RULE reminder: No modded code distros. Thank you, Saint.

[killallhumans]

Dear Saint,
I'm very happy to see it spelled out very clearly, before i screwed up big time, by dragging others
down the Rabbit Hole.
For anyone else tempted...

◦Modifying and then distributing the MAME source code in such a way that is contrary to the MAMEdev policies in an effort to tailor the software towards home or commercial arcade cabinet use. This includes things like adding features and releasing the new version without the source code, or certain modifications such as removing the "nag screens" at the beginning of games that have information the MAMEdevs wish to impart regarding that game.

Please, read carfully.
It can be found here:
http://arcadecontrols.com/BYOAC-and-MAME.shtml
I will stick to helping others with AutoIt code scripts ONLY.
Thank you again.
- David

[opt2not]

I kinda find this policy a bit weird considering the lack of rules using and modifying original commercial artworks. Which can be argued as just as much a violation for the same reasons mentioned for mame code distros.
 

[killallhumans]

Yeah, me too. [Insert sad face here]
But I'm lucky to read it, before my post got slapped silly, and I ended up being banned.

[Malenko]

You have to be a really bad apple to get banned here

[keilmillerjr]

Yeah... we have a whole subforum dedicated to modifying mame source to better work with crt’s and violating this policy. Lmao probably time this rule gets reviewed.

[killallhumans]

Hello?  :whispering:
Mame team don't care if you blow thier source code to high heaven.

  BUT DON'T EVER ADD AN OFF SWITCH TO THOSE WARNINGS!!!   

They didn't even care when they screwed up dx9 calls and caused nVidia user computers to crash.
I guess heart transplants can still be called a success, even if you kill half of your patients.

Funny, how spit works.
- David

[Haze]

Hello?  :whispering:
Mame team don't care if you blow thier source code to high heaven.

  BUT DON'T EVER ADD AN OFF SWITCH TO THOSE WARNINGS!!!   

They didn't even care when they screwed up dx9 calls and caused nVidia user computers to crash.
I guess heart transplants can still be called a success, even if you kill half of your patients.

Funny, how spit works.
- David

MAME was doing everything by the book, the Nvidia drivers were crashing.  Older Nvidia drivers didn't crash.  It shouldn't even be POSSIBLE to crash the OS from userspace.  The problem was not in MAME, and that nobody even put forward a solution in that time, even when various graphics experts were involved, suggests the same thing.  There was no logical reason for it to crash, and no attempted workarounds made a difference.  Nvidia made some buggy XP drivers, then never bothered to fix them because XP was basically dead.  At best somebody seemed to think it was related to enabling a higher frequency event timing in Windows, that MAME required, and the Nvidia code being completely broken for such cases.

But yes, we don't really like it if people start hacking out the information screens, they convey a useful message, which despite a minority of vocal haters, is actually part of the positive user experience, as it makes sure people know that any issues they encounter are not their own fault, but due to errors in the emulation etc.  The only ones moaning are those who think they know better, or those that want to hide that they're using MAME, which does, in 99% of cases, coincide with those trying to build commercial cabinets full of unlicensed games.

I get that the majority here seem to hate MAME and MAMEdev and will do anything to ---steaming pile of meadow muffin--- all over and take for granted those providing the software, but at least saint has the sense to try and limit that a bit.

[Malenko]

I get that the majority here seem to hate MAME and MAMEdev and will do anything to ---steaming pile of meadow muffin--- all over and take for granted those providing the software, but at least saint has the sense to try and limit that a bit.

Every time you self-censor I die a little inside.  Just type ---steaming pile of meadow muffin---. The filter will change it for those who cant handle swear words.

[Haze]

I'm not self-censoring, the board is taking care of it.  Do you think I have all the censorship strings memorized?

[Malenko]

I get that the majority here seem to hate MAME and MAMEdev and will do anything to ---steaming pile of meadow muffin--- all over and take for granted those providing the software, but at least saint has the sense to try and limit that a bit.

Every time you self-censor I die a little inside.  Just type ---steaming pile of meadow muffin---. The filter will change it for those who cant handle swear words.

I have censoring turned off and your the *only* person I see censored.

[Haze]

I suspect it happens when you edit your posts, which I tend to do because I write a draft then proofread + edit it.  If I had to guess I'd say the link between the word and the replacement string is lost as soon as you hit edit with the word simply becoming the replacement string from that point.

I've ended up banned on other forums before due to glitches in their 'edit' function causing posts to be reposted after threads have been locked / moved etc. so it wouldn't surprise me if this was just another poorly tested edit feature.

[killallhumans]

---steaming pile of meadow muffin---

Uh, NO!

Dx9 and nv4_disp loop? So what? You found a hole in the drivers to exploit. Great accomplishment.
If you see a scab, don't pick at the thing until it bleeds.

Your use of vulgar references to fecal matter, in describing comments or posts, is nothing more that
flaming. You came into this thread for no other purpose than to make an offensive remark. You're done.  ;typo! fixed it!
Any more conduct, such as that, will be reported.

[Haze]

---steaming pile of meadow muffin---

Uh, NO!

Dx9 and nv4_disp loop? So what? You found a hole in the drivers to exploit. Great accomplishment.
If you see a scab, don't pick at the thing until it bleeds.

Your use of vulgar references to fecal matter, in describing comments or posts, is nothing more that
flaming. You came into this thread for no other purpose than to make an offensive remark. You're done.  ;typo! fixed it!
Any more conduct, such as that, will be reported.

I responded to your obvious trolling of the dev team.  Feel free to report if you really want to, but your trolling was obvious.  I simply don't have any desire to be even remotely nice to people who come along and do that these days, I'll respond to bad attitudes with the same, because frankly it's deserved.  It's about time more people involved in developing the emulator stood up for the abuse, trolling, and absolute disrespect certain portions this forum gives them just for trying to maintain a consistent and informative experience.

No workaround for the Nvidia D3D driver issue could be found without making things worse for everybody else.  Why should we care about people running MAME on a dead OS, when the problem is with the Nvidia drivers, and the user can quite easily use ones that don't have the bug.  Same reason we don't cater for every stupid compiler bug in every broken version of GCC etc.  Plenty of Intel drivers of that period had horrible bugs that were impossible to workaround too even stuff as dumb as not really freeing texture memory after use.  If your OS / drivers are broken, then your OS / drivers are broken.  These days we just prefer to flat out drop support for anything not conforming to at least a basic standard, much as the rest of the industry does.  By the point this Nvidia driver bug was introduced there weren't even any active developers on XP.

Along the same lines, apparently current MAME won't run on Vista 64-bit, it should, in theory, but we've had multiple reports that Windows throws some DLL problem.  Again, dead OS, clearly something Microsoft messed up in a patch, why should we care?

Anyway, I am sorry if people happen to find my bluntness of late to be annoying, but I'm tired, very tired, and the arcade side of things always just seems to bring me down.  If anybody understood just how much work had gone into everything, how carefully every decision was thought over, how every little thing they seem to moan about has been given literally years of thought already and how the benefits of the way things are greatly outweigh the 'needs' of the few that complain, or even troll, then maybe there would be less of it.

[Gilrock]

That's why I like RocketLauncher to hide that junk.  I'm not running anything commercial I just like it to look professional when a friend sees it.  And yeah I ran into an NVidia driver bug for the software I develop.  Could not get anyone to acknowledge or respond about the issue.  We had a big enough user base to figure out only NVidia cards had the problem.  Technically that wasn't even my code it was in the 3rd part wxWidgets library and I was able to modify their code to avoid the function since I couldn't get NVidia help.

[pbj]

I kinda find this policy a bit weird considering the lack of rules using and modifying original commercial artworks. Which can be argued as just as much a violation for the same reasons mentioned for mame code distros.
 

That's because forum sponsors sell bootleg artwork.  (and multi-boards)

 

[opt2not]

LOL that's so true.

[DrakeTungsten]

I kinda find this policy a bit weird considering the lack of rules using and modifying original commercial artworks. Which can be argued as just as much a violation for the same reasons mentioned for mame code distros.
 

That's because forum sponsors sell bootleg artwork.  (and multi-boards)

 

I was wondering if there was a gentlemen's agreement to not point that out. I've had an art work question related to this subject, but thought it was best kept to myself, for politeness' sake.

[pbj]

Anytime I've pointed it out in the past, my posts are deleted.  It'll probably happen again.

 

[saint]

There's only one forum sponsor. If you knew how little money I made from that sponsor you wouldn't insinuate that the sponsor has any bearing on the rules of this forum. Hint, it doesn't begin to cover the costs here, and it has no bearing on the rules of the forum. I can't begin to tell you how much I appreciate your opinion of my integrity.

The one sponsor we do have here I have because users seem to appreciate the service he offers the community, he's a nice guy, and I'm content to let him deal with the licensing issues for the artwork he offers. If GGG or Ultimarc or other community vendors with a good reputation wanted to advertise here directly, I'd treat them the same.

Other than the one sponsor, the only other source of income for the site are the Google ads, of which I get to block specific advertisers (and have a list that I have blocked due to selling multi-boards), but I don't get to choose who does appear, just who doesn't.

If you know of anyone, either on Google ads or if there's something I don't know about the sponsor, selling multi-boards with ROMs let me know and I'll remove the ads. I have previously removed an otherwise good sponsor because he chose to sell multi-boards.

My stance on modded code distros isn't a legal or a moral stance. I would like this site to be well regarded by the MAME community. They've chosen to allow people to make all the modifications they desire, they've just asked that those not be distributed. I'm asking people to follow MAMEDev's wishes in that regard. No more to it than that, no less. If MAME changes their stance, I'll follow suit.

I've very reluctant to ban people, and have never done so without multiple warnings except for obvious SPAMmers.
 
And now, wondering once again why I beat my head against the wall sometimes, I'm off to do something other than work on the forums for the evening.

That's because forum sponsors sell bootleg artwork.  (and multi-boards)

[pbj]

I still got it, baby.  You gotta admit.   



 

[saint]

You got something alright dude.

I still got it, baby.  You gotta admit.   



 

[saint]

My stance towards MAME hasn't changed since this was posted 22 years ago:

http://arcadecontrols.com/BYOAC-and-MAME.shtml


Build Your Own Arcade Controls
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
BYOAC & MAME
(Last page update 04/02/07)

    "What is BYOAC's relationship to MAME?"

    This is a question that comes up frequently. Here's a stab at an answer

    MAME is the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. It's home is http://www.mame.net/, and came out in February of 1997. From their website: "Even though MAME allows people to enjoy the long-lost arcade games and even some newer ones, the main purpose of the project is to document the hardware (and software) of the arcade games."

    BYOAC is the Build Your Own Arcade Controls website owned by John St.Clair (AKA "saint"). It began sometime in late 1997. It was in mid 1997 that I was frequenting Dave's Video Game Classics message boards, following a thread between a few guys about how great it would be to make arcade controls for computers. Three guys, Eric, Shadow & DeCosa did more than talk about it - they made it happen. All of them were kind enough to pass on instructions on how to duplicate their work. There was a lot of discussion about the hows and whys and such, and I asked if maybe someone could compile it all and post it on a web site. Then I asked again a few days later... Then I got the hint, and voila - Build Your Own Arcade Controls was born

    Beyond the fact that they are projects in a similar vein, there is no official relationship between MAME and BYOAC whatsoever. There is a tremendous amount of goodwill (from BYOAC to MAME, and I hope the other way as well) but one has nothing to do with the other. That being said, because there are similarities between the two projects (MAME strives to recreate the software experience, BYOAC strives to recreate the hardware experience), new users often associate the two. There's nothing wrong with that on the face of it -- most users will run MAME on their home-built arcade hardware -- but it does cause occasional issues between the two groups. The biggest issues are usually either:

•         Someone attempting to profit by using MAME without the blessing of the MAMEdevs. This can take place by someone selling MAME by itself (no bearing on relationships with BYOAC), or by someone selling a cabinet or set of desktop arcade controls with MAME (MAMEdevs have a policy for handling this, and if followed there is no issue), using MAME in a commercial setting (simply not allowed), or by embedding the MAME software in a hardware product such as the xxx-in-1 Jamma boards (unlicensed, likely illegal, and against MAMEdev wishes).
  
  
•         Modifying and then distributing the MAME source code in such a way that is contrary to the MAMEdev policies in an effort to tailor the software towards home or commercial arcade cabinet use. This includes things like adding features and releasing the new version without the source code, or certain modifications such as removing the "nag screens" at the beginning of games that have information the MAMEdevs wish to impart regarding that game.
  
  
•         Complaining about MAME not running well, perfectly emulating a certain game, or lacking a feature. This is not unique to BYOAC enthusiasts, but when done at BYOAC reflects on our community. The software is free and the code is there for one to modify if something is lacking -- the MAMEdevs owe us nothing. It is my belief that constructive criticism, troubleshooting, and offers to help are welcomed while mindless bitching is not. I cannot officially speak for MAMEdev however.
  
  

    I personally have much respect for the MAME project and the MAMEdevs who make it possible. It is my wish that users of this website respect the MAME license and derivative policies. MAME is a lot of fun, and those who use it derive much benefit from it. An inconceivable amount of effort goes into producing MAME, and respecting the MAMEdev wishes is an easy price to pay. One of the MAMEdevs that posts occasionally on BYOAC used the phrase "sites that are friendly to the (MAME) team" -- it is my hope that BYOAC will be considered to be one of those sites.

    BYOAC involves much more than MAME however. When BYOAC was created, MAME was only one of many emulators out there. There were some inklings of the juggernaut it would become, but it was one in a crowd then (My favorite at the time was Retrocade). BYOAC encompasses arcade controls, game console controllers (used on your PC, or arcade controls on your console), shareware and commercial game software (there are hundreds of excellent games out there that work well with arcade controls), jukeboxes, authentic arcade machines, and much much more. A good bulk of the site is user-generated content and the landscape literally changes daily. You will never hear me refer to a project as a MAME cabinet, because to do so entirely misses the point of BYOAC. It is entirely possible to have an emulation/home-built cabinet without MAME entirely. Any game using a keyboard or mouse is fodder for use in an arcade cabinet. MAME is only one facet (albeit a really big and fun one) of what BYOAC is all about.

    Thanks for reading, I hope this clears up a few points, and I hope everyone from all camps continues to have fun remembering the past and creating the future of gaming!

    [BYOAC home]    [MAME home]    [MAMEdev home]

    John St.Clair (saint)
    Build Your Own Arcade Controls
    http://www.arcadecontrols.com
    04/02/2007

   
 
 
 

[meyer980]

I completely understand where the MAMEdev team is coming from, dropping support (or not actively supporting) old OS's. If I'm running an old OS, I should probably just run an old version of MAME too.

On another note, I've been quite impressed with the recent updates over the past two or three years. Interface has gotten easier to use. The integration with MESS has been fantastic in my opinion (as a fan of the old LCD handhelds). I know some have complained its gotten slower - but not from my point of view. The modern versions just require a modern computer. The same I'd expect from any piece of software. And even then, I've run the classics on the newest version of MAME on a windows pc smaller than my fist just fine.

[Haze]

Some of the non-arcade stuff is perfectly cab friendly too.

For example, I just emulated this Geigeki Go Go Shooter thing.  It's a Plug and Play TV game from Japan, a vertical scrolling shmup.


The controls are 2x 2-button joysticks (well 3 button if you count pause)

I dare say had MAME not started looking at non-arcade stuff nobody would have emulated this thing.  This kind of reverse engineering of obscure, or poorly documented / represented platforms is what we've been doing for years for arcades, and by expanding the scope we ended up with a lot more eyes looking for other potential things to emulate, including this kind of hardware.  It's spawned interest in people buying such things for us to emulate, as well as an interest in working out how to dump the ROMs etc. (because they're not 'simple' cases like most arcade PCBs)

[EwJ]

Saint and Haze - Thank You!

Question for those who question and complain:
Why does anyone complain about being asked to not blatantly disrespect the work/services/platforms/wishes of those who provide all of these things without any cost to the complainer?

If you were inundated with bug reports from people that turned off your information and warning screens when, had they had seen that information, they would know not to bother, wouldn't you be a little peeved?

It is incredibly generous what is being given to you, and you reply with sarcasm and complaints?

WTF

[jennifer]

Some of the non-arcade stuff is perfectly cab friendly too.

For example, I just emulated this Geigeki Go Go Shooter thing.  It's a Plug and Play TV game from Japan, a vertical scrolling shmup.


The controls are 2x 2-button joysticks (well 3 button if you count pause)

I dare say had MAME not started looking at non-arcade stuff nobody would have emulated this thing.  This kind of reverse engineering of obscure, or poorly documented / represented platforms is what we've been doing for years for arcades, and by expanding the scope we ended up with a lot more eyes looking for other potential things to emulate, including this kind of hardware.  It's spawned interest in people buying such things for us to emulate, as well as an interest in working out how to dump the ROMs etc. (because they're not 'simple' cases like most arcade PCBs)

Well, Now you have sparked my curiosity...Please do elaborate on dumping ROMS the correct, legal way.

[Haze]

Well in most cases there is no ROM chip, just the die underneath a small blob of epoxy, same for the CPU etc.

So while technically it still exists, it doesn't have an outer shell, doesn't have exposed pins, and isn't something you can remove from the PCB.  The actual ROM dies are *tiny* compared to the ROM chips you see.

To read them out you have to work out what all the lines are on the PCB as if were a regular ROM and then in many cases solder directly to the PCB.  In some cases you also have to disable the CPU by cutting off enable lines from it etc. as you're dumping them 'in place' on the PCB.

This type of 'ROM' is actually quite common with game cartridges, but because it's much easier to establish a pinout from a cartridge people have done that for years without talking about it, but for non-cartridge cases it becomes a lot tricker to work out what's what as you don't know of a single point where all the data/address/enable signals pass and have to figure it all out yourself.  The routing etc. differs greatly between PCBs.

Typically I think it gets done because it's much lower profile than a full-blow ROM chip (easier to fit in a tiny device) and also probably less likely to become lose (it's literally encased in epoxy) as even cheap chinese junk (famiclones etc.) have used the technique for decades.  It also no doubt allows the PCB designs to be cheaper as it makes routing of where traces go easier for the designers.

Some are even worse, because they're MCUs under the glob (single glob with CPU die and embedded ROM) so don't respond to standard ROM readout signals.  That's like having an MCU on a PCB (already a bad case), but even worse as they're not recognizable packages and some likely that don't even exist in package form so nobody really knows if they're readable or not.

[jennifer]

You make that sound so easy, And you are not wrong from what I know from my limited experience and experimentation,  And for what you do is probably the only viable solution...However for us idiots here in the dredges of society there is apparently a suicide kill switch in said ROMS, (although possibly not in some older versions of carts) where it will blow the chip and revert it to a anti theft copyright page, effectively bricked at that point (although there may be a workaround, I quit at that point), That and the board or cartridge  you are trying to save is not pretty after what your describing is rendered useless, and is only good for emulation platforms at best.   

[Haze]

I'm not aware of any 'suicide' for these things.  You could probably blow them up if you applied voltage to the wrong lines tho.

But no, it isn't simple work.  The skills of those surrounding the MAME project and providing support for such things has increased dramatically since we merged the non-arcade stuff in, and the arcade side has been benefiting from that intake of new skills too.  Things like that Taito C-Chip dumping was thought impossible until last year, and even Taito didn't have that data backed up anyway, so not only did finding a way to read it allow the emulation in MAME to be greatly improved, it allows for Taito to release accurate compilations of their own too now, using the original code, should they desire to.

[Malenko]

I'm not aware of any 'suicide' for these things.  You could probably blow them up if you applied voltage to the wrong lines tho.

She may have been alluding to protections like the CPS2 encryption/battery.