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the state of mame

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nitz:


--- Quote from: Haze on December 28, 2010, 09:03:02 pm ---Berzerk on the other hand sounds close to perfect to me.

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Thanks for your response Haze!

Just to be clear, the whining in Berzerk I'm talking about is this (lifted from MAWS):


--- Quote ---- 0.125u9: Update S14001A core [Lord Nightmare]: Improved filtering to be more accurate to the chip, changed internal audio renderer to produce 4 bit sound as the real chip does. Moved filter outside of the main rendering loop into the glue code. Note: With this update, you may hear a whining noise that was not previously present. This is accurate to the chip! The real chip would almost always have an analog filter placed on its output to suppress this whine.

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Maybe your soundcard/speakers suppress the whine more, or maybe your definition of "sounds close to perfect" is "accurate to the chip". I'd rather sacrifice accuracy though for sound that I find less annoying. Others may prefer accuracy even if it is annoying, or they may not find it as annoying as I do. It's all personal preference. ;)


--- Quote from: EwJ on December 28, 2010, 10:06:51 pm ---
--- Quote ---If I think about it, there is probably some other stuff in mame that bugs me also, but I've made my point.

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What's your point?


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I guess I was just saying that I can kinda sympathize with people who feel mame is too accurate because this often introduces stuff we don't like (games needing crazy PC specs being the main gripe). But as I stated, I still think "accuracy" ultimately equals "better" in the long run, even if we don't like it sometimes, because if little hacks are allowed to creep in just to make things run faster or suit personal tastes, it'll end up a being a big mess.

Haze:


--- Quote from: nitz on December 29, 2010, 07:53:08 pm ---Maybe your soundcard/speakers suppress the whine more, or maybe your definition of "sounds close to perfect" is "accurate to the chip". I'd rather sacrifice accuracy though for sound that I find less annoying. Others may prefer accuracy even if it is annoying, or they may not find it as annoying as I do. It's all personal preference. ;)

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Possibly, I just have a pair of cheap headphones on my dev PC at the moment, which might not be capable of reproducing the sound.

This was as much the case with the cabinet speakers / acoustics.  In a noisy arcade you probably wouldn't have a clue where a high pitched whine was coming from, even if one was present, the actual CRT monitors can generate just as much of a whine!  (I'm glad my hearing is worse now than when I was younger, because I found some TVs impossible to watch, or even be within 20 meters of for this reason)

There isn't really much MAME can do about this if it is a correct output tho, especially if there are other games that rely on the frequencies output for correct sound reproduction without the whine.

Of course, the benefits of emulating the actual speech chip are quite clear.  Previously MAME had a set of samples for Berzerk, they might have sounded nice and had imperfections, but they were for Berzerk only.

Recently both a German set of Berzerk, and the rare prototype Moon War showed up.  With only samples for Berzerk these would be have been left without proper speech, and in the case of moonwar it would have been nearly impossible to even record it; only 2 parts of it have shown up, the speech board in the US, many years ago, and a main board (lacking the speech board) in Germany of all places.  It's possible they were once part of the only remaining boardset for the game!  (the German Berzerk set is wonderful btw, the robots sound so much more intimidating speaking German)

Due to the fact the speech chip is emulated, rather than using samples both these automatically ended up with correct speech support in MAME.

The likes of Gorf suffer from a similar problem right now, the only speech support is through samples, so the foreign language versions simply don't play the correct samples.  The German sets of that and Wizard of Wor should also talk in German!

danny_galaga:


--- Quote from: Haze on December 28, 2010, 11:45:00 am ---
--- Quote from: Vigo on December 28, 2010, 10:36:31 am ---
--- Quote from: Haze on December 28, 2010, 09:05:38 am ---
--- Quote from: danny_galaga on December 28, 2010, 03:36:10 am ---
Hands up anyone who thinks of Mahjong games when they think classics?

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Based on the posts I've had on my blog, and the requests we've had for some of them I think if you asked this question on a Japanese forum you'd be flooded with replies.

The early Dynax and Nichibutsu ones especially are considered 'classics' in Japan, and were just as popular, if not more popular than the likes of Street Fighter 2 was over here.  There is a reason they made so many of them and near enough every major manufacturer has a portfolio of them.  There have been just as many donations made *specifically* to buy Mahjong boards as anything else over the years.

On similar lines, if you asked on a Japanese forum 'Who considers Marble Madness a classic' you'd probably get hardly any replies, because it's an American developed game and they really didn't care for those as much.  (A trend which continues to this day, just look how difficult Microsoft found it to break into Japan)

It amazes me that people still try to use this argument to bash MAME, the project, and what gets emulated.  It's a global project, representing a global industry, not something tailored to your exact tastes.


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Don't take this in a rude way, just a question. I honestly don't know how you guys are structured, but if it is the primarily Asia fanbase that considers these endless Mahjong titles of great value, is the development of these titles, the man hours, worked on by a designated Asia MAMEdev team? To me, I would think that a donation to buy Mahjong boards does not relegate that N. America and European support must be doing any further development to the endless sea of Mahjong titles out there.

I also wouldn't think that comparing your everyday Mahjong title with Marble Madness is accurate. I think it would compare much better to video slot machines. There are so many video slot machine games in N. America, and tons of people play them, but there really are not any classics that had the crowds watching on. Mahjong games were more or less your typical gambling games without the payouts.


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Asia / Japan don't really seem to believe in the open source culture as much unfortunately, so contributions in terms of actual code from that part of the world are more limited.  It's clearly a cultural thing, and when you do get Asian / Japanese emulators their approach to emulation is often very different eg. if you look at the NeoGeo CD emulators they've *rewritten* most of the bios code, to avoid emulating it.. In worse cases they will rewrite parts of the game for extra speed, rather than emulating it.. They will integrate the roms in the actual emulator, and encrypt the whole package to stop people reverse engineering it then package the whole thing with a ton of ad-ware so that they can make money of of people using their emulators.  Don't get me wrong, there have been contributions from Asia / Japan which have been valid but the cultural differences, and coding standards / practices make them fewer.  The *primary* development of MAME has always been European, which is ironic when you consider that only a tiny tiny handful of the supported games originate in Europe.  If European devs only worked on European produced games there wouldn't be much MAME at all ;-)

From a 'writing the emulation code' perspective it makes very little difference if you're emulating a Mahjong game or not.  The challenges are still the same, the hardware can still be interesting, and they can help fix bugs / improve things elsewhere.  The Mahjong games on Psikyo's SH2 based hardware were of great help in fixing the SH2 timers / interrupts which in turn also improved the music in several other games relying on that logic.  Improving hardware emulation is always beneficial to the project, and anything that helps that, be it emulation of a Mahjong game, or a console system in MESS is a step forward.  The best devs really aren't fussy over the nature of the games they emulate.  As I've said before, the role of Mamedev is to emulate, not discriminate, and there is a level of responsibility that comes with that to not simply ignore something because you don't like it.

Mahjong seems to have a bigger role in mainstream Japanese arcades than slot machines do over here.  Here slot machines more or less replaced arcade games in many places, in Japan they exist together.  I'm not really sure I'd say they were equivalent.

That said, even for slot machines, there are ones people consider to be 'classic'.  The original Cherry Master for example is really akin to the 'Pacman' of that genre.  It's simple, but to many still iconic, which is why it's copied / rehashed so often.  There are still hacks of this very same game being sold on newly manufactured PCBs today, and fresh 'classic' versions are pushed out just as Namco re-release Pacman every couple of years.  Overall there is a lot of hatred towards slot machines and the like tho, because many see them as the 'killer of arcades'  

For Australia, the early Aristocrat games are considered 'classics' too and have a substantial fan-base.

For a more central European base, Magic Card is another one that regularly gets requested because it doesn't yet work properly in MAME.

Just like any genre, you have a period of games, which are really stripped down to the basics, nothing too fancy, but advanced enough to be functional and memorable.

It's also interesting to see how slot machine mechanics integrate into normal games too.  You've only got to look at something like the Casino Night levels in Sonic 2 to see that elements of the whole 'slot machine' culture are iconic enough to end up as a mechanic in a more modern game, even Japanese developed ones.  Kaneko's Wani Wani World (a personal favourite) incorporates such elements too.

Pinball games are another example, some people see them all as utterly worthless, others will no doubt be able to name what they consider to be 'classics' in that genre too.

Asking if anybody considers Mahjong games classic on a US centric forum isn't going to give you many answers tho because it's a game heavily tied to Japanese culture, which doesn't translate well outside of Japan.


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Good point, but if the japanese fan base of Mahjong games really don't care about accurate emulation, why bother doing it in MAME? Seems to me neither East or West would appreciate all that work...

Warborg:


--- Quote from: Rick on December 29, 2010, 04:12:13 pm ---
--- Quote from: Xiaou2 on December 29, 2010, 03:27:17 pm ---Firstly, I HAVE donated to various money collecting ventures to buy Rare PCBs, several times, despite my poor financial standings.  You?
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Nothing, actually.  I wasn't actually aware this had occurred, as I'm still pretty new here.


--- Quote from: Xiaou2 on December 29, 2010, 03:27:17 pm ---Now, what have YOU done for Preservation sake?
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Hmm.  Again, nothing.

But, here's where we differ:   I respect those who have contributed to MAME development, and I don't post like a pompous, elitist, self-serving ass who thinks he's entitled to have his opinions on the direction of the development actually heard and followed.  You post like your donations or ideas mean you deserve something in return.

It just simply doesn't work that way.  The Development Team doesn't exist to feed your fancy, and they'll do it their own way, regardless of how 'smart' or 'right' you think your ideas are.  There's no sense getting all butthurt about it, either.  Even if you have the be-all, end-all solution to all of MAME's problems for today and the future, it doesn't mean they're going to build it as you say, or make it work as you say.  As it's been said a million times before in this thread, if you want it changed, pick up a programming manual and do it yourself.  Nobody's stopping you.  Just don't expect the developers to do anything, just because you've kicked in some coin, or scanned in some images.

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Sorry, just have to say it...   PWNED.

Hituro:

Wow, such a heated discussion!  :o

All I have to say though, is that regardless of how things are run, I'm at least glad mame exists.  if it wasn't for mame, I would not have had the drive to build my own arcade cabinet that houses a multitude of these games.  Games which I've also went out and bought just to support the saving of these old classics.  I know there are some games that I would love to play that don't work properly, but it doesn't really bother me too much, some of them I'm able to find as PC versions, and although they might not be 100% to the arcade originals, I can still enjoy them and remember the good old days.  On top of that, if it wasn't for mame, I wouldn't have stumbled upon a ton of games that I've never even heard of that were great classics that I myself have grown to enjoy.  Just remember, if it wasn't for mame we probably wouldn't have half the people we have today, working on ways to perfectly emulate arcade game play.  Like Andy from Ultimarc, or many of the awesome cabs that I've browsed through on the web.  And more importantly, this forum may not have ever existed.  Just something to think about :)

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