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Hardware 3D Acceleration In Mame

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Loafmeister:
I haven't read the entire thread so my apologies if this was already written somewhere.

If I recall, aside from the main point of mame being a "documenting" project, their goal is also to make code that is easily portable to other platforms.  IMHO, the reality of adding hardware acceleration would probably fall outside of the portability, tying them to a select few platforms as they would need to take into consideration the different platforms (PC, Mac, PSP, XBox, etc, etc), vid hardware (different video cards) and API's (Direct X, OpenGL, etc).

I think Zinc, etc will need to do for now.

Fozzy The Bear:

--- Quote from: taz-nz on February 24, 2008, 02:03:56 am ---They probaby haven't replied for the same reason I haven't until now, to reply to this rubbish only lends you more crediblity, where the best thing that can happen with this thread is that it falls of the bottom of the page and is forgotten.
--- End quote ---

I'm not sure why I'm even bothering to reply to this, given that you don't seem to have any manners whatsoever. What is it with you, that you can't post a reply to anything without insulting people before giving your usual complete garbage and ranting.


--- Quote from: taz-nz on February 24, 2008, 02:03:56 am ---Hell it would be great to be able to play any number of games at full speed on a mid range PC, but if it means the games no longer run and look like they did in the Arcade, Then what's the point of MAME as a emulator? 
--- End quote ---

What utter and complete hogwash.... Who said anything about having games not look or play like they did in the arcade?  Nobody proposed any change whatsoever to the way they look or play. It's entirely about moving the speed they play closer to the original.

They already don't look or play like they did in the arcade. Who runs Mame on an intentionally badly adjusted monitor, with a bit of colour bleed and screen bow for good measure, just to get them to look how they did in the arcade?? Answer: NOBODY!! The majority of people already run it on PC monitors, and the majority of people (excepting here) don't build replica cabinets or run original arcade monitors to do it. So it already isn't anything like the original arcade.


--- Quote from: taz-nz on February 24, 2008, 02:03:56 am ---Most of the games that are unplayable are not because of preformace, overclocked Core 2 Duo's fixed that issue. 

--- End quote ---

You just screwed the pooch on your own argument..... Now you're telling us that running multi thread code on multi core processors (which hadn't even been invented when 99.99% of these games were in commercial use) from inside Mame, is acceptable to increase speeds, but running 3D Hardware from inside Mame is not. Geeezzzz  :dizzy:

Your irrelevant rants might get given more credance or have more notice taken of them, if you didn't spend your time insulting the people you are trying to convince!!

Best Regards,
Julian (Fozzy The Bear) 


 

Afterburner:

--- Quote from: nipsmg on February 22, 2008, 09:28:11 am ---What i would LOVe to see though, is the ability to offload some of the processing over to the GPU.  I've seen applications for this before and that might be an interesting compromise.

--- End quote ---

This is *exactly* the direction the code should be going....at least for emulating games which used a separate processor for shading/texturing, etc.  It would be a slightly more accurate emulation that just depending upon the primary CPU to pretend to be the primary and graphics chips used in the original.

I say go for it!

hbm*rais:
I don't think things have to be necessarily one way or the other. If MAME were to include a plug in architecture, as found on N64 and DC emulators, you could have it both ways. The 3D load could me sent to an emulated GPU, and be "correctly" emulated the way MAMEDevs seem to prefer, or it could be mapped to an API (OpenGL, D3D...) that would use the real hardware you have on your PC.

MAMEDevs could concentrate on the emulated GPUs, let other people develop the mapping plug ins.

Then again, perhaps MAME is not the best framework for that kind of emulation. Perhaps MAME should be left alone and unpolluted with its "monolithic" emulation and another plug in based emulator should be created to deal with the new challenges.

Fozzy The Bear:

--- Quote from: hbm*rais on February 24, 2008, 08:33:05 pm ---Then again, perhaps MAME is not the best framework for that kind of emulation. Perhaps MAME should be left alone and unpolluted with its "monolithic" emulation and another plug in based emulator should be created to deal with the new challenges.

--- End quote ---

That actually makes a lot of sense.... Mame runs the classics up to the early 90's reasonably well. The problems really come with CHD and genuinely 3D games. It might be worth calling a cutoff date and developing a new architechture for other games after that date.  That said, there's no reason why that new architechture couldn't be incorporated into Mame and run when it needs to be.

Not that it hasn't already been done.... as I mentioned earlier, Aaron Giles developed a piece of test software, as a specific emulator for one 3D game a while ago. It's not impossible to do. Nobody is suggesting that it's easy to do either though. That one 3D game has technical derivatives, that lead down the line as far as games like "Tokyo Cop" and "ATV Trak" on very similar original hardware.

To be honest the games in the arcade do get to a point where no emulation is required, when they start running the original hardware on PC's and Linux Boxes. The downside here is that we will at some point end up having to emulate obsolete 3D graphics cards in order to get it to run. Then I suspect, we'll be back in the same boat again.

Best Regards,
Julian (Fozzy The Bear)

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