any front ends allows you to pick a game and it runs the best version of mame?

[Hoagie_one]

what i mean is, if i pick Pack man and it ran best in V.037, it would use that version.  and if i picked bionic comando and it runs best in V0.59, then it uses that one?

is this even doable?

Would we want this to be doable, is it that important to anyone?

[Howard_Casto]

It's not doable (at least without someone testing every single game and making a database which is constantly updated).  

And I doubt it's important to anyone as any front end that advanced is gonna be a windows front end and windows mame cabs are usually very modern, meaning performance glitches aren't that much of an issue.  

[SirPoonga]

It would be doable, but difficult to pull off.  As it really depends on not only the version of mame, the computer setup.  Some version AMD ran better than Pentium.  

Pretty much it would involve making a list of each game and testing to see what it ran best on.

[Lilwolf]

well sure... its not hard at all..

whats hard is allowing you to specify which is the best version... We don't know... So someone has to tell us...

But the easiest way (I think Lizaraus could do this) is have more then one mame directory... and you put the roms in the directories you want them to run in.

The other way would be to have more then one mame in a directory... all pointing to the roms... And allow you to specify in the frontend which to use.

It COULD go and check the status on each mame from newest to oldest and find which one has the best status rating... but these really aren't all that uptodate.

But many frontends allow for more then one mame version...

[Hoagie_one]

i was more worried about when something is just broken in a new version.

[Howard_Casto]

Well what you do hoagie is you actually TRY the new version out before you put it on your mame cab.  If something important to you isn't working then you wait.  


Actually lazarus doesn't support multiple versions of mame.... Well it does but your gamelists would have doubled entries, one for mame and one for mameb or whatever it's called.  

On the other hand 3darcade does.  You toggle a button and it launches the alternate mame you specified instead of the main.  

I could add this feature, but I don't find it particularly useful.  

Someday, however, I might add it to the listgen's features if it's a slow day.  

[)p(]

On the other hand 3darcade does.  

barely remembered that   but yes i had to use that for example a while back for neo geo games they did not rotate correctly with the normal build of mame. but since...i never used it again...

peter