Yet another "which version?" question, but with a difference...

[MaxVolume]

No, I'm not asking which version runs x, y and z games or what will work best with my hardware.  I've just been out of the MAME scene for a couple years and wanted to ask some questions of those of you who have stayed with it through all the recent changes.

I'm not 100% sure which version I have in my cocktail cab, but I think it's probably around .138 or older.  My goal is to pick a single version for it, my current mini-cab project, and my console project so all systems are using the same version.  I know there have been some significant changes in the past few years, including the switch to emulating the audio hardware in Donkey Kong rather than using samples, which happened just before I started my cocktail project.  With the switch in CHD format, I might as well go with .144 or older, and there are apparently some other changes that rendered some previously-good ROMs useless.  Even though my ROM source labels their roms as .144, I think they just mean that it's a complete set of the ROMs supported by that version, and some of them don't necessarily work under .144 as they used to with older versions.

For this reason, I'm thinking about settling on maybe .140?  Seems a nice round number, but I'm not opposed to using .142 or maybe even .144 if everything I want to run works and there are no major changes.  I'm basically just asking if anyone knows of changes in certain versions that I might want to avoid.  I know it's all spelled out in the whatsnew text files, but I would assume some of you have kept up with all of this enough to just point out a few caveats right off the top of your heads.  I definitely don't need all the fruit machines, etc. that are being added, although I have to say that seeing titles like Family Guy and Monty Python does make me a bit curious.  Best to just try and find a version that is stable and doesn't have any major changes that hadn't been fully worked out.  I'd rather stay a couple versions behind a major change that I'm not concerned about rather than using the first version after the change and not having the advantage of bugfixes, etc.  I'd even go back to .139, .138 or older if .140 might have some issues.

Another consideration is being able to find support utilities like ClrMAMEPro for whatever version I decide on, and it doesn't seem that older versions of those are archived as well as the emulator itself.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

[Pete Rittwage]

I haven't kept up with it for years, but I recall:

* really old PC's/video cards, stick with 0.106.  Something in the video was rewritten and had a big speed hit in 0.107
* cocktail machines, 0.131 (after that many games are screwed up for player 2, and I think it's still broken since years ago)

For newer stuff, hopefully someone who has kept up better will chime in.  

[Haze]

Things get broken, things get fixed.

The *current* version is actually (IMHO) pretty good.

There are a few outstanding performance related issues on some drivers (which given I've just been told *won't* be improved at core level I'm going to have to re-implement bypassing core functions) but a lower rate of change to the core over the last couple of months means we're actually at what I'd say was probably a peak in terms of stability at the moment, people have been actually fixing things without more bits getting broken by mass changes ;-)

Yeah there are probably one or two long-standing regressions, but for several of those the games worked more by chance in the first place, and you'd be looking at absolutely ancient versions if you want them running.

As pointed out, there are quite a few flipscreen / cocktail issues to sort out, although AFAIK the classics like Galaga work correctly again now, a lot of drivers have never really had proper well tested flipscreen support because it's something of a non-standard use case (and buggy on many pcbs too!)

The best advice is usually try the latest version, and move down if you find things to be not working as you need them to.  Keep multiple versions around for different games tho!

[MaxVolume]

Great advice... thanks to both of you!

I think I'm post-.131 on my cocktail project already, and while there are some flipping issues, I've just marked those games "SINGLE PLAYER ONLY" in the menu and disabled 2P START.  All the big names play fine in cocktail mode, and I don't think I'd want to go back to using samples for the DK games anyway.

I'll stick with .146 and do as Haze suggests... just regress if something doesn't work right.  I think my different categories will be set up as "emulators" in MAMEWAH anyway, so if I have to throw an older version into the mix for a particular game, only a single category is affected rather than being a global change.

The biggest problem I have now is trying to piece together a custom set of ROMs, since there are a few where I can't tell what the frick is missing!  

Also, I'm starting to realize that this flood of new games is more likely to be pinball rather than fruit machines, but I have just as little use for them.  I'm really concerned about keeping the cocktail table as lean as possible because it's a 1.6GHz processor with only an 8GB SSHD, so I may not switch versions on that... it ain't broke, so I probably shouldn't try to fix it.  The machine in the FLYNN'S cab is 3GHz, but it's an old single-core P4... it has hyperthreading, but that probably doesn't help much.

I probably shouldn't be surprised by this, but so far I can count the number of CHD games I need to run on one hand, and really I could probably leave them all out for FLYNN'S anyway.  I'd like to include a few on my PROTOVISION console project, but it's only a 1.8GHz dual-core that I don't plan on upgrading, so there won't be many CHDs involved overall.