I'm a little confused as to why Monaco GP isn't included in the official Mame build. According to the old Patch Mame page it doesn't use roms, just like Pong. Then why do I need a rom to play it? Does the rom just link up the samples or something?
It comes down to the difference between simulation and emulation. MAME is about emulation.
BTW, I see nothing on the Patch MAME page saying Monaco does not use ROMS -
http://www.calarts.edu/~nstrum/macmame/readmes/monaco.html says the ROMS are used mainly for graphics. KLOV says the game does not use a central processor.
Now let's look at PacMan, since most people will be familiar with it. There are two approaches to getting it playable on a PC:
1) I can write code in java, C, basic, assembler, etc. to draw the maze and sprites and include logic in the code to make the sprites move the same way they seem to move in the game. This is Simulation.
2) I can write code that simulates (basically) a Z80 series CPU and then use my program to run the original PacMan romsets. This is emulation.
Now let's look at Monaco GP. KLOV says the game is entirely logic gates (assume these are and-or gates using 4066 IC's, for discussion purposes only). I assume Phil Stroffolino was correctly using some type of emulation to read and display the graphics ROMS, but he was probably making guesses on how the logic worked for the and-or gates. If he wrote programs to emulate a 4066 IC and then had hundreds of these running so he could pass values to each of them in the same sequence the game did, it could be included in MAME, but that would be a lot more work. (although I think there is some simlilar dev work going on with other discrete logic games).
BTW, the above is the official story. The "unofficial" story, which is pretty well accepted and maybe more valid is that someone - probably Atari - did not like Pong in MAME and leaned on the MAME team hard enough to get it removed. And since the MAME team removed Pong "officially" b/c it was a simulation, they couldn't leave Monaco in as a simulation, so it got pulled as well.
And like most controversaries, the truth is probably somewhere between the two extremes.
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Topic: no name mame games (Read 5120 times)
