Just a brief update on the Fruit Emulation stuff.
I’ve spent the majority of my MAME time since the last updated (several hundred hours at least) just trying to sort and categorize the various sets that are around, figuring out the hardware, splitting things into appropriate clones, identifying cases where there are missing roms etc.
This has proven to be an incredibly time consuming task, not least because of the sheer volume of sets and variations on sets which exist. You’ll have seen in the last couple of updates there have been a lot of fruit machine romsets added, then renamed, split out, and reshuffled in cases where things were just completely misidentified before they were looked at for MAME.
It’s not really what you’d call a glamorous job, but it’s one that needed doing, as proper set support underpins any further work done in MAME, so despite no real visible progress in the emulation simply doing this is a huge step forwards towards eventually seeing the machines supported properly in MAME.
I know some people cited the monumental nature of this task as one of the reasons why FME would never happen in MAME, saying you’d need an army of people to compile such a database, I guess the reality is you either needed an army, or just one person severely lacking in sanity. Thankfully MAME had me ;-)
The majority of sets have been added now, so the number of *new* fruit machine roms added from this point in any single update should be rather small, although there is a lot of sorting and splitting to be done, which may give the illusion that a lot more is changing than really is. To begin with there was in the region of 5-6GB of sets to look at, I’m now down to around 50MB of stuff which isn’t identified by the latest MAME at all.
The good news is that even if I get hit by a bus tomorrow nobody is going to have to repeat this part of the work.