MAME 0.162 is a MESS (aaahh get it)

[Yeltsew7]

MAME has been getting a lot of updates recently, and because I always need to have the "latest and greatest" version of my software, I try to keep track of the updates and keep my romset updates with them. I got a little behind though, and the last set I used was .159 I think. I had to delete my full split set to free disk space, AND my hard drive with my full MALA setup with like 10 emulators died too.  Right now, I don't have any working romset. I wanted to play some MAME this morning, and I went to a certain site that shall remain nameless to try to find what may or may have not been a romset.  I downloaded something called "MAME 0.162 Software List ROMs (Merged)".  It was ~30 GB which is about how most merged sets are.  After it finished downloading, I looked at it, and it was all in a different set up than I had seen in other romsets, and then within MAME every ROM was just a system. There was Gameboy and SNES and al lot of things that I had no idea MAME had any interest in. I'm really confused as to what this romset is, and what it is used for, since no games were actually in it, only MESS (I guess) systems.  I really just have 2 questions and at this point I'm wondering why I made this thread:

1. Did I really just spend an hour downloading 30 GB of emulators?

2. Do I need these now if I want to play the games that I used to on MAME?

[B2K24]

Since you already downloaded them just keep them. Many of the software list systems work great in MAME and are very fun to play when you can utilize MAME's awesome features like HLSL, load/save states, fast forward slow parts of game, etc.

GBA, NES, Genesis, SNES minus the odd game that rely on the special DSP chips all run pretty well and are a hell of a lot of fun.

You have an opportunity now at the ultimate form of exploration without having to leave your computer chair
Thousands upon thousands of games and software some of which you probably never knew existed.

For the most part MAME still works and operates the same way that you are used to. Just think of the newly added stuff that got merged in and once you have an understanding of how software lists work and function, loading games is extremely simple.

Here's an example of my rompath option in my MAME's 0.162 mame.ini

Code: [Select]

rompath                   J:\MAME ROMs;J:\MAME CHDs;J:\MESS\roms;J:\MESS CHDs;I:\MESS CHDs
So If I want to run some arcade game then I can either pick and launch it with a frontend or type *mame64 bublbobl* in command prompt

If I want to play Nintendo's Super Mario Bros then it's *mame64 nes smb1*

If I want to play SNES Chrono Trigger it's *mame64 snes ctrigger*

If I want to play Genesis and the USA version of Gunstar Heroes it's *mame64 genesis gunstaru*

etc. etc. ect. etc.

For further information one of the Devs Haze has a really informative blog.
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/

[Howard_Casto]

In short there still aren't any standardized rom lists for the mess/console side of things, many popular consoles aren't fully emulated or run really slow even on powerful machines.... so yeah, not much point in using it for that and keep in mind that I am very pro mame/mess. 

I love the idea of MESS, I really do, and I totally understand that from a development standpoint it makes sense to go ahead and merge them since they have really been the same thing for quite some time BUT  I sure wish the MESS end of things would have been standardized and given the level of polish the MAME end has before they were officially integrated. 

Like those special dsp chip games... run perfectly fine on more popular console emulators, even ones that strive for accuracy like bsnes. 

[Haze]

In short there still aren't any standardized rom lists for the mess/console side of things, many popular consoles aren't fully emulated or run really slow even on powerful machines.... so yeah, not much point in using it for that and keep in mind that I am very pro mame/mess. 

I love the idea of MESS, I really do, and I totally understand that from a development standpoint it makes sense to go ahead and merge them since they have really been the same thing for quite some time BUT  I sure wish the MESS end of things would have been standardized and given the level of polish the MAME end has before they were officially integrated. 

Like those special dsp chip games... run perfectly fine on more popular console emulators, even ones that strive for accuracy like bsnes.

It's coming along.

Things like the SNES expansion chips are going to be demanding due to the MAME architecture, they're powerful sub-cpus that need to run in tight sync with the main CPU, MAME has never really been that fast in such cases.

The Software Lists will evolve over time, some are currently very good (things like the Genesis one, which is probably *the* best list of correct Genesis dumps with proper documentation of chip labels etc. when available you'll find) others are works in progress.  (things like the Saturn list where we need to work out which images are good / bad by working out if CHDMAN mangled any of them due to .cue/.bin being such a loose standard etc.) or the CPC list which is very useful, but not in any way tidy right now.

For rare Japanese computers / consoles the support is actually the best; for things like the Casio pv1000 and pv2000 it's the best out there.  For the recently added handheld electronic games (as long as you have the artwork) we're still the only ones even attempting to do that properly.

We couldn't really "wait until it's all polished to integrate it" because that would be like saying we shouldn't have released MAME until every arcade game was emulated; it's a distant goal, the only way we can get there is to go through the various iterations, evolve, improve, rework etc. and the only way that process works is if we get people onboard helping.

In the end it's free content, you can choose to not use it, or you can choose to use it and have a bit extra.  If you don't like it, don't use it, it's like the old 70s b&w games in MAME, most of them hold very very little interest to me, but they exist and hold interest to other people.  In the end we emulate hardware, emulating whatever hardware we can emulate makes perfect sense from the point of view of the development of the emulator, it provides extra test cases out the box whereas splitting stuff away into another project because some people might not want it doesn't make sense.

It's a change, it's been coming for a long time (4+ years) so there has been ample warning, but like any change it's going to take people a little while to adapt to it.  I expect there will be some moaning, people like something to moan about, doesn't matter if it's mahjongs, casino games, porn games, working on obscure arcade games instead of making their favourite 3d ones fast, or now this.  For every person moaning about what we do there are multiple other people appreciating it.

FWIW I think you're being a bit harsh anyway, while we might not be the *best* emulator for a number of the systems we're certainly good enough for many, and things like the vector HLSL make Vectrex a joy, much more pleasing than the competition, even things like our handling of widescreen displays properly makes MAME a better choice than some of the single machine emulators I've used where they still seem to insist on stretching a 4:3 display over the entirety of the widescreen monitor with no way to correct the aspect.  The fact is I could pick a game like Raiden, and run every version of it to a playable degree with the new MAME says a lot ( http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/2015/06/01/what-to-do-in-one-six-two-part-1/ ) and shows just how much more capable this project is in this form.

[Yeltsew7]

Wow, thanks to all of you for the detailed descriptions. So I'll keep the MESS cores, and I'll take a look at the emulation on some that I haven't been able to fine in other places. I hope this means that I'll finally have a good PCE emulator, since all the others I've found are either in Japanese or like on Beta 0.01, released in 2000. I also loke a lot of those old computer systems, so I'll definitely take a look at some of those.

Also, I found a different romset, and it has all the old games like I was used to.

omg a MAME dev posted in my thread

[B2K24]

I think you'll be pretty happy with TG16, PCE and PCECD if you go that far. They run really well if you use the softlists and it always gives me 100% on everything I've ever tried.

It's as easy as *mame64 tg16 bonk*

[Haze]

There are some bugs, and the driver is very demanding due to having to mix scanlines of different resolution, but yeah most PCE stuff is playable.

Some notable bugs include DraculaX crashing in one of the levels, and Air Bonk not working properly, however if you want to play something like Parasol Stars I can't fault it, same for countless other PCE games :-)

For CD games use the Softlisted CHDs for now, there's still debate over what is the correct representation of the images due to the funky gap settings the discs have, meaning some cue/bin collections won't work (we can basically switch the emulation so that one set of images, or another set of images work, but not both at the same time, so the CHD list was made from the image that did work with our emulation)