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Thread: Why does MAME suck so bad?

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    MacMame is pretty awesome, actually. The only problem I have with it is the aforementioned romset compatibility issues. Because of this I have a couple different versions and I alternate between them depending on what game I want to play.

    I've actually noticed that MAME is getting better. About half of the sounds from Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. were not emulated in prior versions but now are.

    I remember there was a thread here linking to an article about a year ago where people were upset about some of the philosophy driving the MAME developers. Specifically, there was an update of MAME a couple years ago that eliminated the feature to save high scores. The developers justified this stating that this more accurately simulated the "real experience" of using the arcade hardware because all the high scores would reset when you unplugged the machine. It is kind of BS imo, but hell, they're providing me with hours of free entertainment, nostalgia, and enrichment of my knowledge about gaming, so I'm not going to complain too much.

    This thread is starting to remind me of all the harsh criticism I'm reading levelled at the Angry Video Game Nerd, and how the "quality" of his "work" has "deteriorated" over the years.

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    i personally love mame.. playing classic games for hours on end for free = good times for me! I need to build a mame cabinet one of these days

    i just downloaded a Lunar Lander Rom... such a fun game

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    Quote Originally Posted by Graham Mitchell View Post
    I remember there was a thread here linking to an article about a year ago where people were upset about some of the philosophy driving the MAME developers. Specifically, there was an update of MAME a couple years ago that eliminated the feature to save high scores. The developers justified this stating that this more accurately simulated the "real experience" of using the arcade hardware because all the high scores would reset when you unplugged the machine. It is kind of BS imo, but hell, they're providing me with hours of free entertainment, nostalgia, and enrichment of my knowledge about gaming, so I'm not going to complain too much.
    There was another issue with high score saving - when you booted the game and MAME applied the high scores... it could interfere with the actual emulation and corrupt the game's memory, causing bugs that weren't in the original game.

    Besides, a lot of games -do- save their high scores. And if it's that important to someone, well, just save a state before quitting. A lot of game drivers have had support for savestates added lately.
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    I think the hardline stance on accuracy in emulation makes a lot more sense if you look at it from a long-term perspective. These games aren't going to last forever in their physical form. It's a race against time. Until it's perfect, making accuracy the primary focus is the right approach in my opinion. They can make it easier to use later.

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    Alex (Level 15) InsaneDavid's Avatar
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    Try some frontends, find one you like, stick with it - easy as that. GameLauncher is my favorite although it's pretty old.

    You have to remember MAME in its present form isn't there so you can play teh romz. It's meant to archive and document hardware and software that's disappearing or was missing / unknown to begin with. Yes, the trade off is you can use it to play games for free. It can also be used to troubleshoot and repair any arcade boards you may own.

    If you're serious about playing games in MAME you get a MAME version and series of romsets that match and a frontend that you understand and stick with them until it becomes absolutely necessary to update. In my mini MAME cabinet I run MAME v0.60 and before that the Pole Position MAME conversion was running v0.56. Heck, v0.76 is what I run for just playing games since that was the last version I got a hardcopy of the full romset for.

    Quote Originally Posted by Kitsune Sniper View Post
    There was another issue with high score saving - when you booted the game and MAME applied the high scores... it could interfere with the actual emulation and corrupt the game's memory, causing bugs that weren't in the original game.

    Besides, a lot of games -do- save their high scores. And if it's that important to someone, well, just save a state before quitting. A lot of game drivers have had support for savestates added lately.
    Can't you just download and add highscore.dat to your MAME directory to provide that service? High score implementation in MAME has never been that solid so I've always used highscore.dat but it's possible that it doesn't work with the more recent builds.

    http://highscore.mameworld.info/
    Last edited by InsaneDavid; 03-14-2011 at 05:57 PM.

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    Quote Originally Posted by InsaneDavid View Post
    Can't you just download and add highscore.dat to your MAME directory to provide that service? High score implementation in MAME has never been that solid so I've always used highscore.dat but it's possible that it doesn't work with the more recent builds.

    http://highscore.mameworld.info/
    That IS what I was talking about. Support for it was removed in standard MAME because of the reasons I mentioned.

    If the game originally saved high scores, though, you won't have any issues, MAME will save those just fine.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Kitsune Sniper View Post
    That IS what I was talking about. Support for it was removed in standard MAME because of the reasons I mentioned.

    If the game originally saved high scores, though, you won't have any issues, MAME will save those just fine.
    Oh, alright. I've always had problems with the MAME high score stuff and used highscore.dat in its place. Since I don't use the newer builds though I'm out of touch with the current operations.

    A couple years ago at California Extreme, Aaron Giles was showing an interesting trick that would actually show faux screen burn from another game (Pac-Man screen burn over Scramble for instance) for those who demanded arcade authenticity.

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    My ass it works-when it wants to, provided you have the right image..But, if i wanna try NFL Blitz or something, it says its missing the proper chd or image files..Lots of games work for me, but a lot (mainly newer) games dont ever find any images, even if i have the official set.I know i wont get a reply, but what gives??

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    Quote Originally Posted by rkotm View Post
    My ass it works-when it wants to, provided you have the right image..But, if i wanna try NFL Blitz or something, it says its missing the proper chd or image files..Lots of games work for me, but a lot (mainly newer) games dont ever find any images, even if i have the official set.I know i wont get a reply, but what gives??
    Look. Harder. You don't have the right files.

    And I think the game requires a powerful PC anyway.
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    Quote Originally Posted by stalepie View Post
    Half of the games don't work, or have problems, or I have to download a different version of MAME, or an older version, or a different set of ROMs, or multiple copies of what seems to be the same ROM, or I have to configure each game separately, and so forth.
    The solution is to just stop downloading updated versions of mame. Just download it once, get all the games you're interested in playing and then just stop updating.

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    The best advice has already been given; find a version that plays what you want it to, get that ROM set, and stick with it until you need something newer.

    I made the mistake of 'upgrading' my version of MacMAME and it's ROM set, making NeoGeo games unplayable slow and breaking some other games entirely. I was never able to track down my old version again, so that was the end of MAME for me on the G4 mac mini.

    Currently, I'm using a version of MAME that can't play Bad Dudes properly because the button assignments are broken.

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    Quote Originally Posted by stalepie View Post
    Why is it command-line? Command-line is worse. We've had mice since like 1985. Every other emulator has nice, easy-to-use menus, which you can also access during the game rather than trying to remember to hit the Tilde key to change the volume (wtf?!)
    Quote Originally Posted by Enigmus View Post
    To me, the interface is the main problem. The menu layout is hard to use compared to modern emulators
    You guys have never heard of MameUI (Previously known as Mame32)? It's not even a frontend.. it's Mame, but with a gui. Do yourselves a favor and look it up if that's what you're looking for.

    And by the way there's nothing wrong with command line. In many cases it's superior to a GUI (e.g. when working with a directory which contains 10's of thousands of files).. a gui would try and render a display list of every file which of course is absolutely useless.

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    Quote Originally Posted by NE146 View Post
    You guys have never heard of MameUI (Previously known as Mame32)? It's not even a frontend.. it's Mame, but with a gui. Do yourselves a favor and look it up if that's what you're looking for.

    And by the way there's nothing wrong with command line. In many cases it's superior to a GUI (e.g. when working with a directory which contains 10's of thousands of files).. a gui would try and render a display list of every file which of course is absolutely useless.
    Exactly. I'm not sure where are the hate and ignorance is coming from. I seriously think kids these days are too spoiled to figure out how something works. Settings up MAME properly should take you no more than 15-20 minutes and if you aren't comfortable with command-line there are probably about 200 different frontends you could try.

    I've had MAME setup on 2 arcade cabinets and multiple times on many different PCs. I've never once had any major issues. Sure there are compatibility issues with some roms but overall it is an incredible piece of software.
    mdk
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    Last edited by stalepie; 03-15-2011 at 12:20 PM.

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    Last edited by stalepie; 03-15-2011 at 12:20 PM.

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    (deleted - sorry)
    Last edited by stalepie; 03-15-2011 at 12:20 PM.

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    Quote Originally Posted by NE146 View Post
    You guys have never heard of MameUI (Previously known as Mame32)? It's not even a frontend.. it's Mame, but with a gui. Do yourselves a favor and look it up if that's what you're looking for.

    And by the way there's nothing wrong with command line. In many cases it's superior to a GUI (e.g. when working with a directory which contains 10's of thousands of files).. a gui would try and render a display list of every file which of course is absolutely useless.
    Even in the case of directories that have 10,000 rom variations, Mame32/UI has plenty of filtering options that automatically diminish what results are displayed in the graphical interface.

    OP - Command line or GUI version, Mame hardly sucks, it's just that it will always be imperfect by way of how much it does well across thousands of different games that were never designed to work in such an environment.

    For everything it does well, I can completely tolerate any shortcomings, and there are umpteen versions that you can have running on any system simultaneously and pointing to the same rom directory ... so, if one flavor of MAME doesn't suit your fancy, get one or two that does what you need them to and boot them up as needed.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Frankie_Says_Relax View Post
    Even in the case of directories that have 10,000 rom variations, Mame32/UI has plenty of filtering options that automatically diminish what results are displayed in the graphical interface.
    Indeed. However I was talking in general about cmd line vs. gui.. not necessarily with mame and it's display of games

    But yeah say you want to copy a single file from a directory that just happened to have 20,000+ tiny files in it. Windows sometimes chokes on trying to display stuff in there just to have you be able to highlight the thing, and ctrl-c it, or whatever. Or you could simply browse their via cmd line, copy the file and be done in 5 seconds.

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    Quote Originally Posted by NE146 View Post
    Or you could simply browse their via cmd line, copy the file and be done in 5 seconds.
    Except that browsing there takes longer than five seconds.

    A combination of command line + gui would seem to be optimal, such as at the top of Windows Explorer, although for some reason this seems to never be done (don't remember seeing it in Linux Gnome/KDE).

    I'm not *extremely* unhappy with MAME, I just want it to be easier to use for the newcomer. I'll address my concerns to the developers in email.

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    Quote Originally Posted by NE146 View Post
    Indeed. However I was talking in general about cmd line vs. gui.. not necessarily with mame and it's display of games

    But yeah say you want to copy a single file from a directory that just happened to have 20,000+ tiny files in it. Windows sometimes chokes on trying to display stuff in there just to have you be able to highlight the thing, and ctrl-c it, or whatever. Or you could simply browse their via cmd line, copy the file and be done in 5 seconds.
    Ah, I thought you were talking about the GUI Mames choking on displaying 10,000 roms.

    Agreed on windows choking on displaying that many files in its own interface.

    OP - As far as search options all GUI versions of MAME that I know of have file name search boxes, and they'll also "jump to" names in the romlist if you simply start typing letters even if you're not using the search box.
    Last edited by Frankie_Says_Relax; 03-15-2011 at 12:57 PM.
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