MAME could become obsolete

[isucamper]

You guys do know that the MAME devs do not care that your PC can't run newer games, just as Encyclopedia Britannica writers do not care that their descriptions of Africa cannot magically transport you to Nygeria... right?

They are not game developers.  They are documenting and preserving the hardware and software that ran these games.   

[Ginsu Victim]

You guys do know that the MAME devs do not care that your PC can't run newer games, just as Encyclopedia Britannica writers do not care that their descriptions of Africa cannot magically transport you to Nygeria... right?

They are not game developers.  They are documenting and preserving the hardware and software that ran these games.   

Especially when it comes to arcade games that run on PCs. Why document that?

[mh12]

You guys do know that the MAME devs do not care that your PC can't run newer games, just as Encyclopedia Britannica writers do not care that their descriptions of Africa cannot magically transport you to Nygeria... right?

They are not game developers.  They are documenting and preserving the hardware and software that ran these games.   

Especially when it comes to arcade games that run on PCs. Why document that?

why not? haven't they already added pirate Windows/MAME boards?

i'm just wondering why some people here are acting like MAME is the only emulator around. most of the popular 3D systems have an emulator out there written specifically for them, usually with playability in mind. that has nothing to do with MAME. i guess the thing is that many emus only last for as long as the developer(s) can tolerate people constantly asking for the latest game to be perfectly playable on whatever hardware they're running. MAME wouldn't survive if many of its devs even listened to stuff like that.

i'm quitting the scene!!

[DJ_Izumi]

Personally, I think MAME is beginning to suffer massively from bloat, and a lack of focus. I wish the mamedevs would split the program in two and have one version for 2D era games and another for the 3D era.

It makes sense to try and emulate the 2D games as accurately as possible, even at the expense of speed, because modern hardware is more than capable of doing so. But 3D era games require a different approach at least for the time being. It not currently possible to emulate those games accurately at anywhere near full speed, so some compromises need to be made. Also, as others have already pointed out, "documentation" is not such an issue for the 3D games as most of them run on already very well documented generic hardware.

I think the issue is that the hardware is progressively more and more complicated and the newer or more one-of hardwares are harder to even tinker with to start any form of emulation.  At least some platforms can derive information learned from other emulation projects.  Chihiro from Xbox, System 246/256 from PlayStation 2, NAOMI from Dreamcast, and stuff like that.  But there's lots of reasonably modern arcade platforms that are just complicated as hell and have no mass produced consumer sibbling.

The newer the game, the less access to the hardware in private collections to dump ROMs or examine the hardware too.

[Jack Burton]

You guys do know that the MAME devs do not care that your PC can't run newer games, just as Encyclopedia Britannica writers do not care that their descriptions of Africa cannot magically transport you to Nygeria... right?

They are not game developers.  They are documenting and preserving the hardware and software that ran these games.  

This is just plain untrue.   MAME dev does want games to be able to be played.  That is the single most important aspect of the documentation process.  What better way to preserve them than to play them?

What MAMEdev does not care about is using shortcuts in the name of speed.  They aim for accuracy first, speed second.  That does not mean speed none.   As long as they can maintain accuracy they will attempt to optimize performance as much as possible.

MAME is nothing like the Encylopedia.

MAME can 99.9% replicate the experience it documents under the right conditions.  Under a loose definition you can consider to not be a reproduction of the game, but simply be it.  The code is exactly the same.  

The Encyclopedia can replicate .1% of the experiences it documents.  It can show you a few pictures, or now videos and audio.  It can give you vague sense of the place.  Enough that you would recognize it if you were there, but really not much more.  

[isucamper]

Purpose
MAME is strictly a non-profit project. Its main purpose is to be a reference to the inner workings of the emulated arcade machines. This is done both for educational purposes and for preservation purposes, in order to prevent many historical games from disappearing forever once the hardware they run on stops working. Of course, in order to preserve the games and demonstrate that the emulated behavior matches the original, you must also be able to actually play the games. This is considered a nice side effect, and is not MAME's primary focus.

http://mamedev.org/about.html

[TOK]

I haven't bought that story since they added Direct 3D scanlines and other foof. 

[Jack Burton]

Purpose
MAME is strictly a non-profit project. Its main purpose is to be a reference to the inner workings of the emulated arcade machines. This is done both for educational purposes and for preservation purposes, in order to prevent many historical games from disappearing forever once the hardware they run on stops working. Of course, in order to preserve the games and demonstrate that the emulated behavior matches the original, you must also be able to actually play the games. This is considered a nice side effect, and is not MAME's primary focus.

http://mamedev.org/about.html

That's just a load of BS.  They know exactly what they are doing.  Of course they have the need to appear academic in order to preserve the integrity of the project and not let it devolve into hundreds of hacks and add-on features, so the above statement is nice to use a a guideline. 

[SavannahLion]

I haven't bought that story since they added Direct 3D scanlines and other foof. 

I don't think anybody buys the foof of downloading 4000+ games in one go for archival purposes either, but you don't see anyone arguing that point.  

[DJ_Izumi]

I don't think anybody buys the foof of downloading 4000+ games in one go for archival purposes either, but you don't see anyone arguing that point.  

I always figured having huge collections like that detracted from the machine anyway.  A lot of arcade games afterall arn't that remarkable and if you have someone walk up to a machine with such a huge collection they'll be less likely to find something they'll enjoy as they scroll through the huge list.  Better to pluck out the golden ones and make it sort of a 'best of', at least if other people are going to be playing like house guests.

Even for gaming events based on consoles that I've done, we'd have someone with a bunch of CD binders with the games, letting people select their own games.  I found it's better to setup the games in advance and just put on the best stuff.  Maybe have a short list of what good games in what genres are available.  Few people would pull Time Crisis 3 out of the CD binder, but if you have the PS2 going with the Guncon's hooked up and it bellowing out in Attract mode 'VSSE has sent in two of their best agents', suddenly it's the coolest thing in the room.   You really want to get them to go 'OHHH!  That game!  Cool!' instead of giving them a laundry list of video game history.

[Ginsu Victim]

I always figured having huge collections like that detracted from the machine anyway.  A lot of arcade games afterall arn't that remarkable and if you have someone walk up to a machine with such a huge collection they'll be less likely to find something they'll enjoy as they scroll through the huge list.  Better to pluck out the golden ones and make it sort of a 'best of', at least if other people are going to be playing like house guests.

I just have multiple lists in Mamewah:

All Games
No Mature
70s
80s
90s
Neo Geo
Lightgun
several different lists by company

[Haze]

Purpose
MAME is strictly a non-profit project. Its main purpose is to be a reference to the inner workings of the emulated arcade machines. This is done both for educational purposes and for preservation purposes, in order to prevent many historical games from disappearing forever once the hardware they run on stops working. Of course, in order to preserve the games and demonstrate that the emulated behavior matches the original, you must also be able to actually play the games. This is considered a nice side effect, and is not MAME's primary focus.

http://mamedev.org/about.html

That's just a load of BS.  They know exactly what they are doing.  Of course they have the need to appear academic in order to preserve the integrity of the project and not let it devolve into hundreds of hacks and add-on features, so the above statement is nice to use a a guideline. 

Really?  Do you think I have any actual interest in the various 8-liners I've been emulating beyond the hardware that they run in?  They offer no gameplay, are utterly mundane and I wish nobody had ever even come up with the concept of them; the hardware and various security solutions and seeing how many of them were hacked by sellers and operators to screw the customer (with the customer sometimes being the operator!) out of a lot of money is interesting tho.

In many sense it IS an academic project if you dig a bit deeper than 'It lets me play galaga on the PC' and that's the main thing that's kept it going compared to other emulators.

It's not a software engineering project (as much as Aaron would like to treat it as one) and it's not a 'games machine'.  It's a piece of research present in the form of source code, and binaries.  The smallest details that a lot of people find completely irrelevant are important to the project.

As for PC based games, sure, there were PC based games running on DOS, Windows 95 etc. etc.  Good luck trying to run them at all on a modern 64-bit version of Windows 7 / Vista; likewise, good luck trying to run these XP based things at all come the next generation of Windows.  These hacks aren't a long term solution to anything and in the shorter term are only likely to result in more drastic security measures and projects being cancelled.

[ragnar]

I want to point out something.  People emulate things like Comodore computers even though they can just use actual Comodore hardware.  Some day, people will not have x86 hardware and they will have to emulate it.

[Dazz]

I wonder if they have Battle Fantasia running yet via this same system.  I think it runs on the same hardware as BlazBlue.

[shateredsoul]

I wonder if they have Battle Fantasia running yet via this same system.  I think it runs on the same hardware as BlazBlue.

Yeah, I wonder the same thing too. Does anyone know the group responsible for this emulator? Does anyone know if they have a forum or site?

Oh yeah,

*ahem* blah blah argh mame blah blah

[Jack Burton]

Purpose
MAME is strictly a non-profit project. Its main purpose is to be a reference to the inner workings of the emulated arcade machines. This is done both for educational purposes and for preservation purposes, in order to prevent many historical games from disappearing forever once the hardware they run on stops working. Of course, in order to preserve the games and demonstrate that the emulated behavior matches the original, you must also be able to actually play the games. This is considered a nice side effect, and is not MAME's primary focus.

http://mamedev.org/about.html

That's just a load of BS.  They know exactly what they are doing.  Of course they have the need to appear academic in order to preserve the integrity of the project and not let it devolve into hundreds of hacks and add-on features, so the above statement is nice to use a a guideline.  

Really?  Do you think I have any actual interest in the various 8-liners I've been emulating beyond the hardware that they run in?  They offer no gameplay, are utterly mundane and I wish nobody had ever even come up with the concept of them; the hardware and various security solutions and seeing how many of them were hacked by sellers and operators to screw the customer (with the customer sometimes being the operator!) out of a lot of money is interesting tho.

In many sense it IS an academic project if you dig a bit deeper than 'It lets me play galaga on the PC' and that's the main thing that's kept it going compared to other emulators.

It's not a software engineering project (as much as Aaron would like to treat it as one) and it's not a 'games machine'.  It's a piece of research present in the form of source code, and binaries.  The smallest details that a lot of people find completely irrelevant are important to the project.

As for PC based games, sure, there were PC based games running on DOS, Windows 95 etc. etc.  Good luck trying to run them at all on a modern 64-bit version of Windows 7 / Vista; likewise, good luck trying to run these XP based things at all come the next generation of Windows.  These hacks aren't a long term solution to anything and in the shorter term are only likely to result in more drastic security measures and projects being cancelled.

The emulation of things like 8 liners just goes toward the eventual goal of playing other games.  You might not emulate them to play an 8 liner, but information and experience gathered might be useful later on down the road towards emulating something more desirable.  And of course there is the fact that even though you don't want to play an 8-liner, you can't deny that they are popular and somebody else will.  

In reality the notion of "I just want to play the games"  and "this is purely for historical reasons" go hand in hand.  As I said before, the best way to document the history of these games and their hardware is to allow them to be played.  

Additionally you can't discount the fact that you might think it's just fun to try to emulate the 8-liners.  Isn't that the way emulator authors usually are?  They sometimes emulate things just to see if they can do it, and don't really care to play the games.  Would you say this is partially true about  MAME?

[Haze]

Additionally you can't discount the fact that you might think it's just fun to try to emulate the 8-liners.  Isn't that the way emulator authors usually are?  They sometimes emulate things just to see if they can do it, and don't really care to play the games.  Would you say this is partially true about  MAME?

I would say that for the devs who have made the most progress over the years that's true.  Everybody has a limited number of games that they like / enjoy, and if you limit yourself to emulating those, then you don't get very far.  The devs who get their enjoyment from actually figuring things out, and completely don't care the nature of the game they're dealing with tend to be more prolific.

Of course, an intimiate knowledge of the game / system you're emulating helps a lot, subtle effects the hardware can perform are sometimes missed by people who don't know what the games are meant to be doing because they don't know the games.

Quite often that's where teamwork comes into play, and also where sites like MAMEtesters with people posting original HW videos can help.  Getting the initial work done can help ensure that the roms are properly dumped, and the hardware is mostly understood, while specific references can help fine-tine the emulation and help bring it closer to a more 'pixel perfect' level, as recently happened with the titles on the Psikyo SH2 based hardware.

I was mainly just saying that people calling out the 'it's a documentation project' as BS really don't understand what's going on behind the scenes, or the nature of the project.  Yes, it lets you play thousands of games, but the driving factor is more often just as much about the challenge of figuring out the hardware, and documenting it so that anybody else can use MAME as a reference piece than anything else.  It's a misconception that the often quoted text is just to cover the backs of the developers.

[BobbyG66]

Ya. let's piss off the MameDEV's, that's a good idea.

[Haze]

Ya. let's piss off the MameDEV's, that's a good idea.

I'd be more concerned with pissing off Taito, but that's just me ;-)

Long term you will just make the lives of the people trying to emulate the games harder tho.

[DJ_Izumi]

I don't see this hurting sales of the game that signifigantly, except in the production of bootlegs and well, some 'company' in China doesn't need some torrents to start pirating arcade games.  They have the resources to pirate that stuff on an entirely different scale.

BB:CS will be released on 360 and PS3 in the summer or so which will be a lot more accessible.  Casual players then won't have to muddle with hardware compatibility and such on the consoles.  With their Vewlix styled arcade sticks and HDTVs, that'll be what hurts the arcade operators. :3

[Haze]

BB:CS will be released on 360 and PS3 in the summer or so which will be a lot more accessible.  Casual players then won't have to muddle with hardware compatibility and such on the consoles.  With their Vewlix styled arcade sticks and HDTVs, that'll be what hurts the arcade operators. :3

It will be interesting to see if it is, often this kind of project can be cancelled for reasons like this.  Hopefully the company concerned will see that XB360 / PS3 are different markets than the PC and proceed anyway, but it only takes one person to pull funding due to this hack for the whole project to fall through and people to lose their jobs over it.

[DJ_Izumi]

It will be interesting to see if it is, often this kind of project can be cancelled for reasons like this.  Hopefully the company concerned will see that XB360 / PS3 are different markets than the PC and proceed anyway, but it only takes one person to pull funding due to this hack for the whole project to fall through and people to lose their jobs over it.

Fighting games have long been the realm of consoles, with very few fighting games ever seeing PC releases.  A lot of fighting game franchises now are released to console before arcade and some are never ported to arcade at all because it's more profitable just to target consoles.

With the lingering death of arcades, I would be shocked if BB:CS never went to consoles, especially when the original has sold almost 500 000 copies globally.

[J.Max]

I wonder if they have Battle Fantasia running yet via this same system.  I think it runs on the same hardware as BlazBlue.

Yeah, I wonder the same thing too. Does anyone know the group responsible for this emulator? Does anyone know if they have a forum or site?

Oh yeah,

*ahem* blah blah argh mame blah blah

It's not an emulator.  It's a leaked, unencrypted copy of the original code...there is a BIG difference.  None of the other games have been decrypted.  Type X2 is a Windows PC, no need for emulation on these games YET.

[saint]

It goes without saying normally, but no piracy links please. Thanks

[Jack Burton]

I think this will certainly not go over well with Taito.  However I can only see it making a positive impact on sales in the US.

Only a handful of arcades in the US bought CS boards, a teeny tiny fraction of those in Japan.  They simply can't be compared.  There are probably 10,000 CS boards in japan, and maybe 20 in the entire US.

Now there will be thousands of home users in the US who will have access to the game, and probably a couple dozen arcades will pirate it. 

This will create a scene for the game and build a community that will only increase when the console release happens.

However, as I said, I don't think Taito will see it this way.  They will simply think piracy = lost profits, and will probably take action in further hardware updates to increase security.

Imagine if SSFIV was going to be released in arcades and this happened?  The consequences would be huge.