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Radical New Idea: Hardware MAME

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RayB:

I dunno if it's all that feasible. There are SO MANY different CPUs. For example the 6502, also had variations, like 6502c, etc. Then there's the 6508. There's the Z80. There's the 68000 and its variations.

Then there's custom video chips, and sound chips like Atari's pokey, which cannot be purchased since they are proprietary technology.




ericball:

Nope, ain't gonna fly.

Take a look at the MAME source code and the number of modules for each custom graphics chip (many of which don't have off-the shelf equivalents).  And it's those graphics chips which are CPU intensive to emulate because they are often massively parallel.


Lilwolf:

There isn't a real reason.

Sure, you could change mame around to use real cpus.

but remember... you have to actually make sure they have access to memory, sync them all, that will slow down the chips.  You might be able to change how the emulation where you emulate the board, and hope that your computer is fast enought to fill in each chips requests before the next tick.  

But you would end up slowing down games that run find on new machines.

And the processors for the non-100% games would be cheaper just to build a bootleg board.



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