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PiMame- are we finally there?
paigeoliver:
Haze if this forum had a rep system I would give you 50 points for that!
--- Quote from: Haze on September 22, 2013, 02:48:51 pm ---
--- Quote from: UFO on September 22, 2013, 01:23:32 pm ---Has anyone got any further with a Pi build?
I'd love an update is someone is looking into this! :cheers:
--- End quote ---
where do you expect it to go?
people have shown what the Pi is capable of, running an ancient version of MAME relatively badly. The limits are now well defined, it's not magically going to improve overnight and you're completely handcuffed with regards what improvements you can make due to the limited capabilities of the MAME from that era if you want to backport anything newer.
taking a pi-based project any further would be sinking a lot of time and money into something for very little reward.
--- End quote ---
Typefighter01:
--- Quote from: Haze on September 22, 2013, 02:48:51 pm ---
--- Quote from: UFO on September 22, 2013, 01:23:32 pm ---Has anyone got any further with a Pi build?
I'd love an update is someone is looking into this! :cheers:
--- End quote ---
where do you expect it to go?
people have shown what the Pi is capable of, running an ancient version of MAME relatively badly. The limits are now well defined, it's not magically going to improve overnight and you're completely handcuffed with regards what improvements you can make due to the limited capabilities of the MAME from that era if you want to backport anything newer.
taking a pi-based project any further would be sinking a lot of time and money into something for very little reward.
--- End quote ---
Wow, that was a completely unnecessary response to a perfectly reasonable question :dizzy: Considering the Pi has only been out for 18 months and MAME and the Windows based PC for over 16 years, it would be remiss of anyone to make a blanket statement that it has reached its limits. Not looking for a battle of Pi vs PC or old vs new versions of MAME cause I would get ---my bottom--- handed to me, but how many games and what version of MAME does it need to play or run for it to be deemed a success? If it plays a handfull of classics well, and it is getting support and updates all the time for $35, then it is a win to me...
UFO - It looks like Shea Silverman has a new book out called "Rasberry Pi Gaming" and I also see they compiled PiMAME to work with the Xin-Mo encoder, so looks like there is progress. I picked up a Pi for my brother for his birthday as he said he was bored and needed a project. I think I will convince him to try the MAME route and see for myself.
Haze:
--- Quote from: Typefighter01 on September 22, 2013, 06:58:45 pm ---If it plays a handfull of classics well..
--- End quote ---
but that's the problem, it does run a handful of classics, but at 12 year old emulator levels, so not 'well' by any modern standards IMHO.
Maybe 'good enough' for a lot of people, but in many cases the sound and video (colour accuracy etc.) just isn't there, and you have little hope of porting any improvements to such an old version (and doing so in many cases would take performance out of the Pi realm anyway) If you even want something as simple as Save States to skip some of the startup tests your out of luck using such old builds, and it certainly doesn't run new ones well by any account I've seen.
I'd love to see more open platforms, don't get me wrong, but like I said, people investing time and money into this is a waste. The device is great for certain applications but emulation really isn't one of them. It was a giant leap backwards as far as emulation projects go when it was launched and becomes even more of one each passing day.
I think a fair number of people have realised this, and are concentrating their efforts on more capable devices because it honestly isn't very rewarding to code up something only to realise it's not actually going to be able to do anything especially impressive.
*if* somebody was to code dedicated single game emulators with tight per-game optimziations using hand-crafted ARM assembly you might get something worthwhile running, but that's one hell of a lot of effort per-game compared to porting MAME and by the time you've done that, tested that and optmized that we will probably be 3 years down the line with far better machines at the same price-point so few would care and even more would just flame you for not doing the game they cared about.
kahlid74:
I saw this thread and was like why did it get resurrected and then was like oh, hmm.
There is nowhere further for the Pi to go from where it was when this Thread was last present. It does a poor job emulating but if you want a 60 in 1 it will fit the bill. The Pi is AWESOME for automation but not too good for emulation.
So for ArcadeControls.com it doesn't really jive. If you want to know if anyone else in the wild has taken the Pi and done kicking/cool things and arcade things like using the GPIO only, go to the Pi homepage and follow their projects blog. Plenty of cool progress there with the PI overall.
Haze:
Yeah I'm sure the topic will come up again and again because there was a lot of hype surrounding the device and it is 'cheap' which is a factor a lot of people find appealing.
Like you said, great if you want to build some kind of robot or weather station, not so great if you want decent quality emulation.
People have done what they can, there are no magic shortcuts, there's nothing you can do to a port of MAME to give it more than a 20-30% performance boost unless you did something horificially wrong the first time around or want to start rewriting huge parts of the code.
The apathy you see now is mostly (IMHO) because the people doing the ports have kinda realised this, seen what it will and won't do, realised it's not really any better than a device they had 10 years ago and gone 'meh' because they were secretly hoping to be wowed by the results of their work but it didn't happen.