One emulator to rule them all?

[Howard_Casto]

In case you haven't seen the latest mame wip, it looks like two emulators are about to become obsolete.  Killer Instinct, KI2, and several of the modeler games are currently being worked on and look pretty complete.  With this recent upsurge of namco 3d games being added to mame, I figure that the viva nonno and zinc games will be added shortly.  

No real point to this post, it's just kinda sad and happy I guess.  

[nipsmg]

Except for one fact.

The WIP post says something about "sorry your 3ghz P4's are obsolete"..   Seemingly in reference to the KI and KI2 additions...

Whereas KIAME is able to run KI1 at near fullspeed on my 400mhz celeron.. so.. I'm willing to bet that the KI drivers probably aren't quite as optimized as in KIAME...

But I could be wrong..

Looks like, however, you might want to hold onto the other emulators until the processors get MUCH faster, or the drivers become a lot more optimized..

(Then again, I'm just bitter cause I've only got a 400mhz system, so maybe it'll all be fine)

--NipsMG

[ashardin]

Just to expand on this, as I read it on the mame.net forum this morning.  Apparently KIAME used some "shortcuts" in its code to recreate the sound, and some routines for Killer Instinct.  It appears the same as the arcade version to the user, but some optimized code is used that isn't true emulation.  The won't work for MAME as the philosophy is to do true emulation, and this will take a great deal of horsepower to emulate the video and the sound.

So I wouldn't exect the code to be optimized any more, simply computing hardware will have to catch up.

[nipsmg]

sounds about right....

MAME is about faithfully recreating the hardware, not about speed (all that much, at least), so you're probably right about the KI drivers... and that probably goes for most of the new games being emulated also (wargods, crusin usa, etc)..

Even though I'm SURE plenty of people will come out of the woodwork to ---smurfette--- and moan <b1tch> ** Why doesn't it run fullspeed on my Pentium 150?!??!?! **  </b1tch> .. (makes me want to hold off on buying a new processor, tho.)



--NipsMG

[Howard_Casto]

Well, the same guy that originally made the ki emulators is who made the framework for the mame drivers.  Although I am positive that they will be slower than the u64emu, at least they will be playable.  The u64emus "shortcuts" led to instability.  Killer Instinct 2 is pretty much unplayable as it crashes after a random amount of time.  At least it does on every machine I've tried it on. And the ai timing is inaccurate on both instanes.

Also modeler takes practially no resources to emulate, so even in mame those games should be very playable on any system.  

Lastly one of the main reasons that the 3d games are so slow is that they are rendered in software mode.    Some of the mame devs are pushing to get a generic d3d renderer added to mame just for such games.  Although it wouldn't be arcade perfect it would look virtually the same and would play much faster.  

[nipsmg]

I would actually have objections to that.. Reason being is this: the legality of emulators (for this sort of purpose) is teetering on the borderline, especially with the DMCA (which, in my opinion is the CRAPPIEST PIECE OF LEGISLATION EVER PASSED.. EVER!) which allows pretty much ANYTHING to be ruled as a tool for circumventing copy-protection and thus be deemed illegal.

That said, adding a d3d renderer would obviously be PURELY for the purpose of making the games playable, and not for trying to preserve the actual hardware in software emulation.  That would sort of destroy that whole argument, which I don't think would be good, considering how sue happy everyone is lately, especially corporations, who are struggling from the lackluster economy.

Just my opinion tho..   Then again, I'm not a mame dev, so I really have no say in it  

[Howard_Casto]

Actually your reading the law wrong.  It's a copy protection law and therefore, players are exempt.  Since MAME is a "rom player" it's ok as long as it doesn't decrpt roms, which it doesn't.  (xor tables are pre decrypted so technically razoola's hardware breaker is the illegal part which only he uses)  

A d3d render would have absolutely NO negative legal issues to be added to it's already grey area of legality.  The various decryption schemes that mame uses would be much more likely to cause legal actions to be taken.  

The real reasons mame hasn't been sued yet:

#1 Too small a number of people use mame for it to be cost effective to the few company's it still concerns to sue.  

#2 90% of the arcade manufacturers are uninterested in "ruining" the mame scene by taking legal actions.  

#3 Up until very recenlty the games that mame ran were not games owned by the few company's that do wish to sue (cough cough midway, cough cough)  

If you are truely concerned about the legal downfall of mame, then what you should be objecting to is the recent additions of the crusin games.   Those will cause the most harm if any is to be had.  

So in short the difference between napster and mame is that at one point about 60% of the internet population was using napster, so the record companys had to take action.  Far far less people use mame so for the most part nobody cares.

[nipsmg]

In order to play some of the games in Mame, copy protection had to be circumvented (read: slapstic, etc), which is what i was referring to as far as DMCA.

--NipsMG

[Lilwolf]

Slapstic is safe... why?  it was broken before the laws came in.  

It's the later games might be in trouble....

[Halen]

All legal issues aside, it would be nice if they coded a d3d module as an option.  That way the emulation-accurate code would still be in there.

[Malenko]

in all honesty I dont really get the point of the crusin games being added other then pride. I have an N64 in my closet (somewhere) if I wanna play the crusin games or KI Gold. If I got my N64 out Id be playing Zelda or Golden Eye anyway :p  My mame computer is only 900MHz (plenty fast for the  games I play like PUZZLE FIGHTER!) heck my non gaming PC is only a P4 1.8 and the cruisin games run like poop on it.

Modeler stuff should be fun and the best part is there are no control conflicts when using mame... Anyone with a HotRod that runs Zinc knows what I mean.

And lastly, a nice generic D3D renderer would be divine, Id liek to be able to actually play the Race Drivin' game on the cab.

Howard, I was readin the "shocked" thread and I'd liek to say that other then MAME32s GUI I like you front end the best. Mame 32 is the easiest/fastest for letting my nephews pick what game they wanna play, but yours is the coolest =) No matter what others say or think there are ALOT of people like me that appriciate the effort you put into your FE