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Thread: Why does MAME suck so bad?

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    Quote Originally Posted by sheath View Post
    I played the Arcade game first at a grocery store with a 6x9 speaker five inches from my head. I bought the NES version first and then more than a couple of years later got to play it on my Genesis. Not only did the game seem roughly equivalent, it absolutely destroyed everything else available for home consoles at the time.
    We keep mourning the loss of the arcades, but what about the loss of good arcade conversions? I recently played Gyruss for the 2600 for the first time. Maybe not the most accurate for graphics and sound, but the game play is great. I found it amazing that they could get the 2600 to handle all of that action at once. High Speed for the NES is a favorite of mine. Some day I will have my own High Speed pin, but I will probably still play the NES version for its "extra" play modes.
    See my latest arcade repair at the Holodeck 2 Arcade Repair Blog: http://holodeck2arcade.blogspot.com

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    Quote Originally Posted by HappehLemons View Post
    I love when people complain about things they get for FREE.
    and dont have clue on how to make it work rigth!
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    Great Puma (Level 12) NE146's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by sheath View Post
    My biggest problem with MAME is that somehow people get the idea that the way Arcade games look, play, and sound in MAME is "perfect."
    Well the most undeniable instance where that could never be the case are games with physical attributes that just obviously can't be emulated. The most classic example I always give is good old Space Invaders. You can dress it up all you want on your monitor, but you can never get the full experience of the flourescent-lit CARDBOARD background and holographic reflection of the mirror onto the playfield, along with the bass & reverbation of the sound through the cabinet amongst many other tactile things.

    It's basically Mame


    vs... this



    But yeah it is what it is. I still dig mame of course.

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    Quote Originally Posted by NE146 View Post
    Well the most undeniable instance where that could never be the case are games with physical attributes that just obviously can't be emulated. The most classic example I always give is good old Space Invaders. You can dress it up all you want on your monitor, but you can never get the full experience of the flourescent-lit CARDBOARD background and holographic reflection of the mirror onto the playfield, along with the bass & reverbation of the sound through the cabinet amongst many other tactile things.

    It's basically Mame


    vs... this



    But yeah it is what it is. I still dig mame of course.
    That effect is cool and I've never seen this game in person, but why can't an emulator make it look more like the second pic (which I realize is a photograph)? I know it's not as good as seeing it in person, but it's obviously better than the first, and you're still seeing it on a computer screen. This means you could have similar optical effects and color-look when playing it in emulator.

    Even some of the sound qualities (reverb) could be emulated. You could even have a module in MAME that includes surrounding sound effects and acoustics of various arcade rooms, so that you hear a bit of Gradius, Pac-Man and Robotron in the background as well.

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    Strawberry (Level 2) tomaitheous's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by NE146 View Post
    Well the most undeniable instance where that could never be the case are games with physical attributes that just obviously can't be emulated. The most classic example I always give is good old Space Invaders. You can dress it up all you want on your monitor, but you can never get the full experience of the flourescent-lit CARDBOARD background and holographic reflection of the mirror onto the playfield, along with the bass & reverbation of the sound through the cabinet amongst many other tactile things.

    It's basically Mame


    vs... this

    Bullshit. MAME support all sort of resolutions, refresh rates, control inputs, etc. You want that authentic Space Invaders onto a glass plate with a a cardboard cut out behind it, then you build it.

    but why can't an emulator make it look more like the second pic (which I realize is a photograph)? I know it's not as good as seeing it in person, but it's obviously better than the first, and you're still seeing it on a computer screen. This means you could have similar optical effects and color-look when playing it in emulator.
    You understand what optical effect of real depth it, right? I mean what you see with your eyes? How is MAME going to reproduce that effect on a simple monitor? MAME has support for the hardcore gamer who build such 'real' displays. If you're not hardcore enough, don't complain and just deal with it. Simple as that.
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    Cherry (Level 1)
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    Quote Originally Posted by tomaitheous View Post
    You understand what optical effect of real depth it, right? I mean what you see with your eyes? How is MAME going to reproduce that effect on a simple monitor?
    I'm just talking about the way the photograph looks. If you can see that photograph on a computer screen, then you could have the emulated game look like that too.

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    Quote Originally Posted by tomaitheous View Post
    You understand what optical effect of real depth it, right? I mean what you see with your eyes? How is MAME going to reproduce that effect on a simple monitor? MAME has support for the hardcore gamer who build such 'real' displays. If you're not hardcore enough, don't complain and just deal with it. Simple as that.
    I DO recall hearing about a MAME fork that simulated these sorts of displays to a larger extent that MAME does via filters. Stuff like the way the display sorta bends and curves around the edges on older, non-flat monitors?

    This was a long time ago and I don't know if any fork of the emulator is doing that these days.

    Edit: Also, MAME does support using screen overlays, like game instructions, around the video display area. It's not 100% perfect but it works.
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    Also with 3D screens maybe you could get a kind of optical depth effect.

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    Quote Originally Posted by stalepie View Post
    That effect is cool and I've never seen this game in person, but why can't an emulator make it look more like the second pic (which I realize is a photograph)? I know it's not as good as seeing it in person, but it's obviously better than the first, and you're still seeing it on a computer screen. This means you could have similar optical effects and color-look when playing it in emulator.
    Look at the bottom of the picture there.. notice the inverted screen at the bottom? That's the actual monitor in the arcade version which is then reflected up with a mirror to produce the floating holographic effect of the invaders over the physical cardboard background. I mean there's just no way you're going to get something close to that artificially.. although I guess you could go out of your way to try and actually construct something to replicate that in some way but good luck on that.

    I got another simple example as well.. Asteroids. You can try and try to duplicate the vector display on a modern computer system, but the actual "shots" themselves had a physically intense glow that's almost impossible to duplicate today on a modern non-vector display. Mame renders all the graphics in asteroids with the same intensity, and thus the shots come out as small pale pellets.

    Asteroids in Mame (you can barely see the shots)
    Arcade Asteroids (shots glow out of the screen. i.e. not a redered glow.. but an actual physically bright glow from the vector beam)

    Yes you can try and alter the game in mame to make the shots brighter in relation to the other parts of the game.. but think about it, what have you seen on your monitor at any time that actually physically is so bright it glows out your monitor like an LED light coming out? (e.g. putting your eye up close to it it's a bright light). Nothing really.. monitors these days are made so everything on screen is the same.

    But anyway.. this isn't a knock on mame at all. It's just the obvious & inherent limitations of emulation itself. Arcade games (especially early ones) were dedicated machines and many had a lot of unique built in features.

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    Quote Originally Posted by tomaitheous View Post
    Bullshit. MAME support all sort of resolutions, refresh rates, control inputs, etc. You want that authentic Space Invaders onto a glass plate with a a cardboard cut out behind it, then you build it.
    I think the difference is more the inverted monitor being reflected onto a mirror or if anything (not resolutions). I mean, feel free to build it if you want for that one single game.. but good luck with that.

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    Quote Originally Posted by NE146 View Post
    I got another simple example as well.. Asteroids. You can try and try to duplicate the vector display on a modern computer system, but the actual "shots" themselves had a physically intense glow that's almost impossible to duplicate today on a modern non-vector display.
    I know, I've often complained about how old 16-bit games look on modern LCDs because they don't have that right "glow", which I assume is even worse with old vector games. But I saw a review of Spike for the Vectrex on YouTube and I felt I could appreciate SOME of its visual quality because he was showing the actual machine in action -- I know that's not the same as seeing it in person, but what I mean is it's like you showing photos of the real thing and screenshots, or this Youtube video of Asteroids - they're both being seen on my (and your) computer monitor which means it's being displayed by technology that could be used in the emulator to produce the same effect. Not the effect of seeing it in person, but still the effect of seeing a video/photograph of it on your monitor


    Yes you can try and alter the game in mame to make the shots brighter in relation to the other parts of the game.. but think about it, what have you seen on your monitor at any time that actually physically is so bright it glows out your monitor like an LED light coming out? (e.g. putting your eye up close to it it's a bright light). Nothing really.. monitors these days are made so everything on screen is the same.
    yes, except you still get some of that effect (don't you?) with the photograph/video or else you wouldn't have used them to compare and communicate what you're talking about.

    Personally however I'm skeptical we can get good video effects like this done because in my experience things like scanlines and "TV mode" looks on emulators just suck. Well, suck is a harsh word, just like I used to describe MAME at the beginning of this thread, but I mean I'd rather have the scanlines and other effects turned off. I'm not sure why they don't look better than they do but I'm sure that with increasing technology there should be a way to mimic very closely the effect of seeing a video or photograph of a live game in action on the correct hardware .

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    Quote Originally Posted by stalepie View Post
    II know that's not the same as seeing it in person, but what I mean is it's like you showing photos of the real thing and screenshots, or this Youtube video of Asteroids - they're both being seen on my (and your) computer monitor which means it's being displayed by technology that could be used in the emulator to produce the same effect. Not the effect of seeing it in person, but still the effect of seeing a video/photograph of it on your monitor
    Quote Originally Posted by Kitsune Sniper View Post
    Edit: Also, MAME does support using screen overlays, like game instructions, around the video display area. It's not 100% perfect but it works.
    I think one of the best examples of maybe what you're talking about is Space Encounters. If you got it all tricked out in Mame with backgrounds, etc., it actually simulates the arcade games flashing lights whenever you shoot. It's actually pretty friggin awesome.

    But again, of course it's just the limitation of emulation because the original had actual flashing light bulbs, and how are you going to replicate that fully... Aside from a custom rig, you just can't. But again, it's sort of what you're probably looking for in that it's a simulated flashing on your computer screen to try and get it as close as possible.

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    NE146 is correct. Mame is a fantastic project, but playing it on a home pc will never replace the real thing (unusual controls, mirrored scenes, vector monitor brightness).

    NE, where did you get that avatar from? http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...m=200587575570 :P

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    I enjoy Mame a great deal but the newer versions are not quite as user friendly in my opinion,i will stick to an older version if possible.

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    Give MAME some credit, its not emulating one set piece of hardware it emulates hundreds of different configurations. And it does it well for the most part. As far as the command line goes, just get a Front end for it. Its been a few years since I used MAME but even then [in 2005 or so] there were plenty of front ends available that added a nice menu gui to it. MAME32 iirc has a nice menu based gui.

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    Since frontends came up, I wanted to give a shoutout to the awesome MAME Tunes for Mac. It has an iTunes-like interface, which lets you organize games into playlists or search, and has a nice visual way to arrange games.



    It works great with SDLMAME. The internal game list is based on MAME's XML export, so you can update the game list when you get a new version of MAME without having to get a new version of MAME Tunes.

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    Quote Originally Posted by z3k3 View Post
    NE, where did you get that avatar from? http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...m=200587575570 :P
    Was that ever any secret? Of course it is

    You the same Z3k3 from IRC?
    Last edited by NE146; 03-17-2011 at 08:19 PM.

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    Quote Originally Posted by NE146 View Post
    Was that ever any secret? Of course it is

    You the same Z3k3 from IRC?
    yessir.

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    Quote Originally Posted by NE146 View Post
    Was that ever any secret? Of course it is
    Yah, I know. Just a chance for me to put in a cheap plug. Surprised there isn't a "For Sale/Auction" forum here. In a week, I'll put up my really nice Custer's Revenge cart/box. I'm just waiting for the crappier condition one to finish up.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Vlcice View Post
    Since frontends came up, I wanted to give a shoutout to the awesome MAME Tunes for Mac. It has an iTunes-like interface, which lets you organize games into playlists or search, and has a nice visual way to arrange games.

    It works great with SDLMAME. The internal game list is based on MAME's XML export, so you can update the game list when you get a new version of MAME without having to get a new version of MAME Tunes.
    Why would anyone deliberately choose to use something that looks like iTunes? For all of Apple's successes, they seriously need to update the look of that program. Writing something to emulate the look and feel of it seems crazy, to me.

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