Help with mame compiling please? (adding individual game fixes)

[adder]

hi all

although im new to mame compiling, im at the stage of being able to successfully compile mame myself without errors (ie. i have mingw set up ok, etc).

i noticed some people like to stick with certain releases of mame rather than update every time a new version comes out, and im currently doing the same thing (im sticking with mame version .148 for the time being).

i notice some people like to add certain individual fixes themselves (eg. stuff they spot over at mametesters) into their older mame builds, and im interested in doing that too.

so that i know im doing things right, can i get some advice please

let's take eg. this fix below from git.redump.net:

http://git.redump.net/mame/commit/?id=708aec3507618b0972380aef4c4784dc1745ae90

can anyone tell me what i need to do to add that to my current build of mame?  i imagine there are not too many steps involved, but i just want to make sure i do it right and not leave any steps out.

i notice when you first compile mame it takes a long time (an hour for me) to finish, but then afterwards it compiles much faster (due to the files now in the OBJ folder?)

how should i deal with the OBJ folder when adding individual game fixes..  should i be deleting stuff from there? is there anything else im not aware of (eg. other files/folders to consider, etc)

any advice greatly appreciated, cheers!

[Haze]

mixing and matching newer patches with older versions isn't really recommended, some patches might rely on other changes made to the core / elsewhere in the project and in the end you could just end up with a bit of a frankenbuild.

if you insist on going down this route then you're probably better off using the SVN with tortoise SVN than the git mirror.
details are still at http://mamedev.org/?p=373

with that you can check out the current source (or an svn revision you want which corresponds to a given version) browse the changelog with tortoisesvn, get the diff for any given change, update only an individual file in your working tree etc.

but like I said, start doing that and you're very much on your own you're much more likely to find things don't work because MAME changes often.

if you update the source it is recommended you do a 'make depend' before doing a 'make' because it will build a more complete dependency tree, but there are still some changes where you will have to do a FULL rebuild or you'll get linker errors / things not working.

this probably isn't something you should be doing if you're not 100% confident in your ability and familiar with the tools.

[adder]

ok thanks a lot for the advice, i will probably leave it then and stick with what i have.