Console games in MAME

[charliew]

Now that MESS is a part of MAME, how do I load for example .nes roms in MAME?
I can't find the Command line options anywhere. The old MESS syntax won't work either.

Has anyone figured it out?

Thanks

[Titchgamer]

I wouldn't bother and just use the dedicated Emus personally.

[B2K24]

Now that MESS is a part of MAME, how do I load for example .nes roms in MAME?
I can't find the Command line options anywhere. The old MESS syntax won't work either.

Has anyone figured it out?

Thanks

This was written way before the merger but the majority of information is still useful.

http://mamedev.emulab.it/etabeta/2010/05/11/documenting-software-at-last/

[Howard_Casto]

I wouldn't bother and just use the dedicated Emus personally.

^This^

All of the popular consoles have emulators that are typically better and/or have features not offered in mame.  Now if you want to play something obscure then mame might be the right choice. 

[B2K24]

All of the popular consoles have emulators that are typically better and/or have features not offered in mame.  Now if you want to play something obscure then mame might be the right choice.

These so called emulators don't have BGFX with different shader chains that's select-able like MAME does

[Howard_Casto]

Yes, but they have this feature called "working".  Let us know when all the popular systems are fully emulated in mame because as of now they aren't. 

[Titchgamer]

^ this.

As the old saying goes dont fix what aint broke and defo dont use a hammer for a screwdriver!

[DrakeTungsten]

Isn't Genesis emulation in MAME supposed to be just fine? I recently tried out MAME for Genesis and SNES, and the only issue I noticed was the well-documented issue of certain SNES games which have a processor chip (or something like that) not having those chips emulated.

[charliew]

So no on has any clue how to launch the roms?
The MESS documentation doesn't apply as the command lines doesn't work with MAME.

[Robbbert]

Normally I'd advise using a front end, but seeing as you want to use the command-line...

NES software comes in 2 forms, that which is in the software list, and that that isn't.

Make sure the path to your software-list software is included in your rompath.

To get a list of the names of the software-list items, type

>mame nes -listsoftware | find "software name"

To run one of them, (let's say "1942")

>mame nes -cart 1942

To run something not in the software-list (otherwise known as "loose software")

>mame nes -cart e:\data\nes\zapper~4.nes   (as an example)

If this would result in spaces in the path or name, enclose it in double-quotes.

If Things don't work, it means you haven't set up your mame.ini properly or in error, or the software is missing.

[charliew]

Awesome, I'll try that when I get home from work.

Thanks! 

EDIT: And I will use a front end, but for MaLa to run the roms it needs the command line.

[B2K24]

Yes, but they have this feature called "working".  Let us know when all the popular systems are fully emulated in mame because as of now they aren't.

There's more games right now that work than you can play in your lifetime, so you needn't worry about it

[B2K24]

Isn't Genesis emulation in MAME supposed to be just fine? I recently tried out MAME for Genesis and SNES, and the only issue I noticed was the well-documented issue of certain SNES games which have a processor chip (or something like that) not having those chips emulated.

This is correct. Although not 100%, the majority of Genesis, SNES, and even SegaCD is completely playable and you're able to complete said game from start to finish.

[Antropus]

It's crazy to me that some people are so quick to ---steaming pile of meadow muffin--- on MAME these days. The emulator had being evolving for 20+ years and had emulated perfectly many chips, including a whole lot of them present in consoles, striving for accuracy, while certain emulators use a lot of hacks to do the job while failing in accuracy. People forget that arcade systems based on consoles are being emulated by MAME for a long while as well, like the ZN systems based on the Playstation 1 or the ST-V based on the Saturn. The PS1 driver in the current MAME works really well as far as I can tell, at least in my machine. The Saturn driver is pretty buggy, but the ST-driver is getting better every time and many games run perfectly, so I think we will end up with a great Saturn emulator inside of MAME in a not so far future.

I've been pleasantly surprised with how many systems work and many work very well in MAME these days.

I've been developing an app that's a more complete alternative to romlister, but it's also a launcher among other things. I'm currently adding support to Software Lists, that at this point are being automatically imported into Launchbox, with all command line parameters already parsed for you, so you don't even need to know them, but they are there available in case you do. My plan is to extend the support to as many front-ends as possible, as long as they support command line per individual games. I say that because everything is mixed, so SNES PAL and NTSC games are all mixed in the same software list/folder, but they will only work if you run it with the correct command line that matches that region. My app decodes that as much as possible and that way it's able to launch any game for that system, automatically detecting the region, because it assigns a custom command line for that specific game according to its region, extracted from the description name/hash xml files. I might change that in the future, but at least for now, it launches games without missing or complaining about it not being supported by a bios of another region.

As for the systems themselves, Sega Genesis, Sega Master System and  Sega CD work great under MAME. Even 32x, which is marked as NOT WORKING has many games fully playable and looking perfect visually (they should update that status to partially working, seriously). NES works great. SNES, unless you are talking a VERY FEW games with special chips, works flawlessly for me. SNK Neo Geo AES, SNK Neo Geo Pocket, SNK Neo Geo Pocket Color and SNK Neo Geo CDZ also work perfectly. Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Atari 800 and Atari 7800 work fine as well, but I had trouble with some inputs that I need to check. NEC PCEngine/Turbografx16, Turbografx16 CD and NEC SuperGrafx work great as well, fully playable for the most part. X68000 works very well as well.

Here's a list of tested systems that I plan to support initially, all personally tested by me:

Amstrad GX4000
Adam
Apple II
Apple IIGS
Atari 2600
Atari 5200
Atari 800
Atari 7800
Atari Lynx
Atari Jaguar
Bally Astrocade
Bandai Wonderswan Color
Colecovision
Commodore 64
Commodore 128
Mattel Intellivision
Mattel Intellivision II
Microvision
MSX1
MSX2
NEC PCEngine/Turbografx16
NEC PCEngine/Turbografx16 CD
NEC SuperGrafx
Nintendo Gameboy
Nintendo Gameboy Color
Nintendo Gameboy Advanded
Nintendo NES
Nintendo SNES
Odyssey II
Philips CD-i
Sega 32x
Sega STV
Sega Game Gear
Sega Megadrive/Genesis
Sega MegaCD/SegaCD
Sega Master System
Sega SG-1000 Mark III
Sharp X68000
Sony Playstation
SNK Neo Geo AES
SNK Neo Geo Pocket
SNK Neo Geo Pocket Color
SNK Neo Geo CDZ
Supervision
Vectrex
ZX Spectrum

The weakest driver on the list above is the Atari Jaguar one, but still, there are fully playable games running great visually, but missing sound, like Rayman for example. The other ones run acceptably well to exceptionally well. People should really stop the nonsense and try things. You might be surprised. This list includes most of the major systems one would want to play, so it's hardly a limited list by any stretch of imagination...

Here's the link to my WIP thread over the Launchbox forums. There are screenshots showing my progress with the software lists in there:
http://forums.launchbox-app.com/topic/30530-lightspeed-ultra-fast-mame-importer-tool/?do=findComment&comment=208051

Here's my current WIP status, showing both arcade and console platforms imported into Launchbox, with all notes, artwork and game info being extracted by my app from multiple sources, including listxml, catver.ini, history.dat, series.dat, nplayers.ini, launchbox's own database among others. All ready to be played with no pain involved:


Cheers,
-Kris

[Titchgamer]

I dont meadow muffin on MAME at all.
I think it is an amazing emulator.

BUT

I think it should concentrate on completing what it started out to do.

By that I mean get all the arcade games working 100% (or near to) with no problems.

The problem I have with mame is that some games require such a ridiculous amount of resources to play. Time Crisis for example.
I feel it would be time better spent working on those games (some of which are not supported by any other emulator or very hard to get) Than to reinvent the wheel to play games that are already emulated very well by other emus.

Also lets face it the MAME library is HUGE, and totally unpractical without hours of sorting etc.

Why add to the list?

[Haze]

telling developers what they should / shouldn't be working on when it comes to a project like MAME isn't going to get you anywhere, it will just result in nobody working on MAME.

allowing developers to work on whatever they want means more people become experienced with the codebase, that's good.

there have already been many improvements to the arcade emulation as a result of people improving non-arcade systems, that's good too.

there have been improvements to arcade systems as a result of people becoming involved in the project due to non-arcade reasons, then seeing that some of the remaining arcade tasks fit their skillset (this is one of the reasons Space Lords will be working in 0.180 for example, the developer who worked on that initially learned the project doing non-arcade stuff)

[Arbee]

I think it should concentrate on completing what it started out to do.

By that I mean get all the arcade games working 100% (or near to) with no problems.

And as soon as you're capable of paying the developers enough to replace their day jobs they'll dance to your tune.  Until then, some things are fun to work on and some things are soul draining tedium with no rewards.

The problem I have with mame is that some games require such a ridiculous amount of resources to play. Time Crisis for example.
I feel it would be time better spent working on those games (some of which are not supported by any other emulator or very hard to get) Than to reinvent the wheel to play games that are already emulated very well by other emus.

Time Crisis is from the era where they didn't have 3D hardware so they threw half a dozen CPUs and DSPs in a box and held it together with duct tape.  That kind of thing is always going to take a lot of resources to emulate and there's no easy way to speed it up since synchronizing all the parts is vital to keeping it running.

Also lets face it the MAME library is HUGE, and totally unpractical without hours of sorting etc.

Why add to the list?

Because everyone has a different set of preferred games.  Once upon a time we banned bootlegs.  But that led to MAME not accurately reproducing the arcade experience in South America where Crazy Kong was common and real Nintendo Donkey Kong didn't exist.  So we don't filter anything, we give you the full drink from the firehose in the hopes that you can pick out the games that have meaning to you.

[Titchgamer]

I think it should concentrate on completing what it started out to do.

By that I mean get all the arcade games working 100% (or near to) with no problems.

And as soon as you're capable of paying the developers enough to replace their day jobs they'll dance to your tune.  Until then, some things are fun to work on and some things are soul draining tedium with no rewards.

The problem I have with mame is that some games require such a ridiculous amount of resources to play. Time Crisis for example.
I feel it would be time better spent working on those games (some of which are not supported by any other emulator or very hard to get) Than to reinvent the wheel to play games that are already emulated very well by other emus.

Time Crisis is from the era where they didn't have 3D hardware so they threw half a dozen CPUs and DSPs in a box and held it together with duct tape.  That kind of thing is always going to take a lot of resources to emulate and there's no easy way to speed it up since synchronizing all the parts is vital to keeping it running.

Also lets face it the MAME library is HUGE, and totally unpractical without hours of sorting etc.

Why add to the list?

Because everyone has a different set of preferred games.  Once upon a time we banned bootlegs.  But that led to MAME not accurately reproducing the arcade experience in South America where Crazy Kong was common and real Nintendo Donkey Kong didn't exist.  So we don't filter anything, we give you the full drink from the firehose in the hopes that you can pick out the games that have meaning to you.

I would think the reward from a project like MAME is personal satisfaction and gratitude from the community is it not?
Not sure why else such a project would ever me done unless paid for.

Time crisis is emulateable, it runs well on a PS emulator but is very jerky in MAME unless you have an extremely high end machine.
I have no clue about the difficulty of emulating said game in MAME (ime not a dev afterall)
But if it can be done for PSX I see no reason why someone with the right skills couldn't do it for MAME.

Fair point about the game Library, But surely at some point you need to draw a line and perfect what you already have?
Otherwise you are permanently playing catch up with moving goal posts.

[Haze]

The arcade Time Crisis hardware, and the playstation have nothing in common.

The arcade hardware is magnitudes more complex to emulate with all the DSPs etc.

There are arcade systems based on the playstation, and they do typically have quite high requirements in MAME too, but in many cases they're also more advanced hardware than the consumer model of the playstation (much higher CPU clocks etc.) with the games often running in higher resolutions than the home versions.  I don't know how well MAME runs the actual playstation version of Time Crisis, haven't tested that one myself.