With the reverse engineering of the Gunpey compression scheme not exactly going well I decided to turn my attention elsewhere for the time being. (I did add a few things like the alpha blending, but it’s not worth showing)
Smitdogg and the Dumping Union got a rare Data East board for a game called Dream Ball, a gambling game.
The credit list I’ve been provided with is ‘J. Finney, TrevEB, Yohji, Smitdogg, The Dumping Union’
(The Dream Ball PCB, picture provided by The Dumping Union)
The hardware uses common Data East components, and is clearly purpose built for low-cost Gambling games, and appears to lack any form of sprite chip (it has a Data East custom 71, but without being paired with a 52 I guess it doesn’t handle sprites, probably just palette / mixing)
The game boots to an NDK 1993 copyright, which is starting to become interesting because it’s a company logo / name we’re starting to see in several Japanese gambling games with little in common between them.
Anyhow, moving on to the emulation, being common components it was pretty easy to hook the basics up, add some inputs and get a playable game. It will give a payout error if you select Payout because the hopper isn’t emulate, but beyond that it works, and was a trivial addition.
(Data East / NDK gambling game ‘Dream Ball’)
The game doesn’t seem to use any balls, not even lottery balls, but the background of the Title Screen is awfully familiar. For anybody who hasn’t already recognized it, it’s from Pocket Gal Deluxe another Data East game, at least THAT one has balls.. What this means however is it’s quite likely this ‘Dream Ball’ really is a Data East product, just licensed to NDK.
(The title screen background is recycled from Pocket Gal Deluxe)
Maybe it’s named “Dream Ball” for the girl in fancy dress (does she lose her clothing?) – Ball as in Ballroom, Cinderella at the ball, etc.?
Card games, fruit and mechanical better to create a separate version of the emulator mame. More than half the games in the list mom belong to this group.
just don’t download the rom dumps if you’re not interested…
I totally agree with JIN. +1
The emulation process is exactly the same, they use exactly the same components, they’re still arcade games, splitting them up makes no sense at all. As a developer I treat all things as equal, as a project MAME does the same. I could say the same about fighters as you’re saying about gambling games.
Just because you don’t like them doesn’t mean they should be split out, MAME doesn’t exist to discriminate, it is not the emulation equivalent of a racist.
Last week I looked at Gunpey, a puzzle game, the week before Cool Riders, a driving game, this week I’ve looked at Dream Ball, a multi-gambling game, next week who knows, I might look at one of the fruit machines, or a Mahjong title, makes no difference to me.
”Just because you don’t like them doesn’t mean they should be split out, MAME doesn’t exist to discriminate, it is not the emulation equivalent of a racist.”
You already do for the consoles, computers and calculators. You call it Mess. Stop being a hypocrite. You discriminate just as much as the jew haters so put these in something else too. I can think of a very suitable treatment.
I totally think both Jin and Jello need to go fuck themselves, fuck off from this blog, and never post comments again if they’re so butthurt about gambling games.
Wow, we’re comparing emulators to the holocaust now? I’d hate to see the kind of impotent tirade you go on if a restaurant gets your order wrong, Andrew. Look into some psychotherapy or medication, you need serious help.
Andrew: you are talking to the wrong man about that. Haze ships and advocates UME, in which no discrimination takes place. It’s reactionary assholes like myself that prefer to keep MESS separate ;-)
“You discriminate just as much as the jew haters so put these in something else too.”
Wow, comparing emulation to the holocaust. You need some serious intensive psychotherapy, man.
Wow, classy comment, and entirely misdirected. It seems to have escaped your attention that one of the main things I use this site for is to offer the ‘UME’ version of MAME, or in simple terms, the ‘everything’ version with all the ‘consoles, computers and calculators’ included.
Yes, Mame / Mess have some historical reasons for whatever level of discrimination/splitting exists there, it doesn’t mean I agree with them (I don’t, I think it should be part of MAME all along, hence UME) It also doesn’t mean we should copy that with others when there are no technical merits in doing so.
Trying to use the ‘well MESS does it’ argument here isn’t going to work, I think I’ve made the point that I consider the MESS part one and the same with MAME enough times for people to realize that, or at least I hoped I had.
MAME and MESS are already distributed together in source form, and I still imagine they’ll end up as the same binary by default one day. If it wasn’t for the work put in by Kale, Robbie and myself (some of which has been gambling work, especially from Robbie) then you’d have very little of note new in MAME at all since the 0.148 release, so if anything we’re probably just slowing down that process by giving the illusion that the MAME side of the project is more alive / active than it really is.
So take your argument, and implications of where we should send the gambling games elsewhere.
Is there a list of unMamed gambling games, similar to the arcade game lists that exist? Not too knowledgeable in this area, but curious as to how many remain from the 80s/90s.
As for those ranting with unhelpful personal opinions, I guess once you’ve dedicated years of your life to developing MAME for no financial return, someone might care!
No, unfortunately not.
I think one of the problems is they were usually regional, because laws differed so greatly between regions (in Italy you weren’t allowed to show actual playing cards etc.) Also because many of them were borderline illegal there was a lot of hush hush wink wink going on with them rather than official documentation before stronger legislation came in forcing such, but even then it seems there were few public records.
Also a lot more of them ended up being destroyed due to legislation changes / were only ever loaned to locations, and of course were more tightly controlled in terms of who could access them, to stop unauthorized hacks. (of course this wasn’t always the case, it seems that in Russia hacks were common, and you could even find tools online to hack the popular ones, tools full of trojans to infect your business PCs at the same time…)
We’ve seen many leak out of video gamblers leak out of Italy, Russia and Germany, but even in Italy I’m told that there were orders to destroy them (which I’m told ended up in many legitimate Taito Puzzle Bobble cartridges being destroyed, because there was a gambling game called Puzzle Bobble on the ‘destroy list’) I guess many weren’t destroyed, but shelved, like so many prototypes from back in the day; that seems to have been the Italian attitude towards these things and we’re quite lucky because of it ;-)
The other problem is that in terms of hardware quite a lot of them after a certain point are well secured as well, many of those Italian ones have no program roms on the board, containing only an MCU with the code, and the graphic roms. For the Chinese / Taiwanese ones IGS were mostly doing them after a certain point and likewise they used their more secure chips there first, before they started using them on actual games.
But documentation is scarce, we know of many UK video gambling platforms we’re yet to see even a single dump on.
Non-video stuff can be just as bad, aside the actual classics many have been forgotten and are difficult to source now. Even machines from the 90s might be destined to never have their sound ROMs dumped; the only reason we have as many program roms as we do now is because they were distributed as updates via official BBS sites, so operators tended to have a backup of them, but of course that rarely included sound roms because they didn’t need to change, nor does it tell you what the machines looked like.
When things come from Japan they tend to be a complete surprise too, nobody had heard of this Dream Ball before it showed up, was purchased and dumped, and the story is exactly the same with redemption games even from major manufacturers like Capcom. I featured “Ganbare! Marine Kun” in the 2012 writeup, until it showed up nobody had even mentioned it online.
We’re starting to see a bit more interest these days, people going through old videos and magazined of amusement arcades in Japan, finding screenshots and the like. There are apparently at least 2 other games in the same series as ‘Kuru Kuru Pyon Pyon’ for example. I can imagine prices will start to go up as a result tho, the Capcom game was *very* expensive because it was Capcom, and while other redemption games tend to be cheap right now I’m not sure how long that will last.
There are practically no dumps of the modern pachislot machines either (and maybe a few unsorted dumps of older ones)
In Korea SemiCom went full-time producing gambling games after they finished with other games in around 2002-2003, we have only a single one of those dumped, so again I guess there is a bigger story there, but we’re still missing a fair number of regular Korean games too, I fear many are lost.
For the US we’ve also likely only got marginal coverage.
For the most part tho these things come as a complete surprise. You have your staple games everybody knows, your fruit machine and video gambler equivalents of the classics through each age (and yes, many are as highly regarded as the likes of Pacman if you talk to the right people) but even with major titles from major manufacturers details can be sketchy, especially when it came to sequels that ended up not being as popular as the originals. There were then bootlegs which ripped all the graphics out of the games, and rebuilt them from scratch, claiming to be sequels! (we saw this with the NeoGeo and things like Kof 10th Anniversary too mind you)
So in many senses MAME helping make sense of these things is essential. Data East weren’t an insignificant player in the arcade market, so finding they also made this stripped down board for a gambling game is interesting. The MAME story has always been about a LOT more than ‘playing the games’ It’s about understanding the past.
and I guess the above posts are partially my fault for saying that MAME isn’t the emu equivalent of a racist in the first place, but geez, people should at least get their trolls straight.
The preservation of electronic games is a fascinating topic in itself. Having worked on a large number of early century feature phone games, I expect these to be completely lost for future generations. Sure, some weren’t classics but there were some true gems.
The same holds for many of the online and social games with large server components that will be lost when those titles are sunset. Yes, they are disposable now. But wasn’t all gaming once?
@reassembler: you’re right. computers are going Clouds so practically your PC will act as a TTY and the remote server will run the spreadsheet and just send you the video screenshots keeping also your files away form you.
It’s true that famous facebook games like farmville will end up in nothing and ppl will only be left with screenshot of beautiful crops and cows…. that’s sad.
Also some cinemas are currently projecting streaming contents, no more 35mm film.
So to keep the big corp. copyrights and interests safe, they are taking software far away form the user.
Just look what Aplle can do with their products: you want to do something with my iGizmo? then you MUST use my software!
There are also less and less “real” programmers. When i asked my IT collegues if they could develop Android apps i was told “That technology is too new for us !” Uggghh!
I remember that 15 years ago i was learning C with a hacked PSX and a comm-link card… :(
Zabanitu – The Cinema streaming is used for previews, as any UK Sky Subsciber with ‘free’ tickets will tell you – hell, those guys cannot even get the aspect ratio right!! (GRRR!)
It looks like the major players want everything in the cloud, the paranoid me doesn’t trust it, whether this is down to infrastructure (internet going down) or unwanted eyes (Billy Gates looking at me porn!).
Regarding MESS/UME, I did try them out this week, and I want to use them, but I will wait a bit longer when certain consoles etc are working perfectly – like the C64 LOL.
Yeah, I think a lot of the mobile stuff could be doomed, likewise anything of recent generations with these appstores and the like… Saving those is even worse than trying to save the Internet, and even sites doing that can’t capture all the online flash games etc.
Some things will be lost, it’s inevitable, modern games (and operating systems) have hundreds of patches, online update software denying you actual access to the update files etc. You’re seeing more and more games with ‘always online’ requirements too, and as you say there is nothing you can do for an MMORPG unless the actual server code is released, and even then the games undergo multiple revisions and are often quite different today than how they launched.
The key for the people working towards preservation is to ensure that anything you can do something about, you do something about it. MAME / MESS definitely have a role to play in that by documenting and emulating known hardware and software. That’s at least the motivation behind a lot of the work I do, updates for things like Cool Riders might be more glamorous and exciting than this one about Dream Ball, but somebody needs to do it and every little bit documented and done is documented and done hopefully for the rest of time because once something is known about and full documented it’s much less likely to be lost or forgotten, especially if done in a recognized project like MAME rather than one likely to be lost itself.
That’s another reason I’ve been promoting MESS via UME and wanting to get it properly integrated into MAME by default, the work done there is every bit as important ESPECIALLY for the obscure systems nobody really cares about. It represents the future of our project in general, but is IMHO too late to the table to make a huge splash on it’s own. Sure there are countless better SNES/C64 emulators than MESS, and you’ll probably find people making new ones even if the old ones stop working on modern platforms, but how many others are going to bother to emulate old systems like the Casio PV1000, mainframes, terminals etc. and ensure a level of accessibility remains for them generations from now? For a number of the older Japanese systems the existing emulators are looking dated, and there is no real gateway to them aside from MESS unless you’re wanting to run an all Japanese emulator that might require an actual Japanese OS to run properly etc. For the more popular ones it’s a nice bonus if they run, but there are often plenty of other options, at least right now :-)
Hopefully MESS will emulate many of the earlier mobile platforms at some point, and if we’re lucky maybe some of the games will survive too, it’s more likely than Internet-only stuff, but at the same time I’m not sure there has really been any great movement in that direction.
I want to get across the message that as a team we do care about everything, from the mundane, obscure, and best forgotten to the blockbusters of the day, the platforms that barely made it out the factory to the ones found in every home and arcade. People can pick and choose what they use our emulator for, and hopefully others can improve it along the way, but I want MAME to represent a place where people know if there is something to emulate we’re providing a platform to emulate it in. That is me doing what I can to help and trying to encourage others to do the same (in addition to actually emulating the stuff of course)
I guess it saddens me that comments like the one made here show that a minority of people would begrudge MAME having consoles etc. emulated alongside the arcades, although it really does seem to be a minority at this point, there wasn’t a single negative comment along those lines on either of the last two ‘combined progress’ articles I did (the u1 writeup and the 2012 writeup) That said, maybe it’s only the gamblers that attract this kind of ire, simply because you can’t really ‘play’ them with any meaningful purpose on a PC, they just suck away your virtual credits and give you some spinny reels in return but those were covered in the combined article too.
I just wanted to say that I really enjoy reading these updates. Especially this one. Being more in the “if I can’t or won’t play it, I don’t pay attention to it” camp, I’d never given any thought to the gambling machines that MAME has emulated. Yet my wife lived across the street from what they called a “Bingo”, which was shut down a few years ago and all the machines apparently destroyed. But I’d never given a second thought to that until just now. MAME is really a fascinating project. May it live forever. :)
I don’t necessarily agree with what the peanut gallery says, but I can certainly understand their frustration.
Mame’s support network (FEs, rom verifiers, helper apps ect) all revolve around the listxml output.
As-is, it’s tedious to filter away all the stuff you want (in most people’s cases arcade games) with the stuff you don’t.
Now I remind people that there is a “mechanical” flag in the xml, that you can use to filter off all the pinball and em stuff, but that isn’t turn-key enough. Romcenter and clrmamepro both generate their dats from a full xml.
For me it’s not a big deal, but I know what I’m doing most of the time, and many users don’t. ;)
Long story short I think a lot of these complaints would magically go away if you could print a listxml based upon game type and if the non-arcade games were labeled a little more blatantly.
But looking at this particular title I don’t see how anyone could argue that it’s not a arcade game. Sure it pays out, but it looks like a typical 90’s data east game to me… the fact that it kind of sucks has little to do with it. ;)
The fact they basically reused a whole bunch of graphics.. ;-)
Sure this stuff is all in the -listxml output, although the softlists aren’t (I think they should be, and -listxml should be a full integrity dump of *everything* the emulator knows, even if it is huge.)
A frontend should only have to call -listxml again if you update your MAME, it therefore doesn’t matter if parsing it takes a while, and while I think MAME should offer some filters for the internal menu / best guess matching I don’t think it should be offering a filtered XML file. The whole point of -listxml is that it’s a braindump of the human decipherable non-code information contained within MAME.
Now you could argue there are a lot of bad frontends around, with MAMEUI (if you class it as a frontend) being one of the worst offenders, but that’s another issue altogether.
@ reassembler: While there doesn’t seem to be a list of ‘unMAMEd’ gambling games (as in, gamblers which are dumped and/or emulated in other emulators but not in MAME), there is actually a list of undumped gambling games right under our noses at EMULAB. If you go to the main site you’ll find a link to the Undumped Wiki, which is split up between arcade and gambling games, although I believe a few gamblers are still in the arcade list (e.g. games that don’t resemble poker/slot games, and hybrid “flick the switch” arcade/gambler type games, for example the Cal Omega list – are these gambling games or ‘amusement-only’ gambling-themed games?).
HowardC made the point already but lemme throw in my remaining 2 bits for what they are worth.
What I miss from a usability pespective (and what MameUI provided at least up to some point… we don’t talk about quality here) was kind of a classification of the games. For example you have sports games, brawling, vertical shooters, horizontal shooters and the like. Given, this is more detailed (although not necessarily more precise) than a “pure” mechanical / non-mechanical clustering but I think something along those lines would benefit the project a lot.
I guess there will be a lot of arguing in which category some games belong, even if you keep things VERY simple. But I would love to filter for certain games (or maybe just exclude the fruit machines that are not playable, whatever) under QMC2 or whatever frontend I want to use. Simply to reduce the big list of games (even excluding clones) to something I feel I can handle better. And yes, it should throw some trolls off track, too ;-).
Ideally the emulator should know about this. Whether it belongs in there is maybe a point to be discussed (MAME is sometimes arcane when it comes to these kind of things) but I think something along those lines would really be helpful and also highly appreciated.
Thanks for the link Heihaci – still a substantial number of these left to dump and implement :)
One idea could be to cover the implementation of a new simple gambler in a “writing a mame driver tutorial”.
It might be a nice way to get new blood into the project, as theoretically some of these games would be more straightforward than the remaining 3D arcade titles and a good entry point into the project.
Can I ask someone remember this game?
A slot machine game is used same sound, fonts and reused graphics from New lucky 8 lines but 3 lines(3 lines*5 row) not 8. Double up game is same but, randomly shows a girl from 3 that have. (One is purple dressed, another shows her pikini top only 2 wins, I forgot third…)
The reason of I remember this is… For ten years old korean kid conquering them was almost impossible. Maybe they are much more lily-white than cowboy girl.
Fast Eddie:
You can get .ini files which most FEs support that allow you to group games by genre and type exactly how you describe. I believe the latest downloads are here:
http://www.progettoemma.net/?catlist
In addition to what Arbee has said, with QMC2 and GameEX plus many other Front Ends allow selecting of games and adding them to Favorites category, which allows the individual to have a fully controlled customized game listing that they can easily create.
Yeah, I think what you (Haze) and a lot of the developers aren’t getting is that unless listxml provides a clear distinction as to what kind of game it is it’s up to the FE developer and more importantly the rom verifier developer to manually make a list to make these distinctions.
There are over 8000 games in mame and the list is always growing and the names are always changing.
I took a hand at maintaining a version of catver years ago and it was a nightmare. And that was before mame started adding all of this stuff!
On the mame developer end it’s quite easy to categorize the game, after all you are hooking it up and making the listxml entry…. what’s two extra seconds to list if it’s a pinball, a em, a gambling game, an arcade game, or “misc”. On the other hand, for everyone else it’s quite difficult. You have to actually boot up the game and play, which means you need the rom, ect….ect…. And of course when a new/better dump is found that rom name might change and you have to be mindful of that, often going back and tweaking things manually.
And like I said, rom verification is far more important. There are only two rom verifiers/managers out there… both of them make their dat files from listxml…. so yeah, listxml does need to be filterable.
There are many poor quality fes out there, I can certainly agree with that, but when the rom managers can’t even do a good job to filtering stuff due to the vagueness of the listxml format, it’s the format, not the programs.
I still disagree, that’s exactly the work people outside the project should be doing, and frontends etc. using that information.
Genres and the like are too subjective and pushing the work onto Mamedev just gives something else to fluctuate over the years, does Pang count as adult, it has boobies, albeit on a statue, what about zunkyou, I swear some of those dancers are naked, but are they really, are they even human? Sarge, there is some dipswitch combination to show adult content, Puzznic might not have girls outside of Japan but you can see hit F4 and see them in the tiles. Gambling / non-gambling really isn’t much easier, even when MAME didn’t support gambling there were always people claiming a certain game was / wasn’t gambling.
Making mamedev do the work doesn’t make it go away, and it isn’t really our concern. A frontend can likely guess most of it based on things having hopper outputs, the gambling button inputs, or even a percentage dipswitch, all that information is already given.
I know you want an easy way to make them all go away because you don’t like them, and that’s all this boils down to.
I explicitly LIKE having it setup like it is because it makes it much more annoying for people wanting to load up pirate cabs with the latest version of MAME because if you’re offering a commercial product you really do have to filter out everything and anything that might not work as expected, or be appropriate to a certain audience. From a hobby / dev point of view instead you can live with that and it causes no real problems. It’s not some restrictive DRM giving you less, restricting what MAME can do, it’s just us giving you something more capable than you probably need.
This is MAME, not arcade nanny and at the end of the day it is not up to MAME to decide if some things are less important or less worthy than other things, which is what such features would be used for.
I never thought of it that way, but it makes sense from all angles. I use a good frontend in my cab which can filter out various things such as clones/majong/mechanical whilst adding exclusions such as ‘pacman’.
It doesn’t get rid of all of them, but makes a tider ‘list’ with the odd one or two that slip the net – there is an easy option with those that slip the net – don’t play ’em!!
I too like MAME/MESS/UME the way it is as it is a central reposiotry of all things electronic in means of entertainment/consoles/computers, as been said many times before comuters in the early years where made of what was lying around so things got recycled.
Ultimatly its the user that has to do the donkey work on getting what they want out of MAME and for me this is half the fun of the setup, because I can get MAME (and hopefully MESS/UME too) to do exaclty what I want it to do without boundries put onto it, and if that stops commerical pirate cabs then good, a small price to pay as someone who has bult his own cab as a hobby
yep, and 95% of the fruit machines are contained in just a handful of drivers anyway, afaik MAME exposes that information so it’s easy enough for a frontend to filter and add exceptions if needs be.
MAME isn’t a great deal of legwork compared to other emus, sure people can moan about romsets needing to be right and the like but that is practically all you do need to worry about. (and having a good enough PC to run the stuff)
The MESS/UME stuff can be a little more work because you often have to know how to use the systems, but even then once you do you can reapply a lot of knowledge across different ones.
Hold up there chief.
NOBODY suggested category filtering be included in mame.
I said specifically “arcade, pinball, em, gambling and misc” These are games with physically different machines. There is no debate really…. anything with payout is gambling, pinball is… well pinball, anything with unemulatable e.m. bits is em, and anything that doesn’t fall into any categories (like photo booth software) is misc.
You keep mentioning front ends, and as I said this is NOT the main concern. Rom managers, you know the things we use to make sure we are using the right sets? They don’t have filters either. The best they can do now is filter off the em stuff because, again, this is the only data listxml gives us.
FEs should use WHAT information? That’s what I’m getting at… this mythical information you are talking about doesn’t exist. It needs to be added. You said in this very post that a list of gambling games, for example, is hard to come by. On the other hand if you are hooking up a driver and it happens to be a gambling game, it is quite easy to put a little note in the xml. Also it’s in mame, so if rom names are changed, things are moved around ect, it will always be correct. And using your very own argument from another one of your posts, once something is in MAME it is preserved.. in other “un established” projects it might not be.
It seems strange to me that someone involved with a documentation project is afraid of documentation.
If this is the attitude that you have, making mame so complex to setup that only people intimately familiar with the emulator can actually use it, I can certainly understand why your UME concept has been rejected thus far.
And again, I don’t have a problem with doing any of this extra work on a personal level, but mame shouldn’t alienate itself from people just for the sake of avoiding piracy. It has absolutely no bearing on piracy either. There are still those burners out there that will gladly burn a set of roms for anyone willing to pay for the “service” and they’ll pick all the gambling games out…. and as you said, FEs can filter it. So your excuses are wearing kind of thin.
I mean mame already has a “ismechanical” flag. You are seriously telling me that a similar “ispinball” or “isgambling” is going to turn mame on it’s head? And likewise you can already do a “-lx romname” call and get the xml just for a single game… you think that “-lx ispinball=1” is going to somehow alter the fabric of the project?
Where are you getting this “less important, less worthy…ect” nonsense? I’m talking about organizing the damn thing. Libraries don’t just throw all the books on the shelves without filing or anything, they have a card catalogue, where you can look up books by genre,title,ect. Also it’s there, in the library, provided by the library. They don’t expect the patrons to make their own card catalogue touting that it isn’t the libraries responsibility.
Also you keep talking about me and what I want. I think you are a bit confused, unlike yourself I’m looking out for the good of the project, it has no bearing on my personal feelings and in this case the good of the project is to keep it useable so it will continue to attract users and developers in the future. We aren’t getting any younger.
Sorry for being harsh, but I think you need to wake up a little and realize just how ridiculous your stance is on this.
the only difference that matters to MAME/MESS/UME is if there is some mechanical component which is necessary to functionality, or if it’s all CPU and logic components.
to separate these we already have the GAME_IS_MECHANICAL flag and you can find it in xml as well.
if a game has no mechanical components, then what the CPUs and ICs are used for is not a concern for MAME/MESS/UME.
we don’t care whether they are used for games or to give a payout, to drive a clock (4004clk), a satellite receiver (dm500 or pv9234), a synthesizer, a printer, a calculator or a chess machine.
we just emulate the components and their interaction
hence, to filter between those uses it’s a job for external inis.
is_gambling etc. would be game categorization, you can turn a (card) payout on for the CPS2 games in some regions (typically hispanic) and it is in fact enabled by default for some games.
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/gambling.png
is Marvel Vs. Capcom therefore a gambling game?
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/gambling2.png
Vampire Savior?
There was a bug on Mametesters because some games even have this enabled by default and warn that there are none left
http://mametesters.org/view.php?id=3854
for similar reasons there are options to show the coin counters present on many CPS2 sets, again enabled by default with some
http://mametesters.org/view.php?id=1915
Maybe Medal / Card / Ticket payout games don’t count? well, that’s confusing too because many of the ones you probably consider gambling do exactly that, to get around gambling laws..
It has to be non-skill based? to what level? individual games on each gambling game have an element of skill, but that’s determined by past players, they work to maintain a set output level so if a previous player utterly sucked at the skill based bits it’s far more likely to give you something, furthermore most of them have bugs and exploits (hence so many revisions) so if you’re aware of those you can force them to pay out by ‘playing’ the game and ‘beating’ it. Does that kind of dynamic difficulty (depending on previous players) make something gambling? Well Star Wars did the same…. If the previous players have been doing too well then you’ll get annihilated on the first wave unless you’re damn good.
Does the payout have to be mandatory? That’s one way you could discount the Hispanic CPS2 sets, but then most of the BFMSC4 stuff is currently running in a ‘door open’ mode (basically free play) which means it doesn’t even attempt to use the hopper, you’re gambling nothing and there are arcades running some of the classic gamblers in this mode simply so that they’re still allowed to operate them and people can *enjoy* the gameplay they offer and hopefully put some money in the others while they’re there.
I’m told some of the Asian companies are trailing similar mechanics in some of their new games, where you buy time on a memory card (and physically can’t 1CC the game / level up properly without one, so you need to buy a card from the arcade, so you could easily argue they’re not 100% skill based) Said games can also use gambling mechanics within the game to actually win extras based on how much money has been pumped into the machine. (and likewise buy extra weapons / more powerful characters from the arcade, much like DLC type BS) Despite coming across as regular beat ’em ups etc. the games will completely fuck you over if they’re not meeting their earnings target in order to get you to spend more, which sounds an awful lot like a gambling game to me, even if some similar buy-in then fuck you over ideas were almost universally rejected with Double Dragon 3.
That’s the thing with MAME, and why I think the existing arcade/home split is silly anyway (because the hardware is basically the same) The nature of the software shouldn’t bother us at all, we should just emulate whatever we can and let other people decide how to filter it all.
As somebody emulating these things I simply don’t care, the process for this one was exactly the same had the board been running a long-lost prototype prequel to Tumble Pop or something, I map a common CPU, I map the common Data East video chips, the EEPROM, sound chip, and any inputs / outputs.
The process for non-video ones isn’t that much different either except without a screen it can be more difficult to know if you’re doing things right, because the on-screen it’s often a good indication that things are running properly.
What I do actively encourage is people to do review sites and the like, cover the interesting stuff in MAME, allow people to form an opinion. If you load up a pinball / slot machine and you’re not interested, you can quickly hit esc and it soon becomes apparent from the naming and drivers involved which ones are likely to be such, all the fruit machines for example have explicit manufacturer / platform information in the description string because we know that many of them were released across multiple platforms, and manufacturers reused the same game titles for different games, sometimes even the same manufacturer for different markets.
At the end of the day personal opinions, pictures, text about a game, and experiences are going to tell you a lot more than a simple filtered list anyway and that’s why I try to cover things like that, give personal experiences, show what can be done with the new changes / new additions. Even if you DO filter out the gambling games you’re still left with a lot of non-gambling games, and many of those simply aren’t very good either, or have astronomically high system requirements.
I can understand why maybe people wouldn’t actively WANT to play this Dream Ball game if they prefer Street Fighter type games, at the same time they might not want to play a late 70s / early 80s game with no AI (are those really a games, you NEED a 2nd player and without one they’re equally as pointless as any gambling game)
I can also understand why people wouldn’t want to run a Pinball game, because you really *can’t* play them on a PC as things stand, but that’s what the is_mechanical flag is really for (it’s just been misused for several fruit machines right now) is_mechanical is also a more generic flag, and can apply to other games with significant mechanical requirements like Ice Cold Beer which you’d certainly not call Pinball but does use balls, and holes, and likewise would need a simulation of the entire cabinet to play. Again tho, any GOOD frontend can already filter that out.
Ironically the UME idea some people seem to be most opposed to is actually probably the most broadly appealing. Is somebody going to be absolutely adverse to playing to playing Harmful Park on the PSX if they love the likes of R-Type and Parodius, just because it doesn’t accept coins? If they are then I suggest they have bigger issues.
Like I said, to me it’s just emulation, I emulate the hardware, we list known software using it, and the compatibility level with such software to benchmark the quality of our emulation, the emulator evolves, it gets better (usually). You get the product of that process which is a very powerful tool known as MAME (and MESS)
I think what HowardC is getting at is, it is a real pain to keep up with the changes? For example if game XYZ changes its name to ‘ABC – super fighters’ there is no way to keep that tied together? Perhaps there needs to be a ‘uniqueid’ involved in the mix? Maybe added to the emu order?
Also it sounds like there are some ‘easy’ tags that are fairly undisputed? Leave the others to the front ends?
The setnames don’t fluctuate that often anyway, the last ‘big rename’ of any sort was when clones were allowed to stop being 8 letters, and even then not many parent setnames changed and it’s rather likely that clones and parents will be the same genre.
For MESS the setnames in the software lists are a little more volatile, mainly because the first pass list creation is automatic and names sometimes less than perfect.
Descriptions can change without the setnames changing, and I very much doubt there are any frontends where the database is tied to the long-names / descriptions anyway.
My point is simply that -listxml doesn’t *need* filtering. Right now a frontend can use the information already output to filter out things tagged as NOT_WORKING (zap most of the fruit machines because I haven’t finished the drivers well enough to promote them, even if many sets in some drivers can be ‘played) likewise anything tagged as MECHANICAL (zap, all the pinballs) At that point you’re left with games and systems we consider ‘working’ and there is no reason for the emulator to tier things any further in terms of genre.
Typically if you’re using a frontend you’re going to want a lot of extras too for screenshots and the like, and if you can maintain a copy of those when things get renamed you can certainly maintain a list of genres for your frontend.
Meanwhile the integrity of the database output is intact, and not being adversely affected and/or filtered by options you may have set in an ini file and forgotten about.
Note, I have suggested to the team, multiple times, that we have a ‘Complete’ version of the MAME project (basically what UME is today) and Classic versions of MAME / MESS in the mold / design of the project as it was many years ago (so no screenless systems, ‘gambling’ games, mechanicals, or home systems in the ‘Classic’ MAME) but the idea was universally rejected. The only reason I suggested that at all was because it both represents what we’re doing now as a whole (the complete project) and the traditional representation (the ‘classic’ builds) because that seems, to me, like the most logical way forward for all parties. Nobody agreed.
Can you clarify what you mean by “universally rejected” and “nobody agreed?”
If I am understanding your suggestion it is as
MAME
[bullet] arcade games, gambling games, fruit machines, pinball, mahjang, video poker and displayless
[bullet] console games, pc systems, other appliances from MESS
MAME Classic version
[bullet] arcade video games
[bullet] no gambling games
[bullet] no fruit machines
[bullet] no pinball
[bullet] no mahjang
[bullet] no video poker
[bullet] no displayless games
[bullet] no console games, or pc systems
MESS Classic version
[bullet] console games and pc systems
[bullet] no arcade games
am I correct?
that would be perfect! who is this “universally rejected” from? can you show there reasons or link me a page with them?
Almost, but not quite. I’m not suggesting we remove the Mahjong titles from such a ‘classic’ version, they were always part of the original MAME vision and Nicola specifically defended their inclusion several times. The design spec for the ‘classic’ version is basically Nicola’s original policy, while the ‘complete’ one is the UME policy.
Other than that, yeah, something similar to what you’ve put there.
Reasons, you might be able to dig some up on prior posts here, generally speaking most of Mamedev didn’t seem to think it was a great idea, or at least the ones who make the decisions, and without approval from them the idea was never going to fly. Most of the reasons against it are flimsy to say the least, and usually just boiled down to ‘well that’s only your opinion’ so it probably just comes down to it being my idea again. Of course saying that just got me a reply of ‘it would be a terrible idea even if it wasn’t your idea’ rather than real reasons, at which point we just endlessly loop over how “MAME is an arcade emulator” even when the natural course of progress is really showing us otherwise. It’s nothing I can argue any further.
PS please don’t post through a proxy, I have to manually approve the posts and you risk them getting lost in the spam folder with all the junk I don’t want on here, you’re lucky I noticed this one.
Oh, and whatever kind of BBCode you’re trying to use doesn’t work in the comments here, I’ll manually clean up your post later.
Yeah, well, mamedev wasn’t keen on the idea of UME either. But there it is. Of course, you still can’t get it from http: / / www . mamedev.org/.
The people have spoken, they want a classic mame. Except maybe without the mahjong’s. lol
I’m not saying that you, Haze, should provide it though. Compiling UME is enough work already for sure. But, is there a way to adjust mame so end-users could compile their own classic version by specifying a switch/flag?
I don’t really see the point in providing further reduced builds if it isn’t official. If people *really* want something stripped of the screenless gambling games + pinball they can take their chances with MameFX. I really want to stick with what’s in baseline with the builds I offer, and providing such a build myself would mean manual changes each time. Massive levels of fragmentation on a single platform aren’t really a good thing IMHO, and creating yet another unofficial build would only serve to create more of that.
I think as an official arrangement what I’ve proposed makes a lot of sense, full project is where the work is at, and the secondary ‘classic’ project where you might not necessarily see any major updates because a lot of the shift is moving towards home systems, and the undesirable gambling games (because there is a lot of work to do there)
I still don’t really understand the opposition to that (it’s the best of both worlds for everybody concerned if you ask me) but until more people come around to the idea it’s really not going anywhere.
I want the full thing… There is little point in reduced builds. Flagging maybe I can see. I personally never use it. As the GUIs always let you sort out the few games you use or goto the specific game you want.
I remember what the big deal about mahjong was the same reason as neogeo games. It was the size (remember most of us were dialup at the time). But everyone was making up whatever excuse they could to get them out.
Is the gambling games issue really on the fact of ‘how many’ rather than where they are found in asument arcades around the world? Was this the same with the Mahjong ones, i.e. too many?
Looks to me then that people want ROM sets that are smaller, here is a bizzare option, just dl/play the games you want, get the FE to just show ‘existing ROMs’ thus you safe on download bandwidth, disk-space and time.
Or am I being stupid for using common sense.
MAME seems to be getting people up in arms because its ADDING features, people are up in arms because Microsoft are TAKING AWAY features, it is a lot easier to get a decent FE to remove the games you don’t want to see than to convert an M$ network into a Linux one, trust me on this, I am doing this right now so to future proof my home network.
My FE is capable of running Flash games, and netflix – should I be ranting about netflix on my cab? No! Because I can turn the app off and never see it again.
Simples.
If you count the number of sets the fruit machines do actually dwarf the regular video games, however the majority are clones, so if you look at just the parents (which again any decent frontend should allow) it’s not exactly the 15,000 ‘useless’ games thing people like to say.
There are a lot of clones of them because each revision has multiple versions for different hardware types and markets etc. and you’re dealing with a large slice of history being added in a short space of time.
In terms of space they take up, if you’re looking at the non-video ones they might be large in number, but they don’t actually take up THAT much space, especially not if you use 7z compression. They’re mostly code, and on the later games samples. A fair bit of the bulk came from the video gambling games that were added at the same time (and previously not known about) Things like the gamtor sets are recentish touchscreen systems with large roms, there’s actually 2 gig worth of sets in one of them but those would have been added (just like this) even under previous policy. I doubt it’s about space anyway, even people who obsessively collect a full MAME set aren’t using that much space, and the 7z support ultimately saves more space than the gambling games took up in the first place!
Even if you are that type of person, the entire 0.148 set stands at 28GB for the ROMs. The CHDs dwarf that at 248GB but there aren’t really any gambling games in there. For CD based system. Both dwarf the MESS system roms at 413MB, there are individual sets in MAME bigger than that! (and if you ignore softlists thats exactly how much bigger in terms of ROM data the baseline UME set is for the obsessive types to keep Clrmame happy)
If you look at the MESS Software List ROMs you’re talking 42GB, and for the CDs it’s currently stand in the TB figures (unsurprising because by that point it was already a bigger market and companies became obsessed with doing everything from their company logo to half the game as grainy FMV once they got their hands on CDs) so yes those are significant but by default they don’t get output by -listxml because they’re not internal to MAME / MESS, they’re already stored in XML files.
I can’t really advocate people downloading all the roms anyway, and those stats are just for the curious more than anything else, however even then the best price/size ratio for a HDD at the moment is around the 3TB mark, so I can’t believe it’s people moaning about *space* when it comes to the gambling games and MAME. For the current base MAME ROMset you could fit the lot on a 32GB MicroSD card, something so small it could pass through your entire digestive system and come out the other end. The people who reminisce about how every MAME ROM used to fit on a floppy, or a single CD, or a single DVD really ought to be considering things like that as a direct comparison using todays portable media. Like I said, the CHDs are bigger, but there are (practically) no gambling games in there anyway. MAME isn’t ‘bloated’ as such, times are just moving on and the project is moving on and growing with them, and the complete supported set list likewise. MAME is not really much further out of line with the technology curve when it comes to requirements as it was years ago (they’ve always been slightly high) although we’ve seen less actual advances these days so some things have felt out of reach for a lot longer.
It’s a lot of fuss about nothing really and I think ends up coming down to people not wanting to drop the utterly useless MAMEUI / MAME32 frontend in favor of something faster with better filtering capabilities.
If you launch a version of MAME just to run Pacman it functions exactly the same today as it did before, if all you have is the Pacman roms from your Pacman PCB you’re really not going to be bothered, it still works as it always did.
I understand people moaning about bloat when it causes direct issues with baseline features, or when software gets loaded with spyware toolbar installers and over the top DRM schemes doing online checks for every single mouse click and lagging the program to hell but we’re doing none of that. Nor are we doing the other dumb thing of crippling core functionality.
MAME and MESS are as powerful, if not more powerful than they’ve ever been, all we’re doing is simply offering extra features and functionality, giving a broader appeal to the project, and showing that it’s a place people from all different backgrounds and with all different interests can come together and emulate anything they feel like emulating, building on what we already have while feeding back their actual emulation progress and any other improvements from their work directly into our codebase. The only cost is a slightly bigger initial download.
I’ll acknowledge, it causes ‘slow start’ issues etc. for MAMEUI, but that’s because MAMEUI is garbage, the code has been broken and rotting for years, and a properly coded frontend where data only needs to be imported when you change the MAME version isn’t going to have any issues at all. MAMEUI isn’t a MAME problem, it’s a MAMEUI problem and we shouldn’t be holding back the main project on behalf of a buggy ill-maintained derivative build. It is also one of the arguments I’ve seen used against UME, because MAMEUI doesn’t fully support all the MESS bits needed so some systems wouldn’t be usable via it, but I find that a weak argument because it should help move people on to better.
Like I said, I think that’s the root of many of the issues we have today in terms of user friction when it comes to the ‘size’ of MAME. If you look at a frontend like QMC2 instead it’s already prepared for the future, it supports all the advanced features of MESS we might one day want to apply to the arcade games too.
I imagine there is further friction caused by the gambling games because people think emulating gambling games is another excuse not to do what they really want, like Raiden 2, or work miracles to make certain systems fast. In that sense they become a scapegoat, a target of hate, much as they did with people who used to frequent the classic arcades with the games they loved only to see them almost entirely replaced with these kind of machines. The truth is that rising costs, and significant improvements to the technology available at home meant the arcades were no longer viable, they lost their cool and couldn’t make money out of cheap to play games which were far snazzier than the ones you saw at home, the arcades had been dethroned by home systems and arcade operators needed new options to stay afloat, so gambling games returned, and took over. I guess it’s important to remember that BEFORE the arcade games people love many ‘arcade games’ were redemption features of sorts, entirely mechanical pinball ‘bingo’ machines and other such devices. The actual arcade video games were the imposters; somebody found a cost effective way to get people to play games with a * 0% * payout rate and without running into as many legal issues, by making better games and providing a broader appeal. Eventually this stopped being the case, the games were no longer better than what you could find elsewhere, they were overpriced with no chance of a return, and they no longer had a wide appeal as people were becoming more accustomed to staying at home to play games, so the gambling machines started to dominate again. If anything blame the home systems for stealing the players, it’s all connected.
For MAME the truth is that the remaining challenges are difficult, it amazes me when we make progress on anything these days. The gambling games are not an easy way out either, understanding some of them can be equally challenging, and will require significant work in various areas of MAME. Progress in other areas isn’t being held back because of them, and things aren’t being ignored in favor of the MESS systems either, but as a dev you want to stay active so it makes sense to have other areas where you can still make progress between attempts at the nasty ones otherwise you’re just going to get burnt out and frustrated at not being able to make any progress anywhere. With a common belief that documentation and preservation of our computing history is important that naturally leads to work being done on things like these gambling games and the home systems. MAME isn’t suffering because of that, even if it can seem more idle in areas people care more about.
It is the developers who don’t keep active, and aren’t open minded enough to explore other areas who usually end up dropping out of the project altogether, not being active in the codebase and losing touch with what’s going on. That makes it more difficult for them to get involved later and reduces the chances of them solving the remaining difficult issues to zero. You don’t want that to happen, believe me.
Bingo in the UK only survived the gambling laws because the companies found a loophole, that’s why amusiment arcades on the seafront of the the UK have so many, I guess when it was ‘cheap enough’ and the gambling laws loosened then it was vaible to make the ‘one armed bandits’.
Brighton Pier over the years I have seen go from Arcade dominant to fruits in little time, so I see exactly where you are coming from – it probably is mroe apperent in the UK becuase Fruits/Video Games have always sat side by side – hell even in greasy spoon cafes!
I think the best way to show how silly the ‘I don’t wanna have friuts in my gamez’ is that if a delveloper decided he wanted to create a way to document viynal records. He wants to start off with the 12″ dance mixes. He then releases this to the public, and someone says, ‘lets go one stage further and document the 78’s of the gramaphone’ – a group of users then say, ‘we don’t want them coz we never played ’em, and they weren’t in the record shops where I lived’
Both have equal value, it opens up new possibilites, and when you do a comparison such as records and gramaphones then it shows the argument is pointless!!
On the other hand I could have said to you Haze, ‘I agree’ but where would the fun be in a two word post!
As you said T-Jay, a lil’ bit of common sense helps once in a while…
Haze, I never thought about digestive systems in that way but it made me chuckle :-).
T-J: As long as you don’t try and play your vinyl LPs with the super-hard needles that were used for shellac 78s.
I think fruit machines will be more accepted when more of the sets actually do something. The primary complaint I’ve always heard is that Haze air-dropped a number of sets roughly equal to how many were already in MAME and none of them do anything. (And given his comment upthread about digestion, you have to wonder where those sets have been ;-)
Incidentally, I do have plans for some of the FMs on the more exotic MCUs that I’m familiar with (H8, 377xx). Would be nice if there were a few more examples of working drivers to cheat off of though :)
Honestly, I’ve never been into this fruit machine stuff when I have to pay for it. But fumbling around with some that work would be interesting, though. I think some are working already (from what Haze wrote), I just have to find them in the heap :-).
@T-Jay and Fast Eddie “‘I don’t wanna have friuts in my gamez’ ”
So if a person doesn’t want a whole set of useless roms they are some kind of rom-kiddie or something? Because that’s what you imply when you spell “games” with a z, and you know it. I assure you it is not kiddies who are asking for this option. It is grownups who know exactly what the hell they are doing.
@T-Jay “here is a bizzare option, just dl/play the games you want, get the FE to just show ‘existing ROMs’ thus you safe on download bandwidth, disk-space and time.
Or am I being stupid for using common sense. ”
Please show me a commonsensical way for a downloader to exclude fruit machines from a torrent with a million damned files with cryptic names like 22vp931.7z? If there were a common sense way, we would not be having this discussion. So quit trying to make yourself feel superior by insulting others who make a suggestion that has been made hundreds of times before.
Yes, FE’s can filter games. Big whoop, that has nothing to do with anything. The problem is having to download gigabytes of crap that could just as easily be put into a separate torrent. There is a valid argument that this splits the swarm thus reducing accessibility, but no one here is arguing that are they?
The only way the arguments I’ve heard make sense is if you subscribe to the notion that the project is only for preserving these games for the future, and exclude the fact that people actually enjoy *gasp* PLAYING the things.
So if you want to keep yourself ideologically pure, and keep everything on the up-and-up, then make mame so you can only run the games in debug mode. That ought to get rid of the gamerz and kiddiez. I’d love to see how long your terabyte collection or romz gets seeded then. That’s alright I suppose, since you superior types probably have a nice usenet account anyway.
Give me a break.
Huggy: torrent your games to one folder, and then use CMP to filter the ones you actually want into your MAME folder.
Alternatively, most torrent clients these days let you exclude a list of files.
@Haze “so I can’t believe it’s people moaning about *space* when it comes to the gambling games and MAME.”
Indeed it is not about space. My current download speed is 128kB/s over wifi. And I’m not alone. Not everyone has a seedbox or even 3MB DSL. Because someone is bandwidth challenged doesn’t mean they should be excluded from the community. There are lots of well intentioned, good hearted enthusiasts who simply don’t have high speed internet access.
Arbee, the point is not to download the unwanted roms in the first place, not get them all then filter them.
Of course I could exclude the files from being downloaded, but they aren’t named in a way that makes that easily possible. If they were in folders, with fruits in one, pinballs in another, etc., that would be possible. But the torrents I’ve seen (and I think we all know the ones of which I speak) are not like that. So as it stands it’s a non-trivial matter to do so.
and like I said, the savings coming from .7z are greater than the addition caused by the non-video fruit machines.
most (all?) current torrent clients let you pick and choose the files you get. I’ve even been kind and (for my own sake) prefixed 99% of the fruit machine sets with a common identifier for the platforms (eg m4, m5, sc4, sc5, ep_) which makes it even easier to ignore them in such a situation.
once some more recent titles get dumped with *piles* of flash ROMS you’ll likely see a single game as big as the whole lot of them put together, you already have that with one of the Arcana Heart sets, although that’s because the manufacturer recycled flash roms from Blue Elf MAME bootlegs, so the actual roms also contain about 1gig of MAME ROMs ;-)
Like I said, you can now pick up MicroSD cards with 32GB Capacity for almost nothing, do you realise how many of those you could fit in the space of a PCB without caring about it? ;-) These days ROMs can be so tiny in physical size you might not even notice them while having a capacity so huge it will eat your free space for breakfast.
We’ve been over similar arguments before, when NeoGeo was being done people wanted Mamedev crucified because we insisted on supporting the ENCRYPTED dumps for the later games, where you get roughly 0% compression on 64MB of graphic data per game rather than 70% if they were pre-decrypted. Nobody even remembers that now.
MAME will not be held back by hangers on, much as we’re not going to offer buggy inaccurate drivers so that people with P3 systems can still run them we’re not going to avoid emulating things just because the romsets are big. MAME is forward planning too, the 7z support was done with the very real possibility in mind that we’ll see games with physically more than 2GB of ROM data, at which point .zip wouldn’t work at all!
Well, I’m not suggesting that anyone remove or restrict anything. The whole thing could be solved if the all-in-one rom torrents were organized differently, not at all your problem.
I mean let’s look at some of the sizes
these are the ‘size counts’ for major non-video UK fruit machine platforms, in MB. This covers the 90s right up until fairly recently.
BFM:
SC1 10
SC2 27
SC4 491
SC5 371
Barcrest:
M4 222
M5 363
Maygay
M1 55
EP_ 70
JPM:
J5 7
J6 86
Stuff from the 80s is even smaller, with tiny programs, no graphics, and no sound they compress to practically nothing like the SC1.
Of those, the biggest, SC4 is actually quite usable, most of the games will boot to something even if you have to run them in open door mode. Likewise plenty of (base hardware) M4 stuff can be booted, SC1/2 likewise actually run quite well for many games, just lack the polish + proper setups. EP_ is the H8 based stuff RB mentioned.
The BM Final CHD is 2.27GB, for one game. The above is around 1.7GB for practically everything released across the course of 25 years.
The people doing torrents etc. will tell you the exact same thing, it’s a really, really silly request and appears to be fueled more by hate than logic.
Is pinball bigger / smaller? I can’t tell you, I can’t say I’ve noticed, I guess due to the demands of making the very complex physical machines there are going to be significantly less of them at least.
Maybe there is some confusion because the gamt* sets were added around the same time, and they total 2GB compressed (as 7z), but those are regular video output touchscreen games. Likewise a whole bunch of Naomi dumps, Atomiswave dumps etc. were added totaling around the same size, KOF XI is over 200MB and like I said Arcana Heart Full comes close to 1GB, those are both VS. Fighters. Like I said, I think the gambling games have just become a scapegoat for the uninformed.
Personally, it’s not my business, and I don’t care, I just emulate the stuff, document the stuff and believe that the integrity of the project as one whole thing is important but it people are waging wars of hate against certain things without even getting their facts right, it needs to be addressed.
I assure you, I have no hate toward any rom. No rom ever hurt me! :P:
I’d be surprised if the total of all the pinball games was more than like 300 megs. Most of the 80s games were under 64k, and even the 90s ones with DMD graphics and sampled sound were generally a meg or less each.
If the mass majority of the current userbase want FM, PinMAME, etc. removed from official MAME because of the sheer number of sets and the fact they are marked NOT WORKING, then would it be possible to transfer that to software lists?
If possible, then those who wish to can ignore them and not “fight” with MAME and those that care about those would treat it as any other software list XML which would seperate those out into their own directory.
I used the ‘gamez’ word, because there are people (whatever the age) that want complete rom sets and the words ‘gamez/romz’ are generally used on illigal games/roms site, I am not condoning this though.
This includes all emulators inluding MAME. This is commonly known as ‘the brag factor’. This is not just MAME specific. The ‘problem’ is that MAME can Emulate (at various degrees of success) Multiple Machines and becuase it adds systems on a monthly basis that is why the Romsets get bigger.
The moment you start putting roms into folders and roms with meaningful names, then it becomes less of a documenting project. It is also then possible for MAME to be used as a listing device for people who want a ‘complete rom collection’.
I got into MAME when someone offered me a CD of arcade games and MAME, (back in 2003) interestingly none of the games had been played when I booted it up so every time I played pacman it shown me copyright warning (LOL). Over the years I have spent less time playing the games, and more time looking at MAME history and getting my arcade cabinet ‘just right’.
Of course there will be no fruit machines on it at all, because it wasn’t built for those in mind. More time goes into getting the thing looking right, and researching about MAME, and the games themselves just become ‘a nice side effect’!
Consoles that are not being sold, thier sets will stay the same size, simply becasue emulators such as EPSXE is a ‘one trick pony’.
The same goes with Operating Sysytems, more features get added, bigger the amount of data on the comuter.
I can see the argument for Fruit machines, UME etc because it makes sense, it makes sense for MESS/MAME to work together because it is the same source code. Fruit machines, like Mahjong, poker games, video gambiling games, like it or loath it are part of our gaming history, and should be documented/presevered.
With the stand alone emulators they are there to play the games, if you look in the source of MAME, you get a piece of code and what it does, scroll down right to the botttom (I am doing this from memory so it might be in the wrong order) and it will tell you which game/s it supports. It also tells you what it’s aim is in the whole scheme of things when it comes down to a games PCB.
I don’t play, nor have an interest in Mahjong games, nor do I have an interest in playing poker games, but someone out there does, and someone out there wants to try to emulate them, whether that is to document/play is up to them, legalities aside.
I am not a dev of MAME, nor am I affilated with the project, but I do have a usenet account and a big fat (by crappy UK standards) broadband pipe. Regarding some torrent sites, what I hate is when someone dl’s something (legalities aside) and then torrents it complete in it’s rar form, that’s a headache I know.
On a positive note, this is what I like about what we are able to do here, being able to have a discussion of a piece of software that we all care about on one of the developers website. This is something that the major software companies could learn from.
Software Lists are for removable media, these are not removable media.
“The moment you start putting roms into folders and roms with meaningful names, then it becomes less of a documenting project.”
I don’t think so. To document something means to make it more clear, not less.
“It is also then possible for MAME to be used as a listing device for people who want a ‘complete rom collection’.”
I don’t see how that’s relevant. It’s these collectors who keep the files shared in a robust manner, and one of the ideas of this project is to keep everything alive. Also, from a dev’s perspective, who has what doesn’t matter does it?
If you look on the MAME website, it states under Derivative Works,
‘Do not provide a means of generating a list of games that specifically identifies those games for which the user does not have image files. This only encourages users to seek out sources for illegal ROM, CD, and hard disk images in order to “complete” their collection.’
If you wiki MAME it gives you the naming structure of the ROMS and why they are named as such.
It is simply coming down to the fact that poeple want to have an easier way to download the games they want, that are still in copyright, thus breaking the law.
Emulation itself is not illegal, the downloading the roms to play are, and I suppose the naming structure is one way to steer most users off.
In the end it’s still an not an argument worth having IMHO.
Like I said, documenting genres and game types quickly becomes subjective, MAME / MESS are about technical facts. Wasn’t that long back somebody flipped out completely over a guy on the MW forums using ‘Arcade’ as a genre when describing the games his Windows game maker software produced, but it wasn’t an uncommon term…
A lot of the non-english ‘gambling games’ have those disclaimers on startup to basically say they’re not gambling games because they only pay out tickets or whatever :S You can claim payout = gambling, but it’s actually as clear as mud. MAME already gives you more than enough information to sort things on a technical basis without resorting to trying to add subjective terms.
Providing instructions on how to use obscure systems is a lot more important than telling people what genre something is ;-)
I guess you should expect this from me tho, because I really can’t see the big deal when it comes to differentiating between Arcades and Consoles etc. If it’s got a coin slot it’s probably an arcade, if it has removable media it’s probably a console / computer, if it has both it’s likely a NeoGeo and if it has neither it’s probably some random device, and yes you can determine all that from -listxml too. The rest is just hardware, usually the same hardware running code, often very similar code, sometimes even exactly the same code.
you’re wrong. the naming structure is due to the fact that most development is done through command line so it’s a lot easier to launch software by typing 8-12 chars than entering a fullname
e.g. to test BS-X support for Same Game in SNES driver for MESS ( http://forums.bannister.org/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=86744#Post86744 )
I just had to type “-cart2 samegmcc” and “-cart2 samegmcd”, rather than “-cart2 Same Game – Chara Cassette (Jpn, BSROM)” or “-cart 2 Same Game – Chara Data Shuu (Jpn, BSROM, Not for sale)”
when you have only half an hour to develop and you need to run a title 20-50 times to debug different pieces of emulation, I can ensure you that the time wasted typing a full title *makes* the difference
an previous post was a reply to
> I suppose the naming structure is one way to steer most users off.
and yeah, as eta says, the naming scheme is primarily because dev work is done on the commandline, that’s one thing that makes the software lists so damn useful in MESS, you get a simple, easy to remember / type software name.
if you’ve got a decent frontend most of that is hidden from you (using the other data MAME provides to the frontend via -listxml) If you’re using a rom manager you don’t have to care about that either.
the actual opposite argument to the one being presented here is used too. With the MESS Software Lists you basically do have things split up, and I’ve seen a lot of people say that’s less convenient, easier to forget to check something, easier to miss something etc. compared to MAME where something is either simply either right or wrong and there are no additional lists or variables to concern yourself with.
To eta: I realise where I made my mistake, the ‘zip’ file of a games data is the shortened name, whereas if you look inside the zip those are the ROMS themselves which derive thier name from where they are on the PCB.