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MAME Movie Maker released
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papercut:
Yeah I agree it can be risky... My 'theory' is though that there's less going on in memory during the beginning of an attract mode cycle so perhaps there's less to worry about with save states.  In other words, once you 'insert coin' you're in a whole new level of interaction with the system and I can see that causing problems... whereas in attract mode, maybe the games are in a 'calmer' state and can be captured safely without harming the little bits and bytes. :)

I'm SOOO technical...
Silver:
Hi,

While its not save states, the idea to skip past the garbage/boot stuff has been around a while. Theres a patch around thats adds a couple of commands to mame - ssf and -fsf (its where the "ssf" name for the ssf.txt file came from originally). ssf skips a set number of frames (completely turns off rendering any video output, making it as fast as possible with a black screen) and fsf simply disabled the throttle for a set number of frames (fast as possible with video rendering).

It may be useful for where savestates fail.
2600:

--- Quote from: papercut on May 31, 2005, 11:07:14 am ---Yeah I agree it can be risky... My 'theory' is though that there's less going on in memory during the beginning of an attract mode cycle so perhaps there's less to worry about with save states.  In other words, once you 'insert coin' you're in a whole new level of interaction with the system and I can see that causing problems... whereas in attract mode, maybe the games are in a 'calmer' state and can be captured safely without harming the little bits and bytes. :)

I'm SOOO technical...


--- End quote ---

Sorry, but your theory is wrong.  The problem with save states is that a lot of drivers don't have them implemented.  Which means when MAME saves the states it doesn't know which bits and bytes to save for sake of a simpler explanation.  ;)

-ssf and -fsf would work on all games if the frame start number of the attract mode was saved to a file.  Just a little something for Buddabing to implement in his long list of things to do.   Actually scratch that Buddabing doesn't need to do this, I want to do another run of attract modes so when I do it I'll output the romname and startframe to a file.

Silver do you have any desire to host this as well, although we should call it something else since people easily get confused about the difference.
Buddabing:
In retrospect I think it was a mistake to call Silver's ssf.txt with the ending frame the same name as the other ssf.txt that just has the start frames. It has confused more than one person already. So I propose we change the name of Silver's file to something else.

Calculating a saved state and loading it will be superior to the ssf for the drivers that support it. Unfortunately I don't know how to tell which drivers have a good save state and which don't.

I will put fsf/ssf support in BuddaMAME, I think it will be useful for guests playing my cab.
2600:
Buddabing it's your baby so I say go ahead and name it whatever you want.  If you change it I believe only you, Silver, and screaming would have to do any changes to anything.  If you put a blurb afterwards on the first post, all of us users can easily get by with any changes that are done.

Saved state would be superior and automatic save state bootup suport on top of that, but I don't think it is in good enough shape to be used.  I could be wrong though.  And the big problem is it's not like it's going to wave a big red flag saying it didn't work it.



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