler games are out), Fantasy Zone, R-Type - which is annoying. There's also an issue with the screen resolution settings, the emulator not including MAME's option to automatically alter the res to give you as near to full-screen as possible without fucking with the game's intended dimensions. Seems that all you need to do to make that happen, though, is load the game, select 'Autodetect' from the screen options (it'll then resize the Raine window to the resolution of the game, but not alter your screen res), then go back into those options and change the setting to 'Accelerated'.

Other graphical problems, too - I just tried Strider and after about two minutes of play the backgrounds went wonky. There are issues with sprite layers, figuring out which should overlap which - easily noticable at the very beginning of Donpachi and the introduction to each level in Guwange - and a fair old bit of flicker.

But fuck it - it's brought me the ability to play the Cave shoot' em ups (it's also meant that I'm once again considering a JPN PS2 over an Xbox 360 as my next hardware purchase, so that I can play these games properly). Hopefully, those members of the MAME community who were active will move onto projects that have already had some work put into them, like this.

[edit]

Ah. Just tried to play 19XX through it - it chugs horribly. I was going to say that I guess that the same applies to all CPS2 games, but just remembered that it runs Gunbird flawlessly, so I'm not sure what's up. Still, when you've got Final Burn Alpha it's not like you really need to be running CPS2 stuff through anything else.

10:34 / 13.09.05

A little off topic perhaps (I'm not a huge follower of the "scene", just wanna play games) but I've been using mameplus 32 and found it to be quite good for the arcade games at least.
Antyone else tried using this?
Only probblem I've had so far is that some games (space invaders & 1942 mostly) are always oriented the wrong way (playing field is horizontal as opposed to vertical)no matter what rotation settings I apply, which is a right pain.
I'm getting heavy into emulation now having
a)fixed my PC which went tits up a month ago
aand
b)gottn a vampent emulator for my nokia phone which allows me to play snes mario kart on the move!

11:43 / 13.09.05

I've just downloaded it and tried it with 1942, as well as some of the vertical shooters I mentioned in my last post, and the screen's the right way up for me. Make sure you've set rotation back to default.

One thing I hate about some emulator frontends is how they force you into playing the games in vaseline-o-vision. 'Smoothing' the edges of pixels because the people behind them are graphics whores who consider these old, low-res games to be ugly. It only ever results in the games looking like a smudged mess, like you're playing them with your glasses off. Mameplus does this, without providing you the option to turn the effect off, as far as I can see. Switching the display to RGB Sharp makes it a little less annoying, but it's still noticable.

Anyone else been having trouble with the sound quality in recent revisions of MAME, by the way? Samples repeating, music 'sticking' like a scratched record, everything becoming fuzzy and crackly when there's too much going on?

21:37 / 13.09.05

hey E.
Nope somethings really up.
Jusr upgraded my verison of mame 32.
haven't made any custrom settings for space invaders or 1941, and both are playing with my "fighter" facing "up" tyhe screen from right to left, instead of bottom to top.
Even playing with thew rotation setting still doesn't change this.
Am
I missing something obvious?

21:48 / 13.09.05

Aha! the pwer of the internet!
Needed to turn off my atwork option in the mam.ini file (weird!)

I'm really loving MAME now, I had started off with a zsnes emulator to mess around but now I'm getting perfect versions all the games I used to play at lunch times in school and collapsing in a nostalgasm!

admiral sausage

13:44 / 14.10.05

I want one of these ! its a portable Linux based games machine intended, primarily to run emulators.

http://www.gbax.com/ordergp2x.html

I guess you can run emulators on a PSP, although Sony are cracking down on that type of thing, and it isnt hard to play GBA (pirate) games of an sd card on a Nintendo DS, but the idea of being able to download a Linux MAME ..........