SDLMAME is no more.. thoughts?

[Silas (son of Silas)]

So you may or may not have noticed but SDLMAME is now included with regular MAME as of MAME 0.136u1

An update over at Arbee's WIP Emporium gives the following info:

MAME 0.136u1 is going to involve some major changes all around, especially for SDLMAME. In order, they are:

- New GCC 4.4.x based MinGW32 and MinGW64 toolchains for the Windows versions (this includes both baseline and SDLMAME Windows targets). Visual Studio is no longer required to build for 64-bit Windows and substantial speedups will be seen by users of 64-bit Windows Vista and Windows 7.
- MAME is switching from C to C++ and will include some of the features of that language. While MAME has been getting more object oriented over time we’ve hit the limits of being able to sanely express that in plain C and many concepts will be cleaner/more intuitive in C++.
- SDLMAME will become part of the standard MAME source code download. There will no longer be separate SDLMAME releases on this site (I will update the homepage to say so) but the SDL components will continue to be maintained by Couriersud and myself.

As a result of this, SDLMAME has lost one minor feature: the ability to use the “scale2x” graphical filter. It was never well-supported and never worked quite right so it was always on the way to destruction, and so it’s now gone. SDLMAME gains two new supported platforms in u1: 64-bit Windows and 64-bit Mac OS X (64-bit on the Mac requires OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, which implies an Intel Mac, and SDL 1.2.14).

I was wondering if anyone went through as much pain as I did migrating my SDLMAME install over to MAME under Ubuntu or any other distro? I followed the instructions verbatim from SDLMAME4UBUNTU only to be left with a busted install and no games to play until I undid the mess it caused and fixed it myself.

Did anyone here use the Scale2x filter? did anyone even know it existed?

[Arbee]

Hi,

u1 had a lot of "teething pains", but as of u3 MAME is now overall easier to build on Linux than SDLMAME was.  You simply type "make" and it autodetects that you're on Linux as well as your CPU type (x86, x64, or PowerPC) and builds appropriately from there.  Protip: on most distros you can avoid doing the line-endings dance by simply patching with the --binary parameter (tested and works on Fedora 12 and a recent Ubuntu).

Scale2x was only accessible with you ran with SDLMAME_UNSUPPORTED=1 (meaning you forfeit all support), and as I said in the blog post it never worked completely right anyway.

As always, you'll get faster SDLMAME support at the official forums: http://www.bannister.org/forums/ but I do try to keep an eye out here

-RB

[Quinny]

Can't say that I've tried changing over to mame yet but I hope it goes smoothly.

[Quinny]

I hope someone can help me.

I am using Ubuntu 9.10 and I still have sdlmame installed. I downloaded the latest version of mame, being 0.138 at the moment.

I put this in /usr/local/src and unzipped and did the "make" command.

(Aside: Here's a trap for young players (like me). This won't work without some other packages being installed. I had to use the following commands to get "make" to work:
$ sudo aptitude install libgtk2.0-dev
$ sudo aptitude install libgnome-dev
$ sudo apt-get install libgnome2-dev
$ sudo apt-get install build-essential libsdl1.2-dev libgconf2-dev
)

Now I have both sdlmame and mame64 installed. When I type "mame" it will run sdlmame. I am not sure where sdlmame is installed as that came from a deb package.

How do I get rid of sdlmame and make the "mame" command work for mame64 (version 0.138) ?
At the moment to get mame64 to work I have to type ./mame64 but only from the /usr/local/src/mame directory.

Also, do I need to install mame somewhere other than /usr/local/src/mame ?

[Sosetsuken]

Can't you just use

Code: [Select]

sudo apt-get remove sdlmame
?

Oh and to use mame64 from anywhere, i think you have to add a symlink to mame64 in /bin or /sbin.  This i'm not sure about since its been a while since i've used linux.

[Quinny]

Thankyou Sosetsuken.

I found that the command "mame" is in /usr/games/ so I set up another link in there.

The remove command worked to remove sdlmame, mostly. There are still some lingering directories.
It's safe to remove those dirs manually.

Just had to create my own .mame (hidden dir) in my home directory and put the mame.ini in there for it to be detected.
All working well now! Thanks.

Cheers.