smallest mame install?

[Mametrix-Reloaded]

ok,I was handed a couple of thin client boxes that have an 8meg disk on chip in them for booting. (they will also let me plugin an IDE drive providing I power it seperately, then the chip is the d: drive). Here's my question...

Is there any way to get a dos, mame, and pacman, ms. packman install working in 8 megs or less? That will also save high scores?

Also, these have a winbond? 266 processor in them. The board has built in sound,video, network, etc. I of course only need the video and sound.

Am I barking up the wrong tree here?

[rampy]

I don't see why it wouldn't work... you'd probably need an ancient version of mame (or other emu... maybe sparcade or vantage?)

I'm pretty sure you could fit that on a floppy if you were going that old skool...

*Shrug*  Do the think clients have lcd screens (like an iopener?) or those thin clients by the SUN guy that were supposed to be the low cost net computing solution?

Rampy

[SirPoonga]

how big is pacmame?

[Mametrix-Reloaded]

Actually they're Neoware boxes. Think I'm gonna try .53b with a stripped down dos7 and see what happens.

[Odonadon]

ok,I was handed a couple of thin client boxes that have an 8meg disk on chip in them for booting. (they will also let me plugin an IDE drive providing I power it seperately, then the chip is the d: drive). Here's my question...

Is there any way to get a dos, mame, and pacman, ms. packman install working in 8 megs or less? That will also save high scores?

Also, these have a winbond? 266 processor in them. The board has built in sound,video, network, etc. I of course only need the video and sound.

Am I barking up the wrong tree here?

It will definetely work.  The install for DOS 6.2 is about 3 megs or smaller (if you delete unnecessary files), mame 0.36 will install at about 2.25 megs.  The Pac-man rom I think is, what, probably 150k?  highscore.dat runs at around 100k, if I'm not mistaken.  That leaves you a few megs free for other roms, drivers, art work, small front end, stuff like that.

Odonadon

[NiN^_^NiN]

Ok i got mame 0.67 + dos (bootdisk fiels but edit it to say something else than starting windows 98) plus 2 pacman roms pacman (missing files ) and pacmanbl and i have the GL frontend

So what happens is it boots to dos and says starting arcade machine

then GL opens up with pacmana nd a screenshot in the background u hit start buttona nd it loads up and then mame plays it

All and all its about 5mb with dos mame gamelauncher pacman rom and the highscores plus the Cwsdpmi.exe so it works in pure dos

not bad and i didnt even del files from game launcher so u could even save more space u could prob fit bout 10 games? (80 games cause there small)

so yeah its very possible

i could zipup what i made if u like

[Lilwolf]

You might also have better luck stripping down Linux.  My boss has one for work related projects that we use on embedded systems running on flash drives..  But that isn't specifically what you want (because we have a lot of other not-needed items).

But you will want to build your own mame to drop the size of the executable.  On that system, you will probably not want to have the executable shrunk... but it might still be an option...  Try it and see.  I removed all but 720 a long time ago.  And it wasn't all that hard.  Just remove all the other games... all the other video drivers... All the sound cores ect... compile and find whats missing and readd it.  You have to comment the living !@# out of the file that instantiates all the other games (dont remember what it was called... but it was obvious).  But with this you should get it down to pretty small size.

Also, on that slow of a machine.. .running old games... you might want to start with .36 core.  faster, especially for older games.  

You don't need more then a floppy worth for Dos... 1.4 or so.  Depends on your other parts.

last... do you have a 10gig drive around you can use for testing?  Then shrink it down until it fits on the 8mg?

[Mametrix-Reloaded]

hadn't even thought about getting into the source of mame. Might be an intersting challenge. Getting it all running on the hard drive and then moving it to the chip was the plan.

My goal is to use this in a Pac Man cabinet I'm restoring until I can get an original (working) board. I'm going to do the pc to jamma thing.

NiN^-^NiN I have the complete roms (since I have the actual board, it just doesn't work) along with the MsPac roms. I was going to try and use the arcadeOS FE on it if not then GL was the second choice. What is the Cwsdpmi.exe file for?

[NiN^_^NiN]

Cwsdpmi.exe is the file needed if you are running mame through pure dos aka booting to dos in windows u dont have to have this file but if u try using mame --BINGO! Either that, or I was attempting to say "before" but it was too many letters to type-- windows loads up it wont work

the file just helps with memory stuff.

You could also fit arcade OS onto the 8mb hdd easily but if u want it to look more like a real arcade board i would say make a small program which just displays the 2 games so it looks like a dip switch setting but your using the joystick for it

but if u dont know how to program it in dos then stick with it

i also had bubble bobble with pacman and it was still under 5 mb and thats with the screenshots so i can see them in GL so its very simple

U should edit your command.com file so it dosent say starting Windows 98 then going into gamelauncher you could set it to saying something like checking dipswitch or something  

if u need some help with it im happy 2 plus im bored hehe  

[Lilwolf]

If you want a real board... why not do the pacman -> single chip php thingy thats around?

What are those burnable chips that have decent smarts in them that someone put all of pacman (and a few others)... so you can burn the emulator (its own) and the rom into a $20 chip... and go from there.

The trouble (last I looked) is that they didn't have anything but a development board to put it on which was over 100bucks.... but then again, you could switch games later.

Anyway, it's an option...

There are also a lot more emulators that emulate pacman well.  Look around and you will probably find some that fit in 10k...

Or even more fun... Try to download mame version .01...  That one had pacman only support... I would be interested to see how good it really was back then.

Good luck!