Bubble Bobble Lost Caves

[Chainsaw]

Hello, any chance we can add Bubble Bobble Lost Caves to GroovyMAME? I'm a huge Bubble Bobble fan, one of my main reasons for getting a cab, and it would be awesome to have these levels to play as well 

Thanks 

[sean_sk]

As far as I'm aware, that's not up to Calamity. That solely rests with the developers of vanilla MAME.

EDIT: Ok, I see it's a fan made mod. I'm not sure that Calamity mucks around with this kind of thing since his main focus is adding better CRT support to MAME.

[Chainsaw]

It's actually really interesting. Not so much a fan made mod, as a group of fans have collected all the Taito maps from other versions of the game - console and computer maps not in the original arcade game - and put them into the arcade ROM. You can put it on a bootleg PCB, or you can rename the modded ROM to the original Bubble Bobble zip file and run it via MAME that way. There are a few versions of MAME which support it.

I'm sure it's not a lot of work to add it, but I'd rather not have to compile my own version of GroovyMAME if I could get away with it  I've never played around with the MAME codebase, I imagine there's a list of ROMs, copy the official Bubble Bobble section and away you go. Probably 

Anyway, as a fan of the original, and after an inclusive All In One MAME, I was hoping Calamity would throw it in. If not I'll do it myself 

[PL1]

MAMEUIFX supports "BUBBLE BOBBLE LOST CAVE 1.2", "BUBBLE BOBBLE REDUX", and several other games that aren't in Vanilla MAME.

See this thread for details.

In that thread, Mamesick (MAMEUIFX author) mentions,

Those extra games are simply modified ROMs. So the drivers in which they are supported aren't modified in any way. You could consider them as "clones" of the original hacked game. And even if they could require some modifications in the source code... I think I'll be able to mantain them in any case.

After moving "bublbobl.zip" to a safe place, try renaming the Lost Caves (or Redux) ROM to "bublbobl.zip" and see if it works.     (worked in MAMEUIFX  )


Scott
EDIT: MAMEUIFX forums moved to new location.  Updated thread link.

[Chainsaw]

Thanks for that. I've already done that. There are no problems with it, I'm simply hoping Calamity will be happy to add the "clone" to his codebase for a more elegant solution Looking through that thread you posted, there are a lot of modded ROMS out there, I guess it becomes a question of what to add, what not to add, and that may well be something best left alone. That's fair enough. I've not any interest in fan-modded ROMs, but as these levels were designed by Taito, it feels kind of official to me

Right now I guess I could have duplicate MAME directories with Groovy installed in both, the original bublbobl.zip file in one and Lost Caves in the other, and run them from the same wheel in HyperSpin. Not very elegant though.

[Chainsaw]

That link contains the MAMEuifx "modded source code". There's a few lines for bublcave that I'd need to copy in. Perfect, thanks for that.

Tomorrow I'll look into compiling MAME

[Chainsaw]

A few src downloads, a few diff files applied and then manually adding bublcave. Compiling fine, I'll give it a try tomorrow

[sean_sk]

A few src downloads, a few diff files applied and then manually adding bublcave. Compiling fine, I'll give it a try tomorrow

Yup. Just tried it now. Works fine.

Pasted the following lines near the bottom of the mame.lst in Mame source:

// extra games

bublcave      // hack

Copied over bublbobl.c from extra_games_src.7z into src\mame\drivers and overwrote the existing one there.
Then applied hi_score and Groovymame diffs, compiled, and all works well. Easy as. If a numbskull like me can do it then anyone can.

Thanks for the link PL1.

[PL1]

Glad to assist.   

Didn't notice the source code link at the bottom of that post until Chainsaw mentioned it.   


Scott

[Haze]

I'm considering cleaning up the HBMame code a little and putting out UME versions with it added, although I'm in 2 minds, because a fair number of the NeoGeo hacks etc. don't work properly because they rely on bugs / unemulated features in older emulators to work so don't work in current MAME, or on real hardware.

If I did that I guess you might see things like Lost Cave supported in GroovyUME by default tho.

[cools]

I'd like to see hacks that have been tested on real hardware make it into MAME proper.

[Haze]

Yeah, it would be nice, at least the interesting ones where significant effort has been put into creating them.

I've proposed test software (things we've created to test hardware features, and thus verify our emulation quality too.  For arcade platforms the majority of the games released barely scratch the surface of what the hardware is capable of and give us little to go on.

I was hoping that bringing MESS closer would allow for some more relaxed rules (we document interesting / useful homebrew in MESS, at least for some systems) but so far we've not really seen that, I guess I was a little over optimistic.

I know some purists would prefer to keep only 'real' arcade games in MAME, and get rid of any MESS stuff, hacks, and bootlegs altogether, so would be very much against such things, but in reality these things cold be filtered out by frontends but be available if people want them.

[Chainsaw]

The Purists should get the PCBs and be done with it 

Seriously though, as you say, a frontend can sort out what people want and don't want. Or just don't get the ROMs to begin with.

[Calamity]

Anyway, as a fan of the original, and after an inclusive All In One MAME, I was hoping Calamity would throw it in. If not I'll do it myself 

It's definitely interesting. However, I'd like to keep the GroovyMAME patch as slim as possible, it's already a monster to mantain as it is now. For this reason I'd like to keep it in sync with main line MAME as long as possible and only do the strictly necessary changes.

Compiling MAME yourself may seem intimidating at first but it's quite straight forward once you learn.

[Chainsaw]

Thanks for the response Calamity. Yep, I ended up compiling my own version with the changes. Very straight forward. Once I've got my cab up and running I'm unlikely to update MAME every version anyway, so doing my own compile every 6 months will be no problem at all