2012 - A Year in MAME

[Haze]

I did a page summing up some of the happenings in MAME / MESS over 2012

http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/2012-a-year-in-mame/

Might be of interest to people here, lots to write about, even if this was one of the quieter years plenty of cool / important stuff happened.

You could write a book out of the last 10 years easily...

[Well Fed Games]

Thanks for the post/link. As someone who follows MAME development from a couple of degrees of separation (forums like this one), it is interesting to hear what has been going on. Glad that the Seibu encryption is still on the radar, and that there are new, mysterious, forgotten games out there still being added. Thanks for all the hard work!

[jennifer]

       Even Jennifer found this enlightening...However Haze, It was stated that Even with perfect emulation its unlikely to ever offer all the bells a whistles of a standalone. If Im reading this right, That has been my problem and subsequently my frustrations with Mame, All the way back to the early years...Im not cutting down the works by the Devs here, (Although they seem to patch a code deviating from a faithful emulation) But here we are decades later, Amazing advances in the computer world Yet still, the problems persist.

[Howard_Casto]

I'll butt in on this one.  I think you misread Jennifer.  Haze was referring to CONSOLE emulation in regards to MESS, not arcade emulation in regards to MAME.  Here's the deal... in order to emulate a system accurately it must be free of hacks and also you need the raw computing power several degrees of magnitude faster than the original system. 

Since console hardware can be rather powerful and most of the stand-alone console emulators are usually hacked to bits, you'll be able to play, let's say Mario 64, on a stand alone emulator, but not in MESS because, your machine isn't powerful enough to run it unmolested and all the structure of the n64 isn't necessarily known.  Since MAME/MESS doesn't cludge code, it could be some time before you could run Mario 64 in MESS.  And since new consoles are coming out all the time, unlike arcade games, MESS will constantly be playing catch up. 

Also "bells and whistles" often refers to hacks and features unoriginal to the hardware. 

MAME/MESS are the MOST ACCURATE emulators, not necessarily the most playable.  So your comment about code deviating from faithful emulation, I'm hoping, was directed towards other emulators, because the mame devs don't do that crap.  That's actually the "problem" with mame as you are seeing it... playability is an after-thought. 

[jennifer]

       Ok Then, I did read that wrong then...Sorry Haze, ( But still I liked the article) And now feel as if Im missing something else, and should revisit the world of Mame/Mess.

[Haze]

by bells and whistles I mean things like the spectrum emulators automatically typing all the loading stuff you need if you drag and drop an image on them, then catching common loaders and hleing the entire loading process so it doesn't really load how the real system would load it, but simulate the whole process to load in a fraction of a second, fake 256 colour modes, and sliders to tweak every aspect of a system timing to values you'd never see used in reality.

stuff like that isn't 'emulation' at least not the HLEing of all the loaders because you're specifically NOT running all the original code the way the systems would if you start doing things like that.  scripting the inputs isn't so bad, and could potentially be programmed into the software lists, but the 256 colour modes are something made entirely for emulation and never existed in reality (well not unless somebody has since built a real machine capable of them)

a lot of the computer and console emulators are similar like this, with fake enhancements, high resolution Playstation graphics is another common example, where everything is rendered as if the original playstation had a 1920x1200 widescreen resolution, with polygons smoothed out etc.  If you emulate it properly most kids today think the graphics kinda suck, but MESS will only emulate it properly.

it wasn't really a statement about the arcade side as much, MAME still doesn't offer such enhancements, but there are less 'alternative' arcade emus, and nobody is going to spend their time doing artificial enhancments for platforms with only a single game ;-)  NeoGeo did see fake transparencies and stuff in Nebula / Kawaks but people got bored of that gimmick rather quickly.  Zinc does hi-res PSX but only runs a fraction of the PSX based titles MAME does, so people quickly stopped caring about it.

so yeah, MAME is still 'no frills' but you don't really need them, if the emulation is correct it does what it's meant to do and that's that.

[jennifer]

      That was quite informative, and I would have no reason not to believe that as fact...The kids not liking the graphics, I can so relate to that, with OEM, Its interesting however why a single game platform would be any less important as another in the name of a historical document... My experience with Mame is very limited at best, Ive tried to follow the advancements and conducted a few experiments over the years, But perhaps I got bad Roms or Whatever, The game always differs from the original, The 3 off the top of my head were, On Spy Hunter the heli doesn't come out on the first level,
on Pac man you cant go through the ghost on a turn, And with Mario...Well he just doesn't run and jump.

[Haze]

      That was quite informative, and I would have no reason not to believe that as fact...The kids not liking the graphics, I can so relate to that, with OEM, Its interesting however why a single game platform would be any less important as another in the name of a historical document... My experience with Mame is very limited at best, Ive tried to follow the advancements and conducted a few experiments over the years, But perhaps I got bad Roms or Whatever, The game always differs from the original, The 3 off the top of my head were, On Spy Hunter the heli doesn't come out on the first level,
on Pac man you cant go through the ghost on a turn, And with Mario...Well he just doesn't run and jump.

for Spy Hunter it probably depends on the difficulty, or a game revision
Pacman trick definitely works, there are videos of it being done in MAME, it's used extensively on maximum score runs etc. and worked even in Mame 0.1, the very first release
Mario works as you'd expect too..

[Howard_Casto]

Yeah I can confirm personally that these these games are emulated quite accurately and the pacman trick absolutely works (I'm a psuedo-hardcore pacman fan.) 

Not sure what you've been playing thinking it was mame, but except for a period where the speedup hack was mapped to a button pacman has been one of the most accurate games in mame... one of the first as well. 

[Gray_Area]

Hell yeah, you can go through ghosts, on both pacs. Not sure on Jr. Pac. I accidentally happen upon it every now and then.

Spy Hunter might be all wonky, as the game seems to have some mysterious way of figuring out what it's going to give you, or not.

[Xiaou2]

However Haze, It was stated that Even with perfect emulation its unlikely to ever offer all the bells a whistles of a standalone.

 Like being able to hook up a real 2-way arcade shifter...