Slightly OT: Interesting MAME statistics.

[Howard_Casto]

CoinOps 6.  Every game works, on a $10 console. 

Every game that will run on a crappy old xbox you mean. 

Am I going to have to block you or were you just having a bad day?

It works and all my games I play are in one place.

Arcade friendly and cheap with a nice interface.  Let's see your wii do that.

I think you've lost your mind ark.  We are talking about a solution to MAME on the PERSONAL COMPUTER.  Suggesting people use a console, which doesn't support their front end of choice, or more modern emulators like supermodel or pc games or mamehooker or led blinky is NOT a viable solution.  WTF does the Wii have to do with that?

[pbj]

What does Supermodel or PC games have to do with MAME?

[B2K24]

You're the one missing the point.

You and everyone else don't need to create a custom romset. Instead simply create your own custom game listing or favorites listing that fully customizable and can be altered/changed anytime you want.

Frankly you sound like someone who relies on MameUI to play, which does help to find what you want fairly easy.  But it isn't cab friendly.
Have you tried to build a list of all playable arcade games from a complete rom library in a FE like MaLa???  It takes days.  Pain in the ass, and once you make a change to your file structure (ie by doing a major upgrade from one version of Mame to another) you have to start over.  If you have other emulators in the same list, as soon as you go and edit the list with the easier to use tools, you lose all your manual settings.  Sure, part of the problem is MaLa hasn't been updated in too long, but the point is that it shouldn't be that tough at all.  Being able to simply filter out the files you want and move the rest to an archive would be great, and having supporting software be OK with that without jumping through hoops would be even better.  With a folder of just the roms I want to load on the machine, I can cut a setup in MaLa down by hours and hours.

No. MameUI is Trash tier when it comes to Front-Ends. Using MaLa isn't the best decision either because it's a dead project from what I understand.

Cab users should be using either HyperSpin or GameEX as both do exactly what I've said about easily creating a favorites listing. GameEX even has config options in it's setup wizard that lets you adjust filters depending on your preference all without shuffling files or stripping out romsets.

Several HyperSpin community members also create custom XMLs which controls exactly how the game list is generated again all without needing to scan or get names from the global romset.

I understand the nostalgia about continuing to use the Front-end as the very first one that you've discovered MAME with, but if it's no longer developed or updated, you should be probably ditching it and using the latest and better options.

[Yenome]

I hated going through the list of all the games to only get the ones i wanted too keep. I even did it the lazy way and it still took time. I didn't want any mature, Gambling, Mahjong, Quiz, and no clones unless it was one I used to play. Filtered out all the games that their driver status wasn't "good". did it all using romlister and clrmamepro. Used romlister to make my XML file and used the XML file as the database for clrmamepro. Then ran it against the huge list of 24k files i had. now down to 1,437 altho i think i may redo my list again and change the main filter to like howard said and make it to where prelim drivers are excluded.

[Howard_Casto]

You're the one missing the point.

You and everyone else don't need to create a custom romset. Instead simply create your own custom game listing or favorites listing that fully customizable and can be altered/changed anytime you want.

Frankly you sound like someone who relies on MameUI to play, which does help to find what you want fairly easy.  But it isn't cab friendly.
Have you tried to build a list of all playable arcade games from a complete rom library in a FE like MaLa???  It takes days.  Pain in the ass, and once you make a change to your file structure (ie by doing a major upgrade from one version of Mame to another) you have to start over.  If you have other emulators in the same list, as soon as you go and edit the list with the easier to use tools, you lose all your manual settings.  Sure, part of the problem is MaLa hasn't been updated in too long, but the point is that it shouldn't be that tough at all.  Being able to simply filter out the files you want and move the rest to an archive would be great, and having supporting software be OK with that without jumping through hoops would be even better.  With a folder of just the roms I want to load on the machine, I can cut a setup in MaLa down by hours and hours.

No. MameUI is Trash tier when it comes to Front-Ends. Using MaLa isn't the best decision either because it's a dead project from what I understand.

Cab users should be using either HyperSpin or GameEX as both do exactly what I've said about easily creating a favorites listing. GameEX even has config options in it's setup wizard that lets you adjust filters depending on your preference all without shuffling files or stripping out romsets.

Several HyperSpin community members also create custom XMLs which controls exactly how the game list is generated again all without needing to scan or get names from the global romset.

I understand the nostalgia about continuing to use the Front-end as the very first one that you've discovered MAME with, but if it's no longer developed or updated, you should be probably ditching it and using the latest and better options.

So your solution is to severely limit our options by giving us a choice of a whopping 2 front-ends, one of which is so graphically busy that half the community hates it with a furious passion. 

That's about as dumb a suggestion as using mameui or using the command line. 

Again, mame should be able to print a  useable, filterable, game list by itself.  It was one thing when mame just did arcade games and the game count was fairly small but now mame is so huge it takes it 1-2 minutes just to print the frikkin xml file! 

[Cakemeister]

Does the MAME shader code support the vector monitor effect? That's the only reason I would upgrade. A lot of my favorite games are vectors.

[B2K24]

So your solution is to severely limit our options by giving us a choice of a whopping 2 front-ends, one of which is so graphically busy that half the community hates it with a furious passion. 

That's about as dumb a suggestion as using mameui or using the command line. 

Again, mame should be able to print a  useable, filterable, game list by itself.  It was one thing when mame just did arcade games and the game count was fairly small but now mame is so huge it takes it 1-2 minutes just to print the frikkin xml file!

You're already limiting your own options, so please continue on with your scripts and filtering. What's next? Individual batch files?
Good luck with that.

[B2K24]

Does the MAME shader code support the vector monitor effect? That's the only reason I would upgrade. A lot of my favorite games are vectors.

Funny you should mention that. Taken from the latest whatsnew.txt

Code: [Select]

-HLSL changes [ImJezze]
 * Unified HLSL render pipline for raster and vector graphics
 * simplified draw call of render pass functions
 * reduced number of used render targets from 7 to 4 (2 native and 2
    pre-scaled)
 * made render pass functions (nearly) independent from each other
 * unified render pipeline for raster and vector graphics, which means
    that all effects are now also available for vector graphics
    (except scan-lines)
 * removed/replaced simple.fx by primary.fx
 * removed CU_PHOSPHOR_IGNORE uniform, which was only used in phosphor
    pass function and is now directly set
 * added CU_TARGET_DIMS uniform based on the current render target
 * added CU_QUAD_DIMS uniform based on the current full screen polygon
    quad
 * removed pre-scale knowledge from shaders
 * fixed DX9 related half pixel offset in most shaders
 * reduced shadow mask color bleeding
 * fixed defocus strength with different pre-scales
 * added slight noise to bloom effect to reduce the color banding of
    lower bloom levels
 * fixed position of reflection effect when screen is rotated or
    flipped
 * fixed roundness and size of rounded corners in any aspect ratio
 * added distortion pass, which is applied after the bloom pass and
    moved curvature, vignetting, rounded corners and reflection effect
    to this pass
 * fixed bloom stair-step artifacts when screen is curved
 * added smooth border effect and option, its amount is limited by the
    amount of rounded corners
 * added bloom overdrive effect and options, this effect allows to
    overdrive pure colors like red, green and blue to become more
    brighter
 * merged vector and raster bloom options, use vector.ini or
    raster.ini to distinguish
 * added raster.ini and lcd.ini to parse_standard_inis()
 * added bounds() and screen_bounds() getter to layout_view
 * added current_view() getter to render_target
 * many other small changes and refactoring
 * fixed vector intensity
 * fixed vector flicker
 * replace beam width by beam width min. and beam width max. width, this
   makes it possible to create a linear dynamic beam width by the amount
   of intensity of the beam
 * added beam intensity weight, this adds an exponential factor to the
   dynamic beam width (values greater than 0 will push larger intensities
   more than smaller intensities)
 * fixed ratio of "vector points" (zero-length lines)
You may create a vector.ini and toss it in your ini folder.

Code: [Select]

hlsl_enable               1
hlslpath                  hlsl
hlsl_prescale_x           8
hlsl_prescale_y           8
hlsl_preset               -1
hlsl_write               
hlsl_snap_width           3200
hlsl_snap_height          1800
shadow_mask_alpha         0.5
shadow_mask_texture       shadow-mask.png
shadow_mask_x_count       6
shadow_mask_y_count       4
shadow_mask_usize         0.1875
shadow_mask_vsize         0.25
shadow_mask_uoffset       0.0
shadow_mask_voffset       0.0
curvature                 0
round_corner              0
smooth_border             0
reflection                0
vignetting                0
scanline_alpha            0
scanline_size             1.0
scanline_height           1.0
scanline_bright_scale     2.0
scanline_bright_offset    0.0
scanline_jitter           0.0
defocus                   0.5,0.5
converge_x                0.0,0.0,0.0
converge_y                0.0,0.0,0.0
radial_converge_x         0.0,0.0,0.0
radial_converge_y         0.0,0.0,0.0
red_ratio                 1.05,0.00,0.10
grn_ratio                 -0.10,1.00,0.25
blu_ratio                 -0.25,0.25,1.25
saturation                1.25
offset                    -0.30,-0.20,-0.05
scale                     1.15,1.05,0.90
power                     0.90,0.90,1.15
floor                     0.0,0.0,0.0
phosphor_life             0.5,0.5,0.5

#
# VECTOR POST-PROCESSING OPTIONS
#
vector_length_scale       0.8
vector_length_ratio       500.0

#
# BLOOM POST-PROCESSING OPTIONS
#
bloom_scale               1.50
bloom_overdrive           1.50,1.50,1.50
bloom_lvl0_weight         1.00
bloom_lvl1_weight         0.64
bloom_lvl2_weight         0.32
bloom_lvl3_weight         0.16
bloom_lvl4_weight         0.24
bloom_lvl5_weight         0.32
bloom_lvl6_weight         0.48
bloom_lvl7_weight         0.32
bloom_lvl8_weight         0.24
bloom_lvl9_weight         0.16
bloom_lvl10_weight        0.08
Here's some global settings in mame.ini to get you started.

Code: [Select]

hlsl_enable               1
hlslpath                  hlsl
hlsl_prescale_x           8
hlsl_prescale_y           8
hlsl_preset               -1
hlsl_write               
hlsl_snap_width           3200
hlsl_snap_height          1800
shadow_mask_alpha         0.5
shadow_mask_texture       shadow-mask.png
shadow_mask_x_count       6
shadow_mask_y_count       4
shadow_mask_usize         0.1875
shadow_mask_vsize         0.25
shadow_mask_uoffset       0.0
shadow_mask_voffset       0.0
curvature                 0.0
round_corner              0.0
smooth_border             0.0
reflection                0.25
vignetting                0.25
scanline_alpha            0.75
scanline_size             1.0
scanline_height           1.0
scanline_bright_scale     2.0
scanline_bright_offset    0.0
scanline_jitter           0.0
defocus                   1.0,0.0
converge_x                0.0,0.0,0.0
converge_y                0.0,0.0,0.0
radial_converge_x         0.0,0.0,0.0
radial_converge_y         0.0,0.0,0.0
red_ratio                 1.05,0.00,0.10
grn_ratio                 -0.10,1.00,0.25
blu_ratio                 -0.25,0.25,1.25
saturation                1.25
offset                    -0.30,-0.20,-0.05
scale                     1.15,1.05,0.90
power                     0.90,0.90,1.15
floor                     0.05,0.05,0.05
phosphor_life             0.5,0.5,0.5

#
# NTSC POST-PROCESSING OPTIONS
#
yiq_enable                0
yiq_cc                    3.59754545
yiq_a                     0.5
yiq_b                     0.5
yiq_o                     1.570796325
yiq_p                     1.0
yiq_n                     1.0
yiq_y                     6.0
yiq_i                     1.2
yiq_q                     0.6
yiq_scan_time             52.6
yiq_phase_count           2

#
# VECTOR POST-PROCESSING OPTIONS
#
vector_length_scale       0.8
vector_length_ratio       40.0

#
# BLOOM POST-PROCESSING OPTIONS
#
bloom_scale               0.050
bloom_overdrive           0.0,0.0,0.0
bloom_lvl0_weight         1.0
bloom_lvl1_weight         0.21
bloom_lvl2_weight         0.19
bloom_lvl3_weight         0.17
bloom_lvl4_weight         0.15
bloom_lvl5_weight         0.14
bloom_lvl6_weight         0.13
bloom_lvl7_weight         0.12
bloom_lvl8_weight         0.11
bloom_lvl9_weight         0.10
bloom_lvl10_weight        0.09

[dkersten]

So your solution is to severely limit our options by giving us a choice of a whopping 2 front-ends, one of which is so graphically busy that half the community hates it with a furious passion. 

That's about as dumb a suggestion as using mameui or using the command line. 

Again, mame should be able to print a  useable, filterable, game list by itself.  It was one thing when mame just did arcade games and the game count was fairly small but now mame is so huge it takes it 1-2 minutes just to print the frikkin xml file!

You're already limiting your own options, so please continue on with your scripts and filtering. What's next? Individual batch files?
Good luck with that.

I have some 30,000 different roms  I "could" play, so if shaving it down to ~2,000 that I would *maybe* consider playing someday is "limiting", then yes, what Howard is talking about is limiting our options.  But it's limiting our options down to only the things that are of even remote interest to us.  Frankly I would rather be "limited" to just the arcade games that are playable than to have the flexibility to fire up that adult mahjong reel game (that doesn't even really work) if I ever get a wild hair up ---my bottom---.

Like Howard mentioned, the XML file is so damn long you have to get special text editors to even be able to load and edit it.  If you use LEDBlinky, it has to read that file when you first enter your FE, so even if you only have 5 games on your cab and boot silently right into your FE, it can take upwards of 5 minutes (2 minutes on a loaded core i7 machine) after your FE is completely loaded before your LEDs come on because it is busy grinding through an XML file with tens of thousands of lines of data that is 90% completely irrelevant to this hobby.

[yotsuya]

Hard drive space is cheap. I just dumped the complete set on my cab and use the FE to filter out what I need.

[BadMouth]

Is Romlister still functional since MAME/MESS have merged and the xml format has changed?

That's how I did all my pruning back at v.146.
It wasn't about saving hard drive space.
It was about having a smaller xml file that I could modify more quickly (for the purpose of adding non-mame arcade games to my MAME gamelist).
The original xml file is so huge that the computer would freeze for a long time after making any change or adding a game.  (and that was before it incorporated MESS)

I plan to add a newer version just for Raiden 2, but it will be treated as a separate emulator and not disturb my current MAME installation.

[Yenome]

Is Romlister still functional since MAME/MESS have merged and the xml format has changed?

That's how I did all my pruning back at v.146.
It wasn't about saving hard drive space.
It was about having a smaller xml file that I could modify more quickly (for the purpose of adding non-mame arcade games to my MAME gamelist).
The original xml file is so huge that the computer would freeze for a long time after making any change or adding a game.  (and that was before it incorporated MESS)

I plan to add a newer version just for Raiden 2, but it will be treated as a separate emulator and not disturb my current MAME installation.

Its been updated i used it last night i have version 031.2 there may even be a newer version out.

[B2K24]

Hard drive space is cheap. I just dumped the complete set on my cab and use the FE to filter out what I need.

OMG! someone in this thread actually has some common sense. Welcome to the club matey 

[B2K24]

I have some 30,000 different roms  I "could" play, so if shaving it down to ~2,000 that I would *maybe* consider playing someday is "limiting", then yes, what Howard is talking about is limiting our options.  But it's limiting our options down to only the things that are of even remote interest to us.  Frankly I would rather be "limited" to just the arcade games that are playable than to have the flexibility to fire up that adult mahjong reel game (that doesn't even really work) if I ever get a wild hair up ---my bottom---.

Like Howard mentioned, the XML file is so damn long you have to get special text editors to even be able to load and edit it.  If you use LEDBlinky, it has to read that file when you first enter your FE, so even if you only have 5 games on your cab and boot silently right into your FE, it can take upwards of 5 minutes (2 minutes on a loaded core i7 machine) after your FE is completely loaded before your LEDs come on because it is busy grinding through an XML file with tens of thousands of lines of data that is 90% completely irrelevant to this hobby.

So you're having to do a bunch of horrible work because this FE author either won't update his FE to make things function more efficiently or development no longer occurs.

That sucks for you. I tried telling you better options exist but it seems you're stubborn in either your set ways or won't switch FE to something that's still actively developed and doesn't have such issues/problems. 

[dkersten]

I have some 30,000 different roms  I "could" play, so if shaving it down to ~2,000 that I would *maybe* consider playing someday is "limiting", then yes, what Howard is talking about is limiting our options.  But it's limiting our options down to only the things that are of even remote interest to us.  Frankly I would rather be "limited" to just the arcade games that are playable than to have the flexibility to fire up that adult mahjong reel game (that doesn't even really work) if I ever get a wild hair up ---my bottom---.

Like Howard mentioned, the XML file is so damn long you have to get special text editors to even be able to load and edit it.  If you use LEDBlinky, it has to read that file when you first enter your FE, so even if you only have 5 games on your cab and boot silently right into your FE, it can take upwards of 5 minutes (2 minutes on a loaded core i7 machine) after your FE is completely loaded before your LEDs come on because it is busy grinding through an XML file with tens of thousands of lines of data that is 90% completely irrelevant to this hobby.

So you're having to do a bunch of horrible work because this FE author either won't update his FE to make things function more efficiently or development no longer occurs.

That sucks for you. I tried telling you better options exist but it seems you're stubborn in either your set ways or won't switch FE to something that's still actively developed and doesn't have such issues/problems.

Still the best FE out there (IMHO of course), which is probably because nobody wants to make a better one because MAME/MESS has become so insanely bloated that you would have to pretty much come up with your own database and then tweak it every few months when a new version of MAME comes out.  As stated earlier, Hyperspin is an overbloated piece of garbage that practically requires a high end computer just to run smoothly. 

I'm sure you will come back and say that some other FE is the best, but of course it's subjective... next you will be telling me what the best arcade game is and how to play it to get the best enjoyment.  Yet for some reason people like me are "limiting" ourselves.  Starting to sound like a Steve Jobs pitch here: selling us on what YOU think is best for us rather than what WE really want.

[vwalbridge]

As stated earlier, Hyperspin is an overbloated piece of garbage that practically requires a high end computer just to run smoothly. 

I'll have to politely disagree with this. I've used Hyperspin on 3 different builds:

- Intel NUC with integrated graphics
- Zotac Pico (Atom Processor) with integrated graphics
- Core2 with integrated graphics

I was able to tweak Hyperspin to run flawlessly in each of the 3 systems.This included using game preview video.  None of them were powerhouses by any means. And NONE of them had discrete graphics cards. 

Unfortunately, Hyperpspin gets a bad rap because people simply don't take the time to understand how it works. I can do just about anything I want with it now. I guarantee I could get it working on a low-end computer with enough tweaking.

The problem is, people spend so much time building their arcades that by the time they get close to the finish line, their patience has worn out and they treat the FE like an afterthought. Therefor, they just want something they can slap on a computer and have it work. Hyperspin is not for impatient people but I happen to think that it is worth the reward. I'll never put anything else in my cab.

[Howard_Casto]

I'm going to have to politely disagree with your disagreement. 

I know my stuff, trust me on this one, and hyperspin would be functionally inert without 2 dozen people writing plug-ins for it to cover it's obvious flaws.  Mind you there is nothing wrong with that at all, but it means the average user has to learn the ins and outs of hyperspin and all the plugins.  Even then it isn't easy and the majority of people who use the FE use some pre-made list that someone else included and are so clueless to the fe's function that they can't do something as simple as adding a custom game correctly. 

I will also say that your definition of powerhouse must be different than ours.  Hyperspin needs a dual core 2ghz+ to run smoothly at a high resolution (if you are using low resolution why would you use hyperspin?)  That's not a super powerful pc by any means but it isn't what a lot of people use either.... we have a guy in the software forums right now trying to tweak his 1.75ghz Pentium 4.  Mind you I wouldn't use something that puny at this point, but there are builds out there that would.

I'm not going to go as far as dkersten, but let's just say that hyperspin isn't for everyone and leave it at that.

[vwalbridge]

I'm going to have to politely disagree with your disagreement. 

I know my stuff, trust me on this one, and hyperspin would be functionally inert without 2 dozen people writing plug-ins for it to cover it's obvious flaws.  Mind you there is nothing wrong with that at all, but it means the average user has to learn the ins and outs of hyperspin and all the plugins.  Even then it isn't easy and the majority of people who use the FE use some pre-made list that someone else included and are so clueless to the fe's function that they can't do something as simple as adding a custom game correctly. 

I will also say that your definition of powerhouse must be different than ours.  Hyperspin needs a dual core 2ghz+ to run smoothly at a high resolution (if you are using low resolution why would you use hyperspin?)  That's not a super powerful pc by any means but it isn't what a lot of people use either.... we have a guy in the software forums right now trying to tweak his 1.75ghz Pentium 4.  Mind you I wouldn't use something that puny at this point, but there are builds out there that would.

I'm not going to go as far as dkersten, but let's just say that hyperspin isn't for everyone and leave it at that.

I will agree, it's not for everyone. So what FE do you think is the best? (You have to pick just one)

BTW, I used Mame Hooker on my mini Qbert and it works PERFECTLY! Thank you so much for that awesome app. I feel like I should throw you a few bucks for it. Got a paypal account? PM me.

[Howard_Casto]

Which ever one the person using it thinks is best.  That's kind of the point.  Options... they are good to have. 

I'm a fan of GameEx and Mamewah.  People will take offense to this, but a lot of the other ones (excluding hyperspin, which is very unique)  just re-hash things the FEs I used to write did.  It's certainly understandable, I haven't updated mine in quite some time and a lot of the features/ideas are a foregone conclusion, but needless to say they don't interest me for that reason. 

I appreciate the thought, but you don't owe me a red cent.  Mamehooker was something absent that we needed, me and headkaze were glad to do it. 

Just keep that attitude in mind when I start writing phone/tablet/metro apps for the community though.  I'm probably going to charge a small fee for those. 

[vwalbridge]

Thanks Howard_Casto. You're very generous with your work and I appreciate all the work you have put into your products. 

[jtslade]

I would imagine those massive libraries are so folks can demo their cabs with hyperspin via youtube.

lol. You know you're happy with your cabinet when the thing you show off the most is the game select menu.

To be honest about the download thing, most people I'm sure download a giant torrent and hope everything is in it. I hate doing it, but I have backed it up onto a few bluray discs and likely won't do it again for a long time. I personally do play some of the adult games, and have an all-games list on my cab that takes like 8 minutes to scroll through without stopping. But it's mostly there for when I hear of an interesting game and want to play it. 99% of the time I just leave my menu up on the favourites list and most people are happy with that. But yeah it is a waste to download all that crap, and even worse to then leave 80% of that hogging room on a hard drive. I'm always scared to delete anything because of how easily you can mess up something else due to weird dependencies

Exactly,. On a podcast or some forum someone says you gotta check this awesome, awful, weird, funny game out.

I can go and find it


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[ark_ader]

So in order to play classic games on an arcade cabinet today we have to:

1. Download a huge amount of data which 20% actually does something (hopefully).  Assuming we are all on fiber...

2. Determine which Front-Ends to display this 20% content and select it on screen (which does take huge amount of time to get configured).

3. Purchase a top end PC to play the 20% content, due to the crap the MameDevs impose on requirements now.

4. Play such content for 30 minutes (if you are lucky) on a weekend, in a basement/garage, on an old stand up machine.

Versus

CoinOPS which you can play 100% content and get to lay on your couch after a 10 sec boot time and play your favorite classic game on a big screen TV.

Let us hear the stats on that Howard.

[Yenome]

So in order to play classic games on an arcade cabinet today we have to:

1. Download a huge amount of data which 20% actually does something (hopefully).  Assuming we are all on fiber...

2. Determine which Front-Ends to display this 20% content and select it on screen (which does take huge amount of time to get configured).

3. Purchase a top end PC to play the 20% content, due to the crap the MameDevs impose on requirements now.

4. Play such content for 30 minutes (if you are lucky) on a weekend, in a basement/garage, on an old stand up machine.

Versus

CoinOPS which you can play 100% content and get to lay on your couch after a 10 sec boot time and play your favorite classic game on a big screen TV.

Let us hear the stats on that Howard.

100% of what content? not 100% of the games that mame runs. coinops compared to the pitiful pentium dual core i used in my bartop. The pentium plays more games at speed than coinops. I do like the fast boot time of coinops. But with an SSD and linux(altho my gaming rig boots in 12 seconds on windows 10)  i would have the same thing. I may just be an exception but i dont have any game i dont have the controls for so on my bartop i dont have a light gun so those are out. with coinops i have the analog stick from the xbox controller so i can use that for lightgun games.

[Howard_Casto]

Exactly.  I don't get how he can't see that.  I can buy a 50 dollar xbox and play whatever games will run on a 700mhz cpu or buy a 50 dollar pc from somewhere like arrowdirect and run everything but the games with 3d hardware acceleration.  Also it's great if you like what coinOps has selected for you, but otherwise you are screwed.

CoinOps plays far fewer games than your typical junk pc mame build does. Not to mention the fact that most people use more than mame on a mame cab.  Supermodel, demul, ect ect.... none of these games are available on coinops. 

[pbj]

Yeah, CoinOps is like those 60 in 1s.  Pretty damned great if that's all you want to play. 

[Howard_Casto]

Yeah, CoinOps is like those 60 in 1s.  Pretty damned great if that's all you want to play.

Exactly.  I'm not knocking the setup because like you say it's a fine solution if that's what you want to play.  It just doesn't apply as a solution to the problem we are facing... at least not for most people. 

I'm not denying that right now running a current build of mame is a huge pain in the butt.... that's what I was complaining about all along.  I'd rather find a true solution instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater though.

[ark_ader]

Yeah, CoinOps is like those 60 in 1s.  Pretty damned great if that's all you want to play.

Exactly.  I'm not knocking the setup because like you say it's a fine solution if that's what you want to play.  It just doesn't apply as a solution to the problem we are facing... at least not for most people. 

I'm not denying that right now running a current build of mame is a huge pain in the butt.... that's what I was complaining about all along.  I'd rather find a true solution instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater though.

I have both PC and console, but it is tiring to keep up with it.  The PC at Arrow Direct for $50 has a nice graphics card in it, but I have to stop and downgrade MAME as most games just do not work properly, then I have to mirror the drives, and have several backups on hand, a new version comes out and it all has to start again....

To be honest it is a ---smurfing--- nightmare and I do not play more than 10 games out of that whole content in a month, in addition to the other cabinet friendly games I have.   Enough is enough.

CoinOPS is a blessing in disguise.  Not the same I know but you get my drift, right?  Or maybe I am falling out of favor with it all.

[B2K24]

I have both PC and console, but it is tiring to keep up with it.  The PC at Arrow Direct for $50 has a nice graphics card in it, but I have to stop and downgrade MAME as most games just do not work properly, then I have to mirror the drives, and have several backups on hand, a new version comes out and it all has to start again....

To be honest it is a ---smurfing--- nightmare and I do not play more than 10 games out of that whole content in a month, in addition to the other cabinet friendly games I have.   Enough is enough.

CoinOPS is a blessing in disguise.  Not the same I know but you get my drift, right?  Or maybe I am falling out of favor with it all.

Damn filthy casuals.

Sometimes I'd spend 50 bucks in a single weekend during the mid - late 90's

*facepalms*

MAME gives you the ability to run Arcade/Consoles/Computers from all over the world and much more easily with softlist loading.

If something so simple is too complex for you guys to keep everything organized . Then by all means stick to your coin OP junk boxes 

[dkersten]

Exactly,. On a podcast or some forum someone says you gotta check this awesome, awful, weird, funny game out.

I can go and find it

But let's be honest, how often is that awesome, awful, weird, funny game part of the 80% of the junk you shouldn't have and don't even need in the complete MAME list?  If you look back to the start of this thread, we are talking about having an easy way to filter out all the crap nobody wants.  Even if you are into checking out some oddball game, filtering out all the mahjong and gambling games as well as games that don't work and the clones of games that do, you will still find it in the ~4,000 titles left. 

We use MAME because we want all the games to be available, even if we don't play them.  But MAME isn't about games you would ever play, it's about emulating anything that isn't x86 based (oversimplification, yes).  I came to this forum to figure out how to build my own cabinet so I could play arcade games.  Not so I could play arcade games on other devices, not so I could play gambling games or mahjong, and not to have a library of games that have not been emulated properly yet.  I just want to load up a list of all playable GAMES without having to spend 50 hours making it work right.  I don't want some kind of spinning menu, this isn't wheel of fortune.  I don't need a supercomputer to run my FE, I already have my PC gaming rig that I dump tons of money into so I can play Fallout 4 on max settings.  On my cab I want to play Pacman, DK, Centipede, and maybe some obscure game I found in an arcade when I was 12 and played for 6 hours.  I want to play some fighting games and maybe even one that came out in the last two decades because I like fighting games on a stand up cab.  And I want it to look like something from an arcade but customized just enough to make it MINE.  So why isn't there any easy solution to do all this?  The learning curve to get to where I am now is insane because MAME is so overstuffed with garbage nobody cares about and the supporting software can't keep up.  Sadly, it gets worse each year.

[yotsuya]

Because the MAME developers don't care about your cab, their goal is to document and emulate their machines from those decades, including the ones you never played. Just like the Pi developers don't care about your bartop project, they have different goals. If you want to do something different than their stated goals, that's your problem, not thers.

[Grasshopper]

Because the MAME developers don't care about your cab, their goal is to document and emulate their machines from those decades, including the ones you never played. Just like the Pi developers don't care about your bartop project, they have different goals. If you want to do something different than their stated goals, that's your problem, not thers.

I agree that, as they're doing the work, they're perfectly entitled to take the project in any direction they choose, however misguided. However, the whole "documenting the hardware" line was introduced quite late in the day. The original MAME developers were much more focused on actually playing the games.

My solution is simply to keep on using an older version of MAME. Sure, it's a shame to miss out on some bugfixes, and the tiny number of worthwhile games that have only become available in more recent versions of MAME. But I'm afraid that the current Mamedevs have made the price too high for me.

[Howard_Casto]

Yeah but again, you just aren't getting it.  The issues we are facing contradict the spirit of a documentation project. 

Go back and read my replies again and maybe you'll understand.  A library of hardware has been created without any card catalog, indexing system or librarians.  This is horrible and unorganized regardless of if you are a guy interested in the chips used for cps2 games or a guy running mame on a cabinet.  Without some basic categories you have to know what games/drivers you are looking for ahead of time and that is NOT how you learn new things.  You do so by finding things you don't know anything about. 

It can't be billed as a documentation project if they are unwilling to document things. 

[yotsuya]

My comments are directed towards us builders and how we use MAME. If you want it to work a certain way, just do it that way. You're not going to change the focus of the project. Get over it and get on with it.

[ark_ader]

It can't be billed as a documentation project if they are unwilling to document things.

The Mamedevs have been saying that for years so they don't get sued or thrown in jail.  Its always about the games and how fast they can get "their" wish list together.  Most of the core stuff we use was done years ago by more accomplished programmers than we have today.  It is a lost cause, and only a few coders remain from the old days, like Haze.  He ranted as much if you can remember a few years back about the state of the project.  Maybe Aaron will come back and lead them from the dark.  Just don't hold your breath.

Document?