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Author Topic: Using a Laptop for a MAME build.....good idea/bad idea ?  (Read 18567 times)

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mike boss

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Using a Laptop for a MAME build.....good idea/bad idea ?
« on: January 16, 2018, 08:29:05 am »
Unsure if this is the best place for this topic, forgive me if I should have put it somewhere else.

Anyone ever use a laptop in a MAME build before ?
I'm having some issues with one of my existing MAME set ups.
I've tried to resolve the issue, but no dice.
Rather than format and do a clean install on that PC, I was looking to put a different (older/used) PC in the cabinet.
As opposed to spending the few bucks I remember my aunt gave me an old laptop I'd never use.
Spec wise the laptop has more power than the existing PC I'm using in the cabinet.
And I think all in all the laptop would be sufficient memory wise, etc for what I need.
Typically I've always used a desktop PC for these type set ups, but trying to be cheap honestly I thought about using the laptop.
It isn't a cab that gets tons of play

The laptop is a Compaq Presario F500 and I want to use it for my vertical MAME cabinet. So essentially games you'd find on a 60-in-1 board.
Found a few specs online :

Specs

Model: F560US (GF593UA)
CPU: 25W AMD Sempron 3500+ 1.8GHz 1600MHz FSB 512K L2 Cache.
Chipset: Nvidia.
Memory: 512MB DDR2 P5300 2 Slots, 1 Open 2GB Max.
Hard Drive: 80GB 5400RPM Fujitsu (MHV2100BH) SATA.
Screen: 15.4" WXGA 1280 x 800 Glossy.
Optical Drive: LiteOn DS8A1P DVD+/-RW/-RAM.

Drnick

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Re: Using a Laptop for a MAME build.....good idea/bad idea ?
« Reply #1 on: January 23, 2018, 02:54:23 am »
Shouldn't be a problem.  As long as there is an option to output to vga with lid closed and you can figure a way of turning it on then it will be fine.

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Re: Using a Laptop for a MAME build.....good idea/bad idea ?
« Reply #2 on: January 23, 2018, 09:57:57 pm »
This is how I run my multi use cab.  It is jamma with a jpac and a cga-vga monitor so i can just plug in whatever I want if not in a mame mood.
Plus I can use it for rom downloads, googling or formatting pi setups as needed.


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Vigo

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Re: Using a Laptop for a MAME build.....good idea/bad idea ?
« Reply #3 on: January 24, 2018, 11:26:46 pm »
Use an older version of MAME, modern mame requirements are obscene when it comes to some games like Frogger. Keep a lower resolution on your monitor as well, like 800 x 600, my experience is that video output at higher resolutions can be a tad taxing on older laptops.

Pay attention to how you plan on booting this. On a PC, you can wire up a button to the mobo. Laptops are not so easy. You can solder to the laptop board, but it can be a pain.

Laptops, especially older ones, have a tighter margin for safe temps, can overheat inside a cabinet if pushed. Make sure to clean out the laptop with canned air and give it ventilation space.


mike boss

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Re: Using a Laptop for a MAME build.....good idea/bad idea ?
« Reply #4 on: January 26, 2018, 05:22:45 pm »
Thanks guys for the info.

I'm currently still working on the PC (laptop) end.
I plan on using MAME 124b I believe it is.
It's the version I run on my other 2 MAME machines.
I have the required ROM set for that build.
I also checked the resolution and I plan on running it at 800x600 as suggested.
Hoping to have the PC set up and configured in a week or so.
Not getting much time with two little kiddies here pulling me away from the project.

Haze

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Re: Using a Laptop for a MAME build.....good idea/bad idea ?
« Reply #5 on: January 27, 2018, 04:34:21 pm »
Use an older version of MAME, modern mame requirements are obscene when it comes to some games like Frogger.

Obscene to the point of 'only' running at 2000% speed on my PC...

Quit your trolling.

MAME isn't optimized to run on your toaster, but yeah, if PC power is available we're going to use it to improve the emulation but Frogger isn't even a good example of where things have got slow.  I'd need a PC 20x slower than this for it to struggle and it's fair to say any PC 20x slower than this would be better used as a paperweight anyway.


« Last Edit: January 27, 2018, 04:37:53 pm by Haze »

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Re: Using a Laptop for a MAME build.....good idea/bad idea ?
« Reply #6 on: January 27, 2018, 07:39:44 pm »
I'm not gonna throw out my laptop simply to run a newer mame. There is a beauty about older revisions of mame and it does everything it needs to do. It's not trolling to appreciate that. So no, George Lucas, your special edition isn't for everyone.   ;)


Haze

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Re: Using a Laptop for a MAME build.....good idea/bad idea ?
« Reply #7 on: January 27, 2018, 09:45:13 pm »
I'm not gonna throw out my laptop simply to run a newer mame. There is a beauty about older revisions of mame and it does everything it needs to do. It's not trolling to appreciate that. So no, George Lucas, your special edition isn't for everyone.   ;)

Sorry, but such massive exaggerations are nothing but trolling.

Any machine that struggles to run Frogger isn't going to have much life left in it at this point anyway.  Frogger isn't slow, not by a long shot.

You'd have to be using incredibly bad hardware for Frogger to struggle, and if you're using hardware that bad the experience is going to be terrible anyway.

Old versions of MAME have awful emulation, and as somebody who has worked on extensively improving MAME for the best part of 20 years I can't begin to overstate that, I don't think there's a single driver that hasn't seen important fixes compared to the versions people seem to think are 'fine'.  Even the classics are pretty damn awful in the old versions if you compare carefully, especially in areas like the sound emulation, but if that's "everything it needs to do" then I guess I can't argue with people just having exceptionally low standards.

Either way, you should always start at the newest version, and if you encounter an issue, work your way down until you find something that works, not just ignore the work that's been done because of some false idea that Frogger now has 'obscene' requirements, so yes, I consider your post either uneducated & ill-informed or outright trolling.  I felt the need to reply because it was one of the most stupid things I'd read so far this year.

There are other reasons why a laptop *might* struggle with current versions, and that's the integrated video chipsets, because despite what people seem to think MAME does require require at least basic DirectX features to work and many Intel integrated chipsets fail to support even the most basic of features properly, and were cut off from working entirely because even with 1000 hacks in the codebase to try and keep them working they were just too much trouble and said hacks were impossible to maintain when it was very much the hardware and drivers at fault.  Again, if you've got one of those chipsets even with old versions it's going to be a bad / unstable / randomly glitchy experience anyway tho, they just weren't good pieces of hardware and some the drivers would even leak memory often resulting in the entire systems crashing after about 2 hours use in applications like MAME.


« Last Edit: January 27, 2018, 10:00:07 pm by Haze »

Vigo

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Re: Using a Laptop for a MAME build.....good idea/bad idea ?
« Reply #8 on: January 27, 2018, 11:59:51 pm »
Either way, you should always start at the newest version, and if you encounter an issue, work your way down until you find something that works, not just ignore the work that's been done because of some false idea that Frogger now has 'obscene' requirements, so yes, I consider your post either uneducated & ill-informed or outright trolling.  I felt the need to reply because it was one of the most stupid things I'd read so far this year.

Yeah, let me get on to downloading that 50-150 gig romset (seems size depending on format and source), only to waste time weeding out roms for mechanical machines, fruit machines, obscure computer terminals and commercial appliances or whatever some of that stuff is to taper it down to a good 200 mb of to run arcade games. And BTW, is there a sane way manage this without needing 3rd party tools? If not, when will this update be available in Mame?

And bro, I have respect for the archive you and a select few have built, but it is a departure from what many people want, and that's why I went with the Lucas analogy.

Star wars from the 70's was awesome. 80's had come classy and subtle updates. 90's got weird with Greedo shooting first and elevator music singing Ewoks, but some people were into the updates. Now we have the eyebrows removed off of Darth Vader in the name of plotline accuracy, and most people feel the changes just jumped the shark. It doesn't mean those people don't like Star Wars. It doesn't mean they don't appreciate the improvements and visual splendor the newest star wars on blu ray provides. Just maybe we don't want to deal with ghost Hayden Christensen and Han stomping on Jabba's tail in order to get those improvements.   

Howard_Casto

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Re: Using a Laptop for a MAME build.....good idea/bad idea ?
« Reply #9 on: January 28, 2018, 02:02:36 am »
^^THIS THIS THIS^^

Man I wish we had a rep system. 

+100 Imaginary reps to you Vigo.

Like I've said.... if it's a damn archive then it needs a card catalog.  Without an easy way to sort roms and make arcade only gamelists, mame has been ruined, despite all the great work that has went into it over the past few years. 


Haze

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Re: Using a Laptop for a MAME build.....good idea/bad idea ?
« Reply #10 on: January 28, 2018, 08:50:53 am »
Well keep living in the rancid cesspool that is the older versions if somehow it makes you happy.

But the progress is undeniable.

Meanwhile I'll enjoy good emulation that makes better use of the hardware available to use without any stupid imaginary limits being applied to what we can / can't do.

I'm glad people like you and howard are a million miles away from deciding what MAME can / can't do, because it would be a travesty if you had a say in it.

The project is absolutely mindblowing right now, it's everything it should always have been, literally one of the best pieces of software I've ever encountered and it's only getting better, far better, doing things we never even imagined possible and that's coming from somebody who isn't even especially fond of the people who are currently managing it.  The results are undeniable tho, the very things you and Howard are rallying against have brought about improvements that I thought I'd be dead before I saw.

I can't stop you using old versions, even if I wish they could be buried forever (the very nature of the project means even if that would be best, it's not what we're going to do, as showing how MAME has improved over the years is as much a part of the story as showing how other things have) but I can say that recommending them is stupid.

Thankfully we've seen more people using new versions of MAME than ever before in the entire history of the project, which kinda suggests we're doing something right considering before the recent work that people here are complaining about the project was fading into obscurity.  (and even then this specific scene was one of the *least* supportive of the project even before the scope expanded, again continually telling people to use old versions, which means I'm less inclined to care about views here, sometimes you just have to ignore what are basically toxic userbases that just want to hold things back)

Maybe it's just not being specifically tailored to your needs anymore, but times change.  Technology moves on, projects move on.  However, even the arcade improvements even over the last year were nothing short of amazing, the impossible was done so many times as a result of the new people involved in the project.  The nicest thing to hear are comments like "Wow, I didn't even know you COULD emulate those"

It's entirely possible that in the next year or two there won't be a single Taito game left relying on inaccurate or unreliable protection simulations, yet rewind a handful of years and practically all of them were, MAME has gone from rough approximations of how those games were meant to be, to actually running all the original code from the PCB.  If you want Star Wars / movie analogies this is like rediscovering the ORIGINAL footage of a movie and taking out replacement hacked together scenes that were filmed for a special edition and instead using the proper footage that is now available.  Except you know the main thing that happens when we do this?  People moan that the romsets have changed....  and again start saying "well the romsets change, you should use an old version"  The extra data / footage isn't going to magically appear in your possession.

The selfless and educated choice would be accept what MAME is and realise the emulation is always improving and understand the fantastic job it is doing to help the preservation of thousands of pieces of software and hardware, even if some of them aren't specifically things you care about.  Or you could just cry like a baby because maybe you have to do a bit more work yourself, and continue to tell people to use old versions, like you always have.  Maybe you could try and do worse and be actively disruptive to the process and screw things up for everybody 20 years from now, but we've just got to remain optimistic that enough people can see the good MAME is doing, and based on evidence we've seen so far, they do.


« Last Edit: January 28, 2018, 09:18:47 am by Haze »

keilmillerjr

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Re: Using a Laptop for a MAME build.....good idea/bad idea ?
« Reply #11 on: January 28, 2018, 09:51:33 am »
I’ve been following news and constantly updating my romset. Updates have been huge over the past two years? We have monthly releases now!

Haze

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Re: Using a Laptop for a MAME build.....good idea/bad idea ?
« Reply #12 on: January 28, 2018, 10:10:05 am »
I’ve been following news and constantly updating my romset. Updates have been huge over the past two years? We have monthly releases now!

Right, over the last year and a bit the following Taito and related drivers all saw big improvements, even if they might not be visible on first boot.

Buggy Challenge
Big Event Golf
Wyvern F-0
Chack'n Pop
Get Star / Guardian
Field Day/Undoukai
Onna Sanshirou
Rumba Lumber
Tokio
Nekketsu Kouha Kunio-kun (Japanese Renegade)
Prebillian
Sky Destroyer
Cycle Mabou
Return of the Invaders
Xain'd Sleena

I mean that's a list of 15 80s games that Taito were involved in developing (or publishing / providing hardware for) that have been improved to the point of us being able to look at things like the old simulation code and go 'Oops, we got that wrong' all come about due to new techniques and the involvement of new people in the project.  Sometimes it might be 'small' things like scoring not working, other cases it was previously no sound, or maybe even the game not working properly at all once you reached a certain stage.  There are even some that actually improved over the year but we decided the quality of the emulation was never good enough, so despite being emulated better than ever they now have a NOT WORKING tag on them, because they probably shouldn't have been marked as working in the first place, just lower standards and a lack of available references back them made us think they were emulated properly when they weren't.  Marine Date, another Taito game from the 80s is one of those.

That's also only the Taito / Taito related bits.  In any other year that work *alone* would have been considered miraculous.  That's not even the extensive list for the Taito hardware stuff either, I've specifically not included simple clones on different hardware that otherwise look and play the same, but previously weren't emulated properly such as Slap Fight, where now all 3 known original versions have their correct MCUs dumped and emulated.  It was also possible to verify that MCUs for games like The Fairyland Story, and Legend of Kage were good, despite coming from unprotected chips back in the day (which could easily have meant they were bootleg code, not the original, like we saw on so many Bubble Bobbles) so while the emulation there didn't change, the trust level increased.

If your only requirement is 'boots to the title screen and seems to play' then you could probably happily ignore all that, but if you actually want something that holds up over time then you seriously have to look at how MAME has improved.

Also love it or hate it, the move away from doing purely Arcade stuff has been the best decision ever made by the team based on how it has helped actually improve things and got new people working on drivers, both for arcade and non-arcade systems.  Who are we to tell them their work isn't as important just because some small faction of the scene deems it so?  Prior to the merger the team was ready to disband MAME, the interest on working on the arcade side of things just wasn't there anymore.  It was a few releases away from being a dead project because everybody just wanted to do other things.  Since then it's been revitalized, people are having fun working on it again, myself included, the freedom to jump between emulating an arcade system (PGM2) and obscure TV Game devices (Radica Arcade Classics Space Invader) and pointless addons for the Playstation (Datel Game Booster Gameboy emulator) and not care about where they were used makes for a far better work environment.
« Last Edit: January 28, 2018, 10:56:22 am by Haze »

Vigo

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Re: Using a Laptop for a MAME build.....good idea/bad idea ?
« Reply #13 on: January 28, 2018, 01:21:13 pm »
Well that was a whole heap of TL;DR.  You kicking it off by calling past revisions of mame a "rancid cesspool" is evidence that you are the George Lucas of Mame.

My skimming your wall of text looks like you are only ranting how my suggestion is denying people a handful of obscure games. For that loss, I do regret it, but it still is an entirely worthwhile tradeoff. (That isn't sarcastic, I love rare and obscure titles! I'll play anything that says "Kunio-kun" on it.) 

What I did notice is that in your two posts, you failed to answer the one and only question I asked. So let me repost:

Quote
Yeah, let me get on to downloading that 50-150 gig romset (seems size depending on format and source), only to waste time weeding out roms for mechanical machines, fruit machines, obscure computer terminals and commercial appliances or whatever some of that stuff is to taper it down to a good 200 mb of to run arcade games. And BTW, is there a sane way manage this without needing 3rd party tools? If not, when will this update be available in Mame?

I currently have mame on 6 machines, not including my regular computer, not including ARM cpu devices like the pi or my chinese handheld game player where I am tied to a version. 3 are machines I manage outside of my household. Of those 6 machines, mame is running magnificently on various "cesspool" revisions of mame, and plays only the games that I want based on the machine, isn't connected to wifi, nor even normally has a keyboard or mouse attached.  I seriously want to know how MameDEV suggests I can easily manage these machines in a real world setting to avoid the "rancid cesspool".

Haze

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Re: Using a Laptop for a MAME build.....good idea/bad idea ?
« Reply #14 on: January 28, 2018, 01:36:17 pm »
How you manage the roms is your business, not ours, that's why I didn't answer that part.

The size of the romset is a product of other people.

If you don't care about CHDs you can get a complete merged set from some places at 39GB

39GB isn't very big.

Uncharted 3, a single PS3 game from 2011 is 47GB on it's own.  A single 6 year old game is bigger than the entire rom content of practically every arcade machine ever, as well as countless other systems.  Games today are even bigger, some download that amount in 0 day patches.  If anything the MAME collection is minuscule, you can fit all that onto something you could swallow several times over.  Relative to the technology available it's smaller than it's ever been, even back in the days when you could fit the collection on a single floppy disc.

It's very difficult to take *any* complaint along those lines seriously at all.

As for managing, if you know your favourites, create a list of the favourites, you'll only see the favourites in the frontend, plus, if somebody suggests something you've never heard of, and you've taken that route, you likely already have it right there to give a spin and maybe find out you like it.  Easy, convenient.  There are even lists you can download on these very forums to use as frontend filters, and while personally I find them a bit lacking, if you use them then it doesn't matter if you have 39GB of roms on your system or 3GB of roms on your system you don't even have to see the things you don't care about.

All with the best emulation quality on offer.

This is more like you telling everybody they should use go back to using MSDOS 6.22 or something like that.

The emulation has improved, that is undeniable.  Older versions are a poor choice if you want good emulation, that is also undeniable.

There are exceptions, true, I'm not even going to deny that either, I mean I personally would NOT recommend a current version for Qbert, but since Qbert requires diagonally installed controls to really feel right anyway it's not one you're going to be using on most setups that often anyway and again, and it would make sense just to use a slightly older version for that one game until the speech issues are sorted out if you really do want to run it.  Sometimes the cost of progress is a temporary regression tho, it's inevitable, but the overall flow is one of very significant improvements over the course of time.  Even if you pick an old version, there will be different things in that where the emulation had regressed for a while before being fixed again later too, it's how MAME was always developed.
« Last Edit: January 28, 2018, 01:56:24 pm by Haze »

keilmillerjr

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Re: Using a Laptop for a MAME build.....good idea/bad idea ?
« Reply #15 on: January 28, 2018, 02:05:35 pm »
Well that was a whole heap of TL;DR.  You kicking it off by calling past revisions of mame a "rancid cesspool" is evidence that you are the George Lucas of Mame.

My skimming your wall of text looks like you are only ranting how my suggestion is denying people a handful of obscure games. For that loss, I do regret it, but it still is an entirely worthwhile tradeoff. (That isn't sarcastic, I love rare and obscure titles! I'll play anything that says "Kunio-kun" on it.) 

What I did notice is that in your two posts, you failed to answer the one and only question I asked. So let me repost:

Quote
Yeah, let me get on to downloading that 50-150 gig romset (seems size depending on format and source), only to waste time weeding out roms for mechanical machines, fruit machines, obscure computer terminals and commercial appliances or whatever some of that stuff is to taper it down to a good 200 mb of to run arcade games. And BTW, is there a sane way manage this without needing 3rd party tools? If not, when will this update be available in Mame?

I currently have mame on 6 machines, not including my regular computer, not including ARM cpu devices like the pi or my chinese handheld game player where I am tied to a version. 3 are machines I manage outside of my household. Of those 6 machines, mame is running magnificently on various "cesspool" revisions of mame, and plays only the games that I want based on the machine, isn't connected to wifi, nor even normally has a keyboard or mouse attached.  I seriously want to know how MameDEV suggests I can easily manage these machines in a real world setting to avoid the "rancid cesspool".

Stop B ITCHING if you want constructive advice.

Keep the complete romset on a machine and use a front end to weed out which ones you want to use. Check the all killer no filler thread. I’ll have a tag list for attract mode based on the work from that thread pushed to github tonight or tomorrow. Easy to filter that list to. In my case, only horizontal and 4 buttons and under. I’m also filtering out Neo Geo games as I have another display just for the Neo Geo. Takes seconds to accomplish. If you need help, make another thread.

Vigo

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Re: Using a Laptop for a MAME build.....good idea/bad idea ?
« Reply #16 on: January 28, 2018, 02:50:46 pm »
How you manage the roms is your business, not ours, that's why I didn't answer that part.

BINGO!
You don't give a crap about UX (user experience), never will.  Mame is ignorant to how people use it in reality. I don't step on your toes, so why step on mine? Why interject your platitudes into this thread where a good guy is trying to make things work for his laptop, and I am offering my best suggestion, which is get a mame that does those 60 games fast without threshing through Gigs of uneeded roms? and without needing to worry about requirements which you even acknowledged yourself may exist on an older laptop.

Remember how this started. My suggestion was listening to the OP when he wanted to be able to:

Quote
The laptop is a Compaq Presario F500 and I want to use it for my vertical MAME cabinet. So essentially games you'd find on a 60-in-1 board.

The dude didn't want to play "Rumba Lumber" or "Onna Sanshirou". He wants a cab to to play vertical classics. I listened to his needs and assessed what I felt would be the best way to do it.

Then you pushed that I was a troll for suggesting he use a perfectly fine revision of Mame for 60 vertical games, or as you call it a "rancid cesspool"

I'm keeping on topic here as to why there is benefit to older mame and if you can't stand that, George Lucas, then do something about making modern Mame a better UX.


Stop B ITCHING if you want constructive advice.

RULE #2, bro. If you feel you need to add a space in the word, just type it or don't say it at all.

I didn't ask for constructive advice, I am objecting to being called a troll for merely suggesting a revision of Mame that can't emulate my coffee maker. Socratic method, homie.


Keep the complete romset on a machine and use a front end to weed out which ones you want to use.

I don't have a single machine that can hold the entire romset and I am fine with that. Solid state is a great tradeoff. And again, 3rd party stuff. If I filter out my roms from a frontend, how can I get those new titles that Haze is suggesting I enjoy? Read his blog so I know what to find? hahaha!
« Last Edit: January 28, 2018, 02:57:05 pm by Vigo »

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Re: Using a Laptop for a MAME build.....good idea/bad idea ?
« Reply #17 on: January 28, 2018, 03:29:54 pm »
How you manage the roms is your business, not ours, that's why I didn't answer that part.

BINGO!
You don't give a crap about UX (user experience), never will.  Mame is ignorant to how people use it in reality. I don't step on your toes, so why step on mine? Why interject your platitudes into this thread where a good guy is trying to make things work for his laptop, and I am offering my best suggestion, which is get a mame that does those 60 games fast without threshing through Gigs of uneeded roms? and without needing to worry about requirements which you even acknowledged yourself may exist on an older laptop.

Remember how this started. My suggestion was listening to the OP when he wanted to be able to:

Quote
The laptop is a Compaq Presario F500 and I want to use it for my vertical MAME cabinet. So essentially games you'd find on a 60-in-1 board.

The dude didn't want to play "Rumba Lumber" or "Onna Sanshirou". He wants a cab to to play vertical classics. I listened to his needs and assessed what I felt would be the best way to do it.

Then you pushed that I was a troll for suggesting he use a perfectly fine revision of Mame for 60 vertical games, or as you call it a "rancid cesspool"

I'm keeping on topic here as to why there is benefit to older mame and if you can't stand that, George Lucas, then do something about making modern Mame a better UX.


Stop B ITCHING if you want constructive advice.

RULE #2, bro. If you feel you need to add a space in the word, just type it or don't say it at all.

I didn't ask for constructive advice, I am objecting to being called a troll for merely suggesting a revision of Mame that can't emulate my coffee maker. Socratic method, homie.


Keep the complete romset on a machine and use a front end to weed out which ones you want to use.

I don't have a single machine that can hold the entire romset and I am fine with that. Solid state is a great tradeoff. And again, 3rd party stuff. If I filter out my roms from a frontend, how can I get those new titles that Haze is suggesting I enjoy? Read his blog so I know what to find? hahaha!

I could tell you how to resolve your space issue easily with only the roms you want, but no. I already gave you enough to figure it out yourself. /thread for me

Vigo

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Re: Using a Laptop for a MAME build.....good idea/bad idea ?
« Reply #18 on: January 28, 2018, 04:18:58 pm »
I got nothing to figure out, brotato chip. Thanks for the half of a meme.  :cheers:

Aren't you one of those raspberry pi lovers anyway? Those all run much older versions of Mame than I am talking about. Don't get where the high horse about having current version is coming from here?...

keilmillerjr

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Re: Using a Laptop for a MAME build.....good idea/bad idea ?
« Reply #19 on: January 28, 2018, 04:21:53 pm »
I got nothing to figure out, brotato chip. Thanks for the half of a meme.  :cheers:

Aren't you one of those raspberry pi lovers anyway? Those all run much older versions of Mame than I am talking about. Don't get where the high horse about having current version is coming from here?...

I think it has its place as well as using a pc for emulation. RPI can run mame0193 so I don’t not know what you are talking about.

Vigo

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Re: Using a Laptop for a MAME build.....good idea/bad idea ?
« Reply #20 on: January 28, 2018, 04:32:39 pm »
I got nothing to figure out, brotato chip. Thanks for the half of a meme.  :cheers:

Aren't you one of those raspberry pi lovers anyway? Those all run much older versions of Mame than I am talking about. Don't get where the high horse about having current version is coming from here?...

I think it has its place as well as using a pc for emulation. RPI can run mame0193 so I don’t not know what you are talking about.

Really? Well, I'm not a pi expert. I just did the retropie thing and called it done, which, as I understand, anything newer is limited and "experimental".

https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/MAME

edit: pretty sure I am using lr-mame2003, which looks to be pretty standard, using mame 0.78. Once you go higher, the wiki seems to show it loses functionality.
« Last Edit: January 28, 2018, 04:36:28 pm by Vigo »

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Re: Using a Laptop for a MAME build.....good idea/bad idea ?
« Reply #21 on: January 28, 2018, 04:34:42 pm »
The dude didn't want to play "Rumba Lumber" or "Onna Sanshirou". He wants a cab to to play vertical classics. I listened to his needs and assessed what I felt would be the best way to do it.

Then you pushed that I was a troll for suggesting he use a perfectly fine revision of Mame for 60 vertical games, or as you call it a "rancid cesspool"

I'm keeping on topic here as to why there is benefit to older mame and if you can't stand that, George Lucas, then do something about making modern Mame a better UX.

I used some examples from this year.

All the classic games are better emulated in one way or another, every single driver in MAME has had work pumped into it over the years.  You never know exactly when one thing improved, it isn't even clear to us always when one thing improved, because it can be an indirect result of something else.  The only reliable way to know you're getting to best experience, even on the classics, is a current version.

I called you out as a troll for saying that Frogger has obscene requirements.  Something that can be run at 2000% does not have obscene requirements.  It's an age old troll people use against MAME, and it's inaccurate.  I stand by my comments, and your further ones just reinforce that.  If you're saying the Frogger requirements are obscene, you're trolling, plain and simple.  If you'd said Kid Niki has obscene requirements, granted, from the surface it does appear that way now, around 350-400% on the same machine that can run Frogger at 2000%, but there's good reason, the drums are all emulated now, and analog drum emulation is very demanding, which is exactly why it *wasn't* done back in the day when the CPU power to do it wasn't available, so even then it's not obscene, it's just higher than you'd expect without a deeper understanding of it.

I even explained why the user experience is just fine, there's a filter system people have created lists of favourites.  That's *exactly* how it's meant to work.

It's not up to us to dictate which things are 'worthwhile' and which are not.  If I gave you my top 200 titles MAME emulates they'd be different to another top 200 games from somebody else.

That's what makes MAME a *good* experience, not a bad one.  Trying to say that only 60 classic games are worthwhile would be stupid, and a bad experience.  As users, that part is entirely up to you to decide, create lists, share lists, write reviews.

You get to play the things you want using a new version, you get the best possible emulation, and everybody who cares about things maybe you don't specifically care about benefits from what we're doing too.

So yeah, take your 'UX' stuff and shove it elsewhere, because that's another troll that certain overly vocal crowds like to reuse.

There ARE some UX issues, but not in any of the areas you're actually complaining about.  Mostly in redefining keyboards for the computer systems and things like that, for the use cases you're talking about tho, put in a custom favourite list and you're done, simple as that.

I'd even go as far as saying the likes of Rumber Lumber were classic vertical games.  They might not have gained the popularity, but they're from the period, they're vertical, they're 4-way joystick and they're from a famous developer.  The 60-in-1 units aren't a good representation of what was actually good because most of what they run are shoddy bootleg versions of whatever they could squeeze onto the terrible ARM hardware they were using.  Games are missing because the hardware wasn't capable of running them.  Stuff like Donkey Kong is better than ever today too (it's subtle, but things like Samples for sound don't give you the slight variations you get between steps etc. and give a fake overly 'clean' sound) any semi-recent MAME even lets you run things like the Donkey Kong II hack, which is a nice thing to have at your fingertips as a bonus.

« Last Edit: January 28, 2018, 04:57:41 pm by Haze »

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Re: Using a Laptop for a MAME build.....good idea/bad idea ?
« Reply #22 on: January 28, 2018, 05:03:46 pm »
I got nothing to figure out, brotato chip. Thanks for the half of a meme.  :cheers:

Aren't you one of those raspberry pi lovers anyway? Those all run much older versions of Mame than I am talking about. Don't get where the high horse about having current version is coming from here?...

I think it has its place as well as using a pc for emulation. RPI can run mame0193 so I don’t not know what you are talking about.

Really? Well, I'm not a pi expert. I just did the retropie thing and called it done, which, as I understand, anything newer is limited and "experimental".

https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/MAME

edit: pretty sure I am using lr-mame2003, which looks to be pretty standard, using mame 0.78. Once you go higher, the wiki seems to show it loses functionality.

Your using a prebuilt package. Your going to get whatever they give. You can run many different distros on rpi and compile your own mame. Some people even compile and share all new versions for you.

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Re: Using a Laptop for a MAME build.....good idea/bad idea ?
« Reply #23 on: January 28, 2018, 05:34:23 pm »

I called you out as a troll for saying that Frogger has obscene requirements.  Something that can be run at 2000% does not have obscene requirements.  It's an age old troll people use against MAME, and it's inaccurate.  I stand by my comments, and your further ones just reinforce that.  If you're saying the Frogger requirements are obscene, you're trolling, plain and simple.

OK, George, this aint trolling when a mod here mentioned the same thing.

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,143205.msg1485286.html#msg1485286

I'm not the only one to complain about frogger, and maybe it got better, but I'm not one to wait for things that break to get fixed when I have concerns something else might break later on. It's just easier to rely on an older version of mame I can confirm works.



It's not up to us to dictate which things are 'worthwhile' and which are not.  If I gave you my top 200 titles MAME emulates they'd be different to another top 200 games from somebody else.

That's what makes MAME a *good* experience, not a bad one.  Trying to say that only 60 classic games are worthwhile would be stupid, and a bad experience.  As users, that part is entirely up to you to decide, create lists, share lists, write reviews.

I'm not saying you need to determine what is good and what is not, I am saying you need to be able to rudimentary break things down at least from things that are and are not an arcade machine. I'm grateful the CHDs are a separate experience. Some other basic folders to divide out roms and packaging as such would be a very welcome change. So I could pick something like the "arcade game romset" and maybe the "tabletop gaming romset" and disregard stuff like the "fruit machine romset".  ANd I am talking about a directory and audit divisions made in mame, not about what other people decide to torrent.

« Last Edit: January 28, 2018, 05:38:43 pm by Vigo »

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Re: Using a Laptop for a MAME build.....good idea/bad idea ?
« Reply #24 on: January 28, 2018, 05:37:14 pm »
Your using a prebuilt package. Your going to get whatever they give. You can run many different distros on rpi and compile your own mame. Some people even compile and share all new versions for you.

What version of mame do you use on your pi and recommend?

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Re: Using a Laptop for a MAME build.....good idea/bad idea ?
« Reply #25 on: January 28, 2018, 05:52:20 pm »

I called you out as a troll for saying that Frogger has obscene requirements.  Something that can be run at 2000% does not have obscene requirements.  It's an age old troll people use against MAME, and it's inaccurate.  I stand by my comments, and your further ones just reinforce that.  If you're saying the Frogger requirements are obscene, you're trolling, plain and simple.

OK, George, this aint trolling when a mod here mentioned the same thing.

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,143205.msg1485286.html#msg1485286

I'm not the only one to complain about frogger, and maybe it got better, but I'm not one to wait for things that break to get fixed when I have concerns something else might break later on. It's just easier to rely on an older version of mame I can confirm works.



It's not up to us to dictate which things are 'worthwhile' and which are not.  If I gave you my top 200 titles MAME emulates they'd be different to another top 200 games from somebody else.

That's what makes MAME a *good* experience, not a bad one.  Trying to say that only 60 classic games are worthwhile would be stupid, and a bad experience.  As users, that part is entirely up to you to decide, create lists, share lists, write reviews.

I'm not saying you need to determine what is good and what is not, I am saying you need to be able to rudimentary break things down at least from things that are and are not an arcade machine. I'm grateful the CHDs are a separate experience. Some other basic folders to divide out roms and packaging as such would be a very welcome change. So I could pick something like the "arcade game romset" and maybe the "tabletop gaming romset" and disregard stuff like the "fruit machine romset".  ANd I am talking about a directory and audit divisions made in mame, not about what other people decide to torrent.

Again... ^this^

How hard would it be to just put a simple category flag for each rom... arcade, console, computer, pinball, elector-mechanical, gambling, and miscellaneous and be able to type "mame.exe -list=arcade" or "mame.exe -listxml=arcade" and have it only print the games with that flag?  Those problem hybrid games that you always use as an excuse as to why this wouldn't work... well that's what the miscellaneous category is for.  I would be more than willing to help categorize the games, but not if I have to do another ini/dat project and have to constantly check mame versions for rom renames to keep things current.... it needs to be in mame itself so this is no longer a problem.

Here's the thing.... it takes frikkin forever to download an entire mame set now and the only way to easily update mame is to download a whole set and then weed out what you don't want... it just doesn't make any sense to waste all that time and bandwidth when a solution could be easily added.     

Haze

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Re: Using a Laptop for a MAME build.....good idea/bad idea ?
« Reply #26 on: January 28, 2018, 06:05:38 pm »
Quote from: Howard
I'm not saying you need to determine what is good and what is not, I am saying you need to be able to rudimentary break things down at least from things that are and are not an arcade machine. I'm grateful the CHDs are a separate experience. Some other basic folders to divide out roms and packaging as such would be a very welcome change. So I could pick something like the "arcade game romset" and maybe the "tabletop gaming romset" and disregard stuff like the "fruit machine romset".  ANd I am talking about a directory and audit divisions made in mame, not about what other people decide to torrent.

Again... ^this^

How hard would it be to just put a simple category flag for each rom... arcade, console, computer, pinball, elector-mechanical, gambling, and miscellaneous and be able to type "mame.exe -list=arcade" or "mame.exe -listxml=arcade" and have it only print the games with that flag?  Those problem hybrid games that you always use as an excuse as to why this wouldn't work... well that's what the miscellaneous category is for.  I would be more than willing to help categorize the games, but not if I have to do another ini/dat project and have to constantly check mame versions for rom renames to keep things current.... it needs to be in mame itself so this is no longer a problem.

Here's the thing.... it takes frikkin forever to download an entire mame set now and the only way to easily update mame is to download a whole set and then weed out what you don't want... it just doesn't make any sense to waste all that time and bandwidth when a solution could be easily added.   

The way things are done now is almost a DIRECT result of users proving beyond any doubt that this isn't an objective thing anyway.

Even what people consider 'arcade machines' is entirely subjective.  Ask me, all Fruit Machine, Gambler and Ticket games *are* Arcade machines.  Walk into any arcade today and it's practically all you see, they're also where the companies you care about made most of their money (hence why Konami are basically exclusively doing that today)

Ask other people, they're not.  You clearly want them categorized as 'not' others would disagree.  It's subjective.  The machines you want to be called 'arcade' and nothing else are infact only a small snapshot in time of what was in arcades, before that it was mostly non-cpu, mechanical pinball (which we can't really emulate, as some of it had no electronic parts at all) these days, it's all ticket based games.  Your definition of 'arcade' is not the most important one but a small part of history.

So in the end, our response, screw it, we don't care, let the users create their own custom filters, let them decide.

One of the reasons I was curious to emulate this Radica 'Arcade Legends' TV Game is because I've seen it running in a single player arcade cabinet, obviously not requiring coins, but still.  It was in an arcade.  It was in an arcade I visited once, it has arcade in the name, should I tag it as arcade?  Should all the prototypes not be tagged as arcade, because most of them never were, some of those are test boards without coin support too... but wait, now some of them are in Galloping Ghost, on Freeplay, so maybe they are again?

How hard is it for people outside of MAME to create these lists and filters, so they're the ones who can decide what something is / isn't based on their own personal preferences?  Less hard.  Download the filters here and you won't see any of them.

On another site, somebody might have a different set of filters that do.

This is putting the users in control and allowing them to decide what counts as what, not the devs.  What MAME does today is give a lot more power to the user and less dictation of what's what from the devs.  From the resource dump MAME provides you can get information like coinslots, hoppers, screens and make your own conclusions, just as if you walked up to something, looked at it, and decided what it was based on that kind of thing.

The main problem is you seem to think the project should be about your definition of things, the way you define what is / isn't an arcade.  That will never be an objective thing.  It might be in your head, but it isn't, and there will always be people with a different opinion.  Best that the devs don't have to make that decision at all.

As an example, I've seen the filters this forum comes up with.  I've seen the filters some Chinese forums come up with.  They're very different indeed.  The chinese ones don't include anything from before about 1990, because over there they don't seem to consider those 'arcade' games at all, they're just primitive pieces of junk not worth their time (Pacman, Space Invaders are pure trash to them from the conversations I've had with certain members)  Their lists are populated by 90s and newer fighters, up to the PGM2 stuff I recently emulated, with a lot of the gambling themed games thrown in too.  They're sad because one of their favourite arcade machines, a very common gambling type thing they call 'Mario' or sometimes 'Big Mary' (which has nothing to do with Mario, see https://sc01.alicdn.com/kf/HTB1_8OvHpXXXXXoXFXXq6xXFXXXX/Mario-coin-arcade-slot-game-machine-TINY.jpg ) doesn't have any versions of it at all in MAME.  You'd put it on the trash pile and say it wasn't an arcade.

Go to Spain, they want all the Gaelco games, outside of Spain, few people care.

Go to Japan and you'll get lists consisting of Mahjong games, with a special distaste for a lot of 'eurotrash' and crappy US developed games (even ones that you'd probably consider classics)  They likely wonder where all the pachinko arcade machines are, since that's what has happened to arcades over there.  (Last dedicated PCB for any other purpose was released in 2012)

Japan is an interesting one actually, because my Chinese contact indicated that IGS specifically took the 'card reader' support out of Oriental Legend 2 for Japan because they felt a lot of Japanese players and arcades wouldn't consider a game that basically required you to use a card and play multiple playthroughs, grinding levels over and over again etc. to be a real arcade game / machine either.  As a result the non-Asian versions of the game are rebalanced (although that's surprising, because from what I gather Japan had machines like that first)  Again, it indicates different cultures have different ideas tho.

MAME avoids the issue entirely, people from different cultures can decide by themselves, share lists, and be happy.

You're yet to explain to me what makes your view of what is more important more valid than any of the others, why what other cultures might consider integral parts of their arcades should be considered 'misc' because you don't...


« Last Edit: January 28, 2018, 06:51:34 pm by Haze »

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Re: Using a Laptop for a MAME build.....good idea/bad idea ?
« Reply #27 on: January 28, 2018, 07:17:38 pm »
Nope, sorry, wrong.  You are probably the only person in the world that would argue that fruit games and gambling games are arcade machines.  First off, they are frikkin illegal in most states without a special permit, so you definitely don't see them in an arcade.  Secondly you are not so dumb as to argue that you can't tell the difference between a video game that takes quarters and other redemption and gambling games that take quarters.  You know the difference, you know you are dead wrong on this, but you can't admit it for some reason.  Suck it up, admit you are wrong, and let us help you find a solution to the problem.

How hard is it to make filters externally?  It's pretty frikkin hard!  You wouldn't know that because you've never done it but it is incredibly hard.  First off, you have to download every single frikkin game, even if it doesn't run on your system well, play it, and categorize it.  We are talking tens of thousands of roms here.  Then you have to somehow convince every single front-end developer, or at least the popular ones, to actually re-code their front-ends to read the new dat and/or write a rom management program that uses the dat and convince everyone to use it.  But wait, your work isn't done.... now with every single solitary release you have to check to see if mame has renamed any rom sets and manually change the affected data and that doesn't even include the addition of new drivers.  Guess what?  Now you have to do this FOREVER!  That is if you expect us to use the latest and greatest build of mame, which was your argument right?

Now if you do it in mame, yes, initially it's a lot of work, but it can be split out amongst developers and guess what?  No re-writing of front-ends and you don't have to perpetually update the thing.  When a developer fixes or adds a driver they already know what kind of game(s) it is and there isn't a lot of work in just categorizing a handful of newly added games when you are the developer that just added them, so it'll be just one more bit of info that gets added when a game is normally added, no big deal. 

I assure you, I've thought this out... the way to do this is within mame... no other method is going to work well.
« Last Edit: January 28, 2018, 07:20:03 pm by Howard_Casto »

Haze

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Re: Using a Laptop for a MAME build.....good idea/bad idea ?
« Reply #28 on: January 28, 2018, 07:59:17 pm »
Nope, sorry, wrong.  You are probably the only person in the world that would argue that fruit games and gambling games are arcade machines.  First off, they are frikkin illegal in most states without a special permit, so you definitely don't see them in an arcade.  Secondly you are not so dumb as to argue that you can't tell the difference between a video game that takes quarters and other redemption and gambling games that take quarters.  You know the difference, you know you are dead wrong on this, but you can't admit it for some reason.  Suck it up, admit you are wrong, and let us help you find a solution to the problem.

Again, a very US-centric view.  MAME is not a US project, MAME is a global project.

You have a very rigid definition of 'arcade' that isn't the real one.  The fact there is even an argument to be had over this shows exactly how subjective it is.

Right, I get it, you don't like what arcades have become, right, the games that payout money often end up in the adult section with the over the top gory ones, while the kids section has games that pay tickets instead of cash (which really is no different)  All of this is within arcades.

It isn't 1984 anymore, things have changed a lot.

Yes there is a difference, in the sense that some pay nothing, some pay tickets, some pay cash, and (mostly in Japan) some pay medals, but no that does not make one more of an arcade game than another.  It definitely makes some of them better games than others, but that's not really the point.

A large number of arcades today (most of which operate half the machines on a 'Freeplay' system) also have sections with popular consoles in because that's the business model that works, and means they don't just go out of business.  Families can go there and the younger generation can play some Wii games while the parents might play on some of the (non-free) ticket games because those are what filled the arcades they grew up with, and the (at this point) Grandparents might be playing some 80s Namco game or something.  That is all under the roof of an arcade too.  That is the 'arcade experience' today.

The last arcade I went in had some kind of 'social' game where you put a credit in just to display a giant animated emoji, that one didn't even pay out, it just literally displayed your emoji and message on a giant screen for about 10 minutes unless somebody else put more money in than you did (with the counter of how much you needed to put in to change the message decreasing a bit each minute)  That apparently is what an arcade machine is today too.  The kids there *loved* it, that will likely become their memory of what an arcade and an arcade game is.  The adults of course hated it, because once it was up to about £5 to change the message, that's a lot of money to make your kid smile, but you feel like a bad parent if you don't.  Place must have been raking it in from that one.  Interesting idea tho, basically pitting parents against each other to see who will spoil their kids most, and obviously adaptive to how busy the arcade was because with nobody trying to up the previous amount it would drop down to almost nothing for a new message.
 
It feels like you've living under a rock if I'm honest, and have no view of what arcades are except some memory of somewhere in the US in the 80s, while the reality is they're very different places today.

Even my earliest memories of the places are very different to that, cabinets like Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles surrounding a giant Sega Royal Ascot racetrack (with the actual horses that would race along) and the ching ching ching of coins falling from another corner of the place, some dodgy Galaxian rebooting all the time because there was clearly something wrong with it.  You're basically saying "that isn't a valid view of an arcade"


« Last Edit: January 28, 2018, 08:25:50 pm by Haze »

Vigo

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Re: Using a Laptop for a MAME build.....good idea/bad idea ?
« Reply #29 on: January 28, 2018, 08:27:16 pm »
Howard is spot on. There are some OBVIOUS categories that can be built, arguing that multiculturalism prevents you from creating BROAD categories just doesn't make sense. The suggestion isn't to make flags for Gaeleco games or games from the 90's onward to please Chinese users. Howard's categories sounded like a great start to me: "arcade, console, computer, pinball, elector-mechanical, gambling, and miscellaneous"

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Re: Using a Laptop for a MAME build.....good idea/bad idea ?
« Reply #30 on: January 28, 2018, 08:29:32 pm »

I called you out as a troll for saying that Frogger has obscene requirements.  Something that can be run at 2000% does not have obscene requirements.  It's an age old troll people use against MAME, and it's inaccurate.  I stand by my comments, and your further ones just reinforce that.  If you're saying the Frogger requirements are obscene, you're trolling, plain and simple.

OK, George, this aint trolling when a mod here mentioned the same thing.

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,143205.msg1485286.html#msg1485286

I'm not the only one to complain about frogger, and maybe it got better, but I'm not one to wait for things that break to get fixed when I have concerns something else might break later on. It's just easier to rely on an older version of mame I can confirm works.



It's not up to us to dictate which things are 'worthwhile' and which are not.  If I gave you my top 200 titles MAME emulates they'd be different to another top 200 games from somebody else.

That's what makes MAME a *good* experience, not a bad one.  Trying to say that only 60 classic games are worthwhile would be stupid, and a bad experience.  As users, that part is entirely up to you to decide, create lists, share lists, write reviews.

I'm not saying you need to determine what is good and what is not, I am saying you need to be able to rudimentary break things down at least from things that are and are not an arcade machine. I'm grateful the CHDs are a separate experience. Some other basic folders to divide out roms and packaging as such would be a very welcome change. So I could pick something like the "arcade game romset" and maybe the "tabletop gaming romset" and disregard stuff like the "fruit machine romset".  ANd I am talking about a directory and audit divisions made in mame, not about what other people decide to torrent.

Again... ^this^

How hard would it be to just put a simple category flag for each rom... arcade, console, computer, pinball, elector-mechanical, gambling, and miscellaneous and be able to type "mame.exe -list=arcade" or "mame.exe -listxml=arcade" and have it only print the games with that flag?  Those problem hybrid games that you always use as an excuse as to why this wouldn't work... well that's what the miscellaneous category is for.  I would be more than willing to help categorize the games, but not if I have to do another ini/dat project and have to constantly check mame versions for rom renames to keep things current.... it needs to be in mame itself so this is no longer a problem.

Here's the thing.... it takes frikkin forever to download an entire mame set now and the only way to easily update mame is to download a whole set and then weed out what you don't want... it just doesn't make any sense to waste all that time and bandwidth when a solution could be easily added.   

You do know that you can have a torrent for a full romset and only download certain files within that torrent, right?

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Re: Using a Laptop for a MAME build.....good idea/bad idea ?
« Reply #31 on: January 28, 2018, 08:32:58 pm »
Howard is spot on. There are some OBVIOUS categories that can be built, arguing that multiculturalism prevents you from creating BROAD categories just doesn't make sense. The suggestion isn't to make flags for Gaeleco games or games from the 90's onward to please Chinese users. Howard's categories sounded like a great start to me: "arcade, console, computer, pinball, elector-mechanical, gambling, and miscellaneous"

And I'm saying that those are subjective categories, because the 'gambling' 'electromechanical' and other stuff are just as much arcades as anything he thinks.  They're no different to genres.  Again, not something of concern for MAME as an emulator.  Other people have already categorized them.

Maybe an easier example to understand would be level of violence / sexual nudity.  Again, it's something that differs *greatly* and has even changed over time.

Last time I saw a Mortal Kombat it was in the 'adults only' section of the arcade, along with many of the games that pay cash.  Again we've had demands to create built in filters for such things in MAME, because apparently it's very clear what is / isn't an adult game but again, it isn't MAME's responsibility to be doing that, same for the games with nudity.  Even the people who have created filters seem to disagree over that, where, a single frame topless flash, or pixelated animation is ok, but full on nude photos as found in the likes of the Fantasia games apparently isn't.  Many would disagree.

That is *exactly* why it should be a user made filter, not a MAME filter.

People keep asking for filters like the ones you're requesting to be added, like the Violence ones to be added, like the nudity ones to be added.  In all cases it's a job better handled externally.

It is not MAME's responsibility to decide those things, it's a user responsibility, always will be, that is the correct way for things to be, not something for us to dictate.

MAME has *tried* to decide these things before, at least with the gambling games, and it was one of the most controversial, contested and frustrating things to deal with in the history of the project, because even if you *think* it should be obvious, people couldn't agree.  Things got excluded that shouldn't have been, things were included despite having all the traits of a gambling game, but apparently weren't for some other reason.  It was stupid.  By *not* trying / having to make those decisions things are running a lot more smoothly because there's no room for them to be contested.  The very process of trying to categorize them and exclude certain ones based on such subjective measures was one of the *worst* decisions ever made and probably did a huge amount of damage to the preservation efforts back then.

There is of course a legal aspect to it, Howard says the machines are illegal in some places.  By saying what is / isn't a gambling game it could be taken that MAME is offering an actual legal opinion, when it really, really isn't.  By not doing that, it again is up to the operator to decide.  I believe in some cases the rules are 'if it shows playing card faces it's a gambling game and needs a permit' and that applies *regardless* of it it has a payout function (this is true for Italy at least, hence why MAME has some versions of games that were clearly designed for Italy because they're identical other than the removal of said graphics - compare "Deluxe 5" with "Deluxe 4U", the former would be considered a gambling game in Italy because it has a blackjack game as one of the 5 games, even with no payout. which incidentally is exactly why the previous attempt to categorize things ended up so controversial, it was attempting to apply Italian rules to the world just as you now want to apply US ones.)

MAME is just the emulator, it is neutral to such views and opinions.



« Last Edit: January 28, 2018, 09:00:10 pm by Haze »

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Re: Using a Laptop for a MAME build.....good idea/bad idea ?
« Reply #32 on: January 28, 2018, 08:54:11 pm »
You do know that you can have a torrent for a full romset and only download certain files within that torrent, right?

Not much help with the mame nomenclature isn't always obvious and there some roms are dependent on others existing.


Howard is spot on. There are some OBVIOUS categories that can be built, arguing that multiculturalism prevents you from creating BROAD categories just doesn't make sense. The suggestion isn't to make flags for Gaeleco games or games from the 90's onward to please Chinese users. Howard's categories sounded like a great start to me: "arcade, console, computer, pinball, elector-mechanical, gambling, and miscellaneous"

And I'm saying that those are subjective categories, because the 'gambling' 'electromechanical' and other stuff are just as much arcades as anything he thinks.  They're no different to genres.  Again, not something of concern for MAME as an emulator.  Other people have already categorized them.

I'm not suggesting perfection, although 99% of roms you will be able to get right. Heck, just put any of the debatable ones up in a "=uncategorized" category until a general consensus has been reached. If none is reached, it rots there. Viola! The users have decided and not mameDEV. Better than today where every single rom sits in the 'uncategorized' category. If somebody doesn't like the categories, they are fully free to still download the entire romset like they can today and there would be no difference to them.

 


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Re: Using a Laptop for a MAME build.....good idea/bad idea ?
« Reply #33 on: January 28, 2018, 08:57:43 pm »
You do know that you can have a torrent for a full romset and only download certain files within that torrent, right?

Not much help with the mame nomenclature isn't always obvious and there some roms are dependent on others existing.


Howard is spot on. There are some OBVIOUS categories that can be built, arguing that multiculturalism prevents you from creating BROAD categories just doesn't make sense. The suggestion isn't to make flags for Gaeleco games or games from the 90's onward to please Chinese users. Howard's categories sounded like a great start to me: "arcade, console, computer, pinball, elector-mechanical, gambling, and miscellaneous"

And I'm saying that those are subjective categories, because the 'gambling' 'electromechanical' and other stuff are just as much arcades as anything he thinks.  They're no different to genres.  Again, not something of concern for MAME as an emulator.  Other people have already categorized them.

I'm not suggesting perfection, although 99% of roms you will be able to get right. Heck, just put any of the debatable ones up in a "=uncategorized" category until a general consensus has been reached. If none is reached, it rots there. Viola! The users have decided and not mameDEV. Better than today where every single rom sits in the 'uncategorized' category. If somebody doesn't like the categories, they are fully free to still download the entire romset like they can today and there would be no difference to them.

 

I think you're still missing the point.

This isn't our problem.  This has nothing to do with MAME.

This has everything to do with the scene built around MAME.  The users can't *give* that responsibility to the people writing the emulator when it has absolutely nothing to do with the emulation.

If the people making the existing filters are letting you down it is them you should be contacting about it, and asking why everything has ended up with the wrong labels or in the wrong places.  MAME is no worse because it does more things these days, it's better.

If people cared about this subjective dividing of things half as much as you seem to think then the filters you were talking about would be immaculately maintained, but instead, they're not, because it's only a fraction of users that actually feel the need to have them, the rest are happy to have a full set, slap in a favourites list, or if they want to get full reward from MAME, simply run unfiltered and dive straight in discovering what they like / don't like of their own accord.  Plenty will also only have a couple of sets, again, add those to their favourites list and again get exactly the experience they want.

The beauty is MAME works perfectly for all those cases and gives an experience that the vast majority are happy with.
« Last Edit: January 28, 2018, 09:11:39 pm by Haze »

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Re: Using a Laptop for a MAME build.....good idea/bad idea ?
« Reply #34 on: January 28, 2018, 09:10:29 pm »
I get it perfectly, it is about you and not the people who use it. Doesn't matter what you don't produce because you washed your hands from anything that deviates toward offering more for users.

So why care when some people find it much easier to use an older version?  ??? You should be equally agnostic to what people do with it when you make it clear this isn't your problem, and people using older versions doesn't harm you from your library work.

And for the record is isn't about wanting "subjective dividing" It is about the fact that mame is a behemoth with no categorization, and users are forced to download massive romsets to deal with it. Howard said it perfectly earlier. It is a library without a card catalog. Even libraries know to seprarate categories like fiction and nonfiction, and know where to put the books that are historical fiction.
« Last Edit: January 28, 2018, 09:14:24 pm by Vigo »

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Re: Using a Laptop for a MAME build.....good idea/bad idea ?
« Reply #35 on: January 28, 2018, 09:16:06 pm »
I get it perfectly, it is about you and not the people who use it. Doesn't matter what you don't produce because you washed your hands from anything that deviates toward offering more for users.

So why care when some people find it much easier to use an older version?  ??? You should be equally agnostic to what people do with it when you make it clear this isn't your problem, and people using older versions doesn't harm you from your library work.

Because using an older version DOES affect the emulation, and what we offer is the emulation.

MAME is the emulator, I think I said that already.  I'm going to recommend the version that gives the best emulation.

The rest, much like the 'MAME has obscene system requirements' is just people blowing things out of proportion and the user interface 'issues' aren't so much issues at all (there are solutions out there that work better than ever for a wider set of use case than ever, heck a few years ago MAME didn't even have built in management of favourite lists etc. or relied heavily on things like the Windows registry to do it, which was never a good idea)

A line has been drawn over exactly what MAME will provide in terms of built in categorization, but really, it's doing more for you to help with that kind of thing than ever before anyway simply by having the ability to use user made filters, history.dat type views etc. (if you want to read about the machines you may / may not run before adding them)  The latest version even has a nice little button names plugin to keep the people who want huge amounts of button name metadata happy without us having to hardcode it in MAME.  (although considering how many people have actually tried submitting patches to add such data, the lack of interest in it now that we've actually given them a clean and easy way to do it is surprising)





« Last Edit: January 28, 2018, 09:18:39 pm by Haze »

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Re: Using a Laptop for a MAME build.....good idea/bad idea ?
« Reply #36 on: January 28, 2018, 09:17:51 pm »
I think you're still missing the point.

I kind of think you are the one missing the point.

You keep preaching subjectivity , but you don't realize that whats best for the OP is also subjective. I have to agree with Vigo that an older version of MAME to run those games is likely a better solution than a newer, slower, albeit more accurate version of MAME.

If you can't accept the MAME is taking on a lot of extras that have little or nothing to do with arcade machines, well than that's you're own daftness.
If you're replying to a troll you are part of the problem.
I also need to follow this advice. Ignore or report, don't reply.

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Re: Using a Laptop for a MAME build.....good idea/bad idea ?
« Reply #37 on: January 28, 2018, 09:20:19 pm »
I think you're still missing the point.
If you can't accept the MAME is taking on a lot of extras that have little or nothing to do with arcade machines, well than that's you're own daftness.

I'm not denying there's some non-arcade stuff in there.

I am debating what some people consider to be arcade and don't tho because it's nowhere near as clear cut as anybody makes out.

I am also telling you that the non-arcade stuff being there is the only reason the project is even still alive tho.

I'm also saying it's up to the users to filter that, MAME can load the filters, people have made the filters.  MAME has done it's part there by allowing the use of such filters, that's what the support is there for, letting people decide for themselves.

The only impact it has had on how the arcade stuff runs is ensuring that the arcade stuff runs better than it ever has.  It is also ensuring that the team supporting and developing MAME is stronger than it ever has been in the past.

Quote
You keep preaching subjectivity , but you don't realize that whats best for the OP is also subjective. I have to agree with Vigo that an older version of MAME to run those games is likely a better solution than a newer, slower, albeit more accurate version of MAME.

Very much depends, if the newer version can handle them on the hardware in question, then objectively, running the newer version is better because we've made many improvements over the years.

If it can't, and only if it can't, is an older version a compromise that should be considered if better hardware is unavailable because it's objectively a poorer choice but one that might be dictated for financial reasons.

My issue is that somebody came along and started talking the same old BS about 'obscene' MAME requirements, for something that quite comfortably runs at 2000% on current hardware.  That's taking the piss and almost saying we can't actually take advantage of 15 years of computing power if it helps improve the emulation.

Then somebody else came along trying to make points that we've already solved by allowing mame to load a favourites filter, and then when they were unable to accept that started going on about how MAME needs to start catgorizing things, when the purpose of things like the favourites filter is to let people do that themselves based on group opinions and lists people have made for such purposes.


As I've said before, I get the feeling that this scene (the arcade scene in general I meal) feels that MAME owes it something, when really in the last 10 years or so it's been one of the scenes that has really held MAME back the most with views like those being expressed, criticism just because system requirements have gone up when we've improved the emulation, or made the code more maintainable to ensure MAME has a future.

The scene here seems to like to think that it is supportive of MAME, and an important to MAME, but I don't honestly feel it is.  When people just recommend older versions all the time, are quite willing to completely overlook progress it's absolutely hostile towards the people who are actually trying to make progress, it's insulting, it's toxic.  Most of the recent improvements that have really taken MAME forward have come about by deciding to *completely* ignore the kind of views that are expressed here, and just get on with making the best emulator that we can possibly make.  This isn't targeted ant any specific individuals btw, it's just a general thing, plenty of people are guilty of doing it over the course of the last 20 years.

I'm at least trying to provide a communication channel to explain why things are being done the way they are, and explain the features that are now there to help, but at the same time it's become clearer and clearer to me why this side of things has started to be ignored entirely.  Doesn't seem to matter what gets done, what useful features are added that can easily help you do the things you want to do there are always more demands etc. because even if we've already emulated the majority of 2D arcade games, and our interest is in *emulation* people seem to think that MAME should instead be responsible for all sorts of other metadata when in fact all anybody working on the project wants to be responsible for is emulation, that's the skillset.  The natural course of the emulator is the one it's taken, emulating things, emulating anything; that is what is of interest to the people working on the project, that is why the work gets done.  It is up to the rest of the scene to build support files, lists of favorites, list of what was / wasn't in arcades in their country etc.

It is also up to the scene to try and not exaggerate things, and actually recognize the progress that has been made over the years for what it is.

« Last Edit: January 28, 2018, 09:50:15 pm by Haze »

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Re: Using a Laptop for a MAME build.....good idea/bad idea ?
« Reply #38 on: January 28, 2018, 09:40:46 pm »
You keep editing, makes replying hard. So I'll just say this:

You were a dick to Vigo by calling him a troll just because his opinion differed from yours. You lost a lot of respect points today.

Earn em back by going into the Pi section and call of those people plebs for using an old version of MAME on their RPis
If you're replying to a troll you are part of the problem.
I also need to follow this advice. Ignore or report, don't reply.

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Re: Using a Laptop for a MAME build.....good idea/bad idea ?
« Reply #39 on: January 28, 2018, 09:44:08 pm »
You keep editing, makes replying hard. So I'll just say this:

You were a dick to Vigo by calling him a troll just because his opinion differed from yours. You lost a lot of respect points today.

Earn em back by going into the Pi section and call of those people plebs for using an old version of MAME on their RPis

I called him a troll for massively exaggerating something.  I stand by it.  If that loses respect points so be it.  Posts like that give people the wrong impression, it's harmful.  Intentionally harmful posts like that to me = trolling.

I'm sure you know my opinion on the Pi problem, as I've posted elsewhere "I used a Pi" has become the new "I installed an X-Arcade"