Synching with the current version was likely a good idea - it is a lot easier to find a current ROM than one for R36 or R65 or so - The question is five years from now, when someone picks up AAE version 3, what tells them that they need MAME 0.120 Roms?
Don't worry about the mode switching - see below ...
***
Okay, I got AAE working with a FX5200 card. More on that below … (This is update 3 BTW).
I briefly tried Asteroids Deluxe and the vector effects are incredible.
Problems with the emulator (and workarounds) -
The emulator does not scale graphics properly if you are using the GUI. For example, if I set the GUI to run at 1024x768 and launch my game and tell the game to run at 640x480 - the game runs in a little 640x480 Window at the bottom-left of the screen. If I set the GUI and the game both at 640x480, all is fine. If I set the GUI at 640x480 and the game at 800x600, the game displays in at 800x600 in the 640x480 resolution, so you only see the lower third of the game on-screen - again running at 800x600 in the GUI and the game also fixes this.
Running from the command line does not have any problems even if the game is at a different resolution than the desktop (despite what I posted previously - I was using AAE basic and running on a slower card (Quadro) with more background task running). Command line works fine.
If you wanted to run AAE from the GUI and run different games at different resolutions (for instance Bzone runs much slower and needs a lower resolution than astdelux for me), you need to create say an AAE800 folder and an AAE1024 folder with a full copy of the emu in each one, and even then, you have to remember which games work and only put those roms in each folder, and then you could pick a wrong game and not know until the ROM loading failed.
There is also a slight glitch in Battlezone in that if you disable the single stick hack (I used the MAME trusted E,D,I,K,Space mapping), the right-stick up-down settings are still ignored, and you have to use and invert the single-stick up-down settings from UP and DOWN to K and I and then it works fine.
I take that back, the single stick hack is working, the dual-stick mode does not work. Actually, I think many of the inputs are just mapped wrong - it plays fine if you set the following mappings:
Left/Up = Normally should be E, but needs to be I (This seems to be the right up input)
Left/Down = Normally should be D, but needs to be K (This seems to be the right down input)
Right/Up = Normally should be I but is ignored, I set it to E or 9 and pressing 9 did nothing. This seems to be a dead input - it has no effect in single stick mode.
Right/Down = Normally should be K but is ignored, I had it set to D, then changed it to 0 and pressing 0 did nothing. This also seems to be a dead input and also has no effect in single-stick mode.
Fire = Is mapped correctly, need to be changed to Space instead of L Ctrl for keyboard play, but works fine.
Single Stick Right - I left set to Right - it has no effect, this seems to be mapped correctly.
Single Stick Left - I left set to Left - it has not effect, this seems to be mapped correctly.
Single Stiick Up - Normally should be mapped to UP, needs to be mapped to E. This works in single stick mode also. The input seems to be mapped to both single stick up and left stick up.
Single Sitck Down- Normally should be mapped to Down, but needs to be mapped to D. This also works in single stick mode also. This input seems to be mapped to both single stick down and left stick down.
There is a very minor glitch in Bzone that if you pause the game, it drops back to a 640x480 window inside the current desktop resolution and then restores when you unpause. This would be fine if all games did this, but astdelux pauses at the same resolution, so I think it’s a bug. Llander has this bug also - I didn’t test all the games.
To get the RADAR text in Battlezone, you have to enable bezel artwork. This is not considered bezel art in MAME, so it confused me for a while.
Some of the game settings can be changed in real-time and others cannot - for example I changed the Gamma, Brightness, and Contrast with the attract screen running and could see the effects of the changes as I made them, but I changed line-width from very thin to tubba and could only see the changes when I exited and re-started the game.
Minor Gripe - Some settings like Vector Glow and ScreenBurn are not working yet, but you can change the settings and they will then get changed back and you will think they didn’t work.
Also, you don’t get error messages - missing roms, unplayable games in command line mode.
Very Minor but important gripe - my monitor only supports up to 1280x1024, although the graphics card will do much higher. I use Multires to limit the available settings, but AAE doesn’t read this, so it will let you select 1600x1200 and lock up your screen. If this happens, if you did it in the GUI, you need to manually edit your aae.ini file, or if it happens in the game you need to manually edit your aae/cfg/gamename.ini file.
I am mostly testing Battlezone, but I want to point out some (minor) flaws with the emulator, and some great things as well.
First off, I am running an XP2800 Barton with something like 1.5G of RAM with an Albatron 128M FX5200 Card and DNA Force 94.24 Drivers. These drivers seem to work very well in general, BTW. This or an ATI 9550 with Catalyst 6.11 drivers are probably rock-bottom price wise to run this with any success. My previous card was a 64M Radeon 9200 running Omega 6.5 drivers, which is slightly faster than the FX5200 (I previously tested other games such as Train Simulator with it), but won’t run AAE. I am using a KDS VS-7e 17” CRT monitor.
I am very familiar with BattleZone as you might or might not know from MAME.net. I played the game using MAME R36B12 well into the 0.90’s realease of MAME b/c it sounded good and gave me full framerates (and did that when I had a Pentium 200 also). Discrete sounds in Asteroids has come a long way and it doesn’t bother me anymore but discrete sound in BattleZone still isn’t there despite repeated requests to fix it. (EDIT: I should clarify, by that I mean making the game sound like it sounded when you were playing it, not making the game sound accurate - i.e. if the game output a loud whine at 18,000 Hz, but the speakers only went to 12,000 Hz, so you never heard it, but MAME adds the whine and your PC spealers reproduce it, MAME is accurate, but the game is not realistic. I recently (a couple years ago) switched to BzoneGL by Tim of astgl, and ran it well at 1152x864.
AAE was fairly slow with the game, so I tried BzoneGL and it was dog-slow with the FX5200. I went into the driver settings and changed Anti-Aliasing (AA) and anisotropic filtering (AF) from Application controlled to off. Performance then improved to what I was a bit less than what I was used to seeing with the 9200 card. Later, I set Image Quality from Performance to High Quality - this is a general purpose computer and I type this review on it, and it makes a big difference in Word, looks better in the games and didn’t seem to affect performance. AA killed performance, even at 2X, and oddly it seemed even disabled in the game and app-controlled in the driver - leave it disabled with this card. AF didn’t take much of a performance hit, so I set it back to App Controlled:
Performance:
NOTE: I had Word and Windows Explorer open for most of the testing, but when I closed Word it didn’t seem to matter much to the scores.
BattleZone would only run full speed at 800x600 or less. At 1024x768, it ran at about 25 FPS out of 40 with noticeable slowdowns. So the options are:
1) Run AAE at 800x600 (I still have some tweaking to do with the various settings).
2) Stay with BzoneGL, which will run full-speed at 1152x864.
3) Buy a better video card, but I am not sure how much better is required, nor whether memory amount, memory speed, or GPU/GPU speed (or AGP/PCIe) will make the most impact or how good is good enough.
Armora ran full speed at 800x600, 28/38 FPS at 1024x and 24/38 FPS at 1152x and 20 FPS/38 at 1280x.
Oddly, Asteroid only ran fullspeed at 640x (it looked good though), it ran about 51/60 FPS at 800x and looked great and played fine, so if you didn’t hit F11, you wouldn’t know the slowdown was there.
AstDeluxe ran full speed even at 1280x1024 (highest my monitor supports (and looked great)
Invaders ran full speed at 640x, at 800x it ran 42/60 but with some slowdown.
Llander ran full speed at 1280x and looked great.
Red Baron still needs some work I think. At 800x it is running at 50/40 FPS (which I thought was supposed to be prevented), and the artwork does not look like the MAME art (which is very good) and there is no way to have the bezel art shown but the game still full-screen edge-to-edge regadless of the crop setting. (Runs at about 32/40 at 1024x.
Spacduel ran full speed at 800x and 32/45 at 1024x
Starcas ran full speed at 800x and looked incredible, it ran about 28/38 at 1024x but I didn’t try to play it
Tempest only ran at 640x - at 800x it ran at 45/60 with noticeable slowdowns, however, oddly it looked better at 640x to me (but I also didn’t tweak the line widths).
The Good:
Bzone looks better in AAE at 800x600 than in BzoneGL at 800x600. BzoneGL is sharper at 1152x864 than AAE at 800x600, but I have more adjustments to make. I decided I like the following settings for my monitor at 800x600:
Windowed - No
Gamma - Negative 5%
Brightess - Negative 3%
Contrast - 0
Vsync - Enabled
FSAA - Disabled
Smoothing 4X
Phosphor Trail - Little
Vector Glow - N/A
Linewidth - Very Thin
Pointsize - Bigger (Might need to increase this more)
Monitor - Analog
All other settings Yes, except Screenburn is N/A.
Asteroids Deluxe has never looked so good. (even at 800x600).
I have been using the R36 Bzone artwork with all emulators and am using it with AAE, but the newer MAME-based and AAE artwork finally looks good with this emulator and I may switch it back.
The sound is the best I have heard, with the tank motion clearly present when the tank is turning. The shots sound a bit weak, but much better than in MAME. I don’t know if the three volume settings have anything to do with this or not, and I haven’t played with the settings to find out if it can be improved.
Thanks AAE for all your hard work on this!!!!
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Topic: New VECTOR GAME Emulator (AAE) (Read 99790 times)
