Mame is kicking some tail recently (Megatouch!)

[zektor]

Man, I have been out of the whole Mame loop for awhile. I haven't used or updated Mame since v0.115. I moved from Windows to Ubuntu awhile back, and recently decided to re-visit Mame...which is now to 0.128u4 (this is MANY versions ahead of where I ended).

I got SDLMame/KXMame combo running like a pro and am in the process of updating the games. This is when I noticed quite a few "Megatouch" and "Touchmaster" machines are now emulated. I have been wanting these to be emulated for YEARS. Many bar memories of playing "Tri-Towers" and "11-Up" amongst others, and it is just really great to play the actual games right here at home. All I need is a beer and some pretzels to be complete!

The games of course are using a crosshair and mouse to simulate the touchscreen, but what the hey. They are the actual games and I am extremely happy. Has anyone else played these via Mame yet? I have not looked at any changelogs, but they were probably added way before this recent version.

[Lady Jaye]

Thread moved to Arcade Alley (where discussions of MAME go).

[Slash]

I haven't done much with MAME recently, but if you are running a Gnome or GTK2-based desktop under Linux, you might want to check out GMAMEUI here: http://gmameui.sourceforge.net/

It's a fork of gxmame which has long been abandoned. AFAIK all the MAME32 assets work with it. Of course kxmame is a good choice if you are running KDE

[SegaAges]

Whoa, I knew it did marvel vs capcom, but I did not know about the "crack" machines (as I call them). Those were like crack. So addicting.

What other newer games like mega touch and MvC work with MAME now?

[Lerxstnj]

I just tried out Tri Towers, not bad! I will have to check out some more new ones.
Mame 128u5 will fix some problems with 128u4 (which is what I am using).
Battle Rangers / Bloody Wolf and a few others were crashing Mame.

[Icarus Moonsight]

Might have to start looking at touchscreen monitors now.

Sounds like fun either way.

[Jorpho]

Last time I read about MAME, it had become considerably more difficult to use, with games frequently breaking between revisions and the fullset ballooning to gargantuan proportions with huge CHD images. And wasn't there much concern about removing support for hiscore.dat?

Have matters improved recently?

[Captain Wrong]

No. I'm kind of bummed about the highscore.dat thing. The official line is to use save states, but that's ridiculous. You can't blame the MAME team for the size of a full set though. I haven't kept up with the CHDs though because I think I'd be down for 20+ gigs of Bemani games I have no intention of ever playing. However, they finally added some Laserdisc support, but they are insisting on using an uncompressed file resulting in Dragons Lair's CHD being 10 GB! Hardly practical.

Max respect to the MAME coders, but I am a little confused by some of the recent decisions.

[Lerxstnj]

No. I'm kind of bummed about the highscore.dat thing. The official line is to use save states, but that's ridiculous.

Don't be bummed, just use Mameplus! It has high score support as well as a bunch of other cool features.
If you want to record video files of your games (for documenting and sending high score proof to Twin Galaxies) you should use WolfMame.
There is a version of Mame out there for just about everyone.
Version .129 of most of them should be out by early 09.

I'm digging the Megatouch games quite a bit, thanks to the OP for the suggestions. I'm thinking about getting a touch screen monitor some day.

[kingpong]

Hiscore.dat was removed mainly because the devs got tired of people submitting false bug reports caused by the use of hiscore.dat. It was a hack, albeit one that worked fairly well, and something like that didn't belong in a decent piece of software.

The laserdisc images are so large for a few reasons. The first is accuracy. The laserdisc video is ultimately analog, and proper capture of analog video takes a ton of space. The second reason is the desire to maintain the accuracy that was so painstakingly captured, and that's means using non-lossy encoding. The devs had to come up with their own encoding since there wasn't a non-lossy codec that met the licensing requirements to be distributed with MAME. If you so badly want to play a LD game that you probably don't have a legal right to anyway, but you aren't willing to use a few more GB for the video file, go use Daphne and its lossy videos.

IMO, moves like these are actually significant improvements. In a project like this, doing things right is more important than making something work or making it easy. If that means "breaking" something that used to work, go for it. If you're just in it for the free games, you should be thankful that it works as well as it does given the massive internal changes Aaron Giles has been doing to remove the disgusting open source-ness of the code. It is amazing that he has been able to turn all that garbage hack code into a real piece of software without breaking the whole thing.

There's still a long way to go with MAME (think bsnes style accuracy everywhere) to do it right, but I'm curious as to which decisions they've made are perceived as bad ones. I can see some being inconvenient, but I can't think of any you can seriously argue against.

[Jorpho]

The laserdisc video is ultimately analog

Wait, what?

[kingpong]

Long story short, the video data on a laserdisc is a composite video signal, NTSC or PAL depending where you are. On later laserdiscs there may also be digital audio signals, but there's always an analog composite video signal.

[Jorpho]

Gee, I thought it used the same binary system of pits and lands as CDs and DVDs. How else would the data be stored?

EDIT: Ah, there we go. Fascinting.