XMen 6 player invisible characters

[severdhed]

I put my 4 player pedestal cabinet in storage because it took up a lot of space and my kid's never really played it anymore. I just remodeled my 2 player cabinet and it reignited my obsession with arcade games. Since I had a bunch of extra controls lying around, I decided to 3d print some arcade stick enclosures and made a set of 6 arcade sticks that I can connect to a mini PC that it connected to my main TV. This way I can sit on the couch with a joystick on my lap and play mame games. Since I have 6 of these controllers, I thought it would be fun to be able to play 6 player X-Men. However when I launch the game, only the background is visible, none of the characters or enemies show up. The 4 player version works fine.  I'm running mame 150 because that's what I had on my other cabinet. Is there something I need to do to get this working?

[PL1]

when I launch the game, only the background is visible, none of the characters or enemies show up. The 4 player version works fine.  I'm running mame 150 because that's what I had on my other cabinet. Is there something I need to do to get this working?

MAMEInfo.dat shows missing sprites that Hap fixed in v0.151 and several other improvements since.

- 0.250: Osso fixed corrupt or invisible sprites in clones X-Men (6 Players ver ECB) and X-Men (6 Players ver UCB).
. . .
- 0.223: Fixed some gfx issues in clone X-Men (6 Players ver ECB) [dink/fbneo]. Use shared_ptr_array [hap].
. . .
- 0.151: hap fixed missing sprites in clones X-Men (6 Players ver ECB) and (6 Players ver UCB).

Just ran a quick test with "xmen6pu" (6 Players ver UCB) in both MAMEUIFX 0.152 and mainline v0.262 using the v0.152 ROMs.  Video option "Dual Side-By-Side (Gapless)" looks great on a widescreen TV.  All you have to do is map the controls. 


Scott

[severdhed]

The last time I updated my mame version, a lot of my roms weren't compatible and I had to find new roms.   I don't understand how that works. I thought the roms were dumped from the original hardware, so why are the roms not a constant?

It has been many years since I've gone through this process, I don't remember how it works.  I guess there is no simple fix other than starting from scratch with a newer version.

[PL1]

The last time I updated my mame version, a lot of my roms weren't compatible and I had to find new roms.   I don't understand how that works. I thought the roms were dumped from the original hardware, so why are the roms not a constant?

Some older dumps were not-quite accurate so those have to be properly redumped.

Sometimes a previously un-dumpable MCU is decapped and decoded to replace MAME Devs' best guess on how it worked.

Sometimes a new variant is found that causes a change in the ROM naming conventions.
- For example, the US version of Gondomania was dumped in early 1999.  The World version wasn't dumped until 2018.  Since MAME usually uses the World version of a game as the parent ROM for a driver, the US version ROM was renamed to "gondou" and the World version ROM was named "gondo".

It has been many years since I've gone through this process, I don't remember how it works.  I guess there is no simple fix other than starting from scratch with a newer version.

Depending on your system configuration, you might be able to run more than one version of MAME.

A small step from v0.150 to v0.152 should be fairly painless.  Sometimes you can find update ROMsets that have just the ROMs that changed between versions.

If you decide to take the big leap to a recent version, many people find it easier to first find a known-version set of ROMs, BIOSes, devices, and desired CHDs then download the matching version of MAME.


Scott