What is the deal with MAME Plus?

[honkey]

I am still new to MAME. Is there a reason nobody seems to recommend using MAME Plus? Is it a hack of MAME or is it just a different version?

[BadMouth]

I use it for setting up and testing games before adding them to the main list on my front-end. 
It allows you to make changes through a decent user interface, but still use the regular mame.exe
That way if I have an issue, I know the issue is in the genuine version of MAME and not because it's a derivative.
It's been most useful for tweaking video settings for individual games to try to eek a little more speed out of them (California Speed and SF Rush, specifically).

I'm not sure why it's not more popular.

(IIRC, it does come with mamep.exe, but I've never used it.    )

[Necro]

Part of it might be the complete lack of information on it - I just searched for 5-10 minutes and couldn't find a feature list of what's different than stock...

[honkey]

Part of it might be the complete lack of information on it - I just searched for 5-10 minutes and couldn't find a feature list of what's different than stock...

That makes me feel a bit better. I also did a search and came up empty handed. I had started to wonder if for some reason this was a taboo topic. The only thing I found was a person saying that all the games that are considered unplayable (Blitz, Gauntlet Legends, etc.) were running at full speed in MAME Plus.

[Necro]

Wow, really?  Now I need a copy of the 0.136 version.

[Gray_Area]

"mame plus"

second result here

This is a command line and GUI version of Windows
MAME that includes multilingual support, enhanced video effects and more.
MAME Plus! project started in May 2002 (first version 0.60), initially intended to implement Unicode support for MAME. Now Plus! has many features to make it a great unoffical build.
Last update: 2009-02-20 ((at Zophar's))

For more, grab it and try it out.

[Necro]

That's a ridiculously detailed version of what's included....

(That was intended to be a joke, right?)

[Cynicaster]

I am still new to MAME. Is there a reason nobody seems to recommend using MAME Plus? Is it a hack of MAME or is it just a different version?

I use MamePlus on my cabinet (v122 I think).  It works great.  I don't know all of the things that make it different; the only reason I started using it was for the high score support.  Unlike standard MAME, MamePlus stores high scores so that they don't disappear when you exit a game or power down the cabinet.  With all the different friends and family that play on my machine, it makes for some great competition as people fight for the top spots on the classics. 

Standard MAME used to support high scores but they eliminated it several versions ago because they didn't want scores being stored on games that couldn't store scores on the original hardware.  Some games had non-volatile RAM (NVRAM) that would store high scores even after the machines were powered down (Black Widow and Track and Field are examples that come to mind), and those games still do it in MAME. 

It doesn't work on every single game, but I'd say it's worked on upwards of 95% of the games I've played, especially the older ones. 

[BadMouth]

Last update: 2009-02-20 ((at Zophar's))

For more, grab it and try it out.

preferably from a up to date source 
New releases are on emucr and it has it's own forum over on mameworld.
It's updated with most MAME releases, but not every single u release.

[Mr. Dude]

I've run MAMEPlus in the past.  The main thing I could see different from regular MAME was it had some extra visual effects to play around with the game graphics... higher resolutions etc.  Also comes with the GUI and command line version both which is kinda nice cause cause you can go into the MAME32 GUI and make quick changes.

[CrazyKongFan]

I use wolfmame plus 106 (which is the version TG requires, although I haven't submitted to TG in some time)

[Gray_Area]

Standard MAME used to support high scores but they eliminated it several versions ago because they didn't want scores being stored on games that couldn't store scores on the original hardware.

More, they took it out because it screwed the emulation up.

preferably from a up to date source 
New releases are on emucr and it has it's own forum over on mameworld.
It's updated with most MAME releases, but not every single u release.

I was giving him the benefit of the doubt.....OR.....giving him a bunch of slack to.....