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.
Wow, have a break mister!!
Great stuff Haze. Thanks so much for the effort. Keeping up with your work has been tough (so many changes!) but well worth it. Thanks again.
Very cool stuff. So what sort of state was it in? What it really bad or just ‘sorta bad’ or ‘not bad’? How did you find clones? Was it by scanning code or just similarities between games? Do these guys copy/swipe from each other like with some of the clones in the rest of mame?
Top Man, many many old fat 10p have gone into these back in the day, oh to see strike a nudge again or bonus talker !! But will make do with siderwinder :)
Thanks again, btw, whats up with mameworld ?
great fruit-work! ;)
how about some ex-ussr fruitmachines ? belatra, extrema, unidessa and others.
some stuff about them can be found here – http://free.igrosale.ru/
More then 5000 of fruit roms omg! I gonna to be sick.
A lot of that russian stuff just looks like files you’d install on a generic PC and run, which can’t really be handled at the moment. It should probably be archived in some form tho.
There is some interesting stuff in there however which I’ll have to take a look at ;-)
I have a roll of lifesavers for AnimalBear.
Thanks for the updates, good to see its getting somewhere
more than 10Gb and 2500 of these NON WORKING fruit machines and gambling games added to last Mame release !!!
Even if i respect all the work you’ve made and all the time spent behind this awesome task, i really see no interest to add them to MAME…
@JacKc
Mame is an preservation and documentation project, a key part of which is documenting and maintaining correct roms. Even if no one ever gets these running I personally think preserving them for the future is important.
In any case I would wager that many of these run on the same hardware and what is more likely to hold emulation back is the lack of artwork :-)
the vast majority of the roms added in u7 are video based systems, which can, if somebody puts in the effort, be fully emulated.
The Konami games should be fairly straightforward if they have any similarities with their arcade counterparts, it didn’t take long to get the Tasman games to show something for instance. Hopefully they don’t have any custom MCUs or other unreadable-without-decapping chips.
Haze, can you write new article about cave sh3 stuff, and upcoming support.. i see you are pretty active in development of new driver..??
I might write something about it after the release.
It’s been a team effort more so than anything else tho, combining SH3/4 core work, Luca’s old work, extensive optimizations, bug fixes from Demul guys, Sound from Olivier, EEPROM support, the RTC support from Kale as well as the overseeing / coordination of it all so that people are working together properly.
(and yes, that’s why there haven’t been many updates on the fruit front since u7, change of focus for a few builds)
and.. one more question: i follow http://git.redump.net/mame/ in last few months… and see many updates from you.. but you are not registered with your nickname.. instead, other devs post your work using your nick as notice…
what’s wrong with this.. you are not oficial dev anymore, just freelancer, or what.. it’s not fair.. your dedicated work deserve more!!