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Comment by rebolek | Hacker News Reader

MAME supports Casio CZ-101? My favourite synth? I thought MAME is for arcade emulation.

Anyway, I need to try it, I love it'đ sound, I wonder how close it is to original.

I'm super impressed that someone has emulated the CZ-101's sound generation LSI!

Lots of people use MAME as an emulator to help reverse-engineering vintage synthesisers. I only recently discovered this too. Since most 80s synths were built mostly out of 'off the shelf' components, it's not too difficult to build a MAME driver which is capable of running the synth's firmware. The actual sound generation is another story though.

I wrote a MAME driver for the Yamaha DX9 while working on this project: https://github.com/ajxs/yamaha_dx97

I wrote a little bit about the project here in case anyone is interested: https://ajxs.me/blog/Hacking_the_Yamaha_DX9_To_Turn_It_Into_...

Haha the pitch modulation noise sounds like LFSR white noise from an 8-bit console...

I wrote my own CZ-101-like synth (it's not an emulation, more like "based on", as it has some unique features), I've tried various CZ-like VSTs but nothing beats the original. So I'm really interested what MAME has to offer. Even if the synth is digital, its waveforms do not look like anything you would expect from some simple digital emulation, so emulating CZ properly isn't that easy as it would sound. Thanks for the links, I'm definitely going to check your DX9 emulation. As a proud owner of FB-01 I really dig that 4-op sound.

MAME stopped being "just arcade" long ago. It's basically an "emulate every hardware thing ever made" project :)

Even Tamagotchis, plus Casio assistants, even that one which was made for girls.

MAME can even emulate Nintendo Game & Watch!

They spent a lot of time getting the artwork correct too.

It can even emulate a Sonic the Hedgehog popcorn machine:

https://www.neogaf.com/threads/mame-can-now-succesfully-emul...

Speaking of which, see also Bintracker. A Chiptune Audio Workstation that uses MAME as emulation backend.

https://bintracker.org/

Recently discussed on HN about 49 days ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37377529

I was surprised to learn it is the most capable emulator for SGI machines: https://sgi.neocities.org/

I guess the hardware is similar enough.

Apparently SGI emulation is very slow. I'm not familiar enough with MAME, so I wonder if this is expected performance for such a complex system in MAME or it can be significantly improved in the future.

I am running Mame as a SGI Indigo on a Pinebook Pro (an ARM based laptop) It is slow. But it a SGI Indigo on my $200 laptop. I was so thrilled to see that’s possible :-D

MAME absorbed MESS and became a more generic multi-system emulator. It aims for 100% accuracy in emulation, even at the expense of speed, and so it is quite resource hungry for a lot of things.

I remember I have started using MESS (because I care more about computers than games) before the merge. One thing I notice in many drivers (the "plugboards" where various emulator parts are connected) is that they could, with some work, be compiled to some HDL.

Would be quite a thing.

It also emulate home consoles. It’s got the best Sega Genesis emulator to my knowledge. Usually, emulators have issues with its sound hardware. But not MAME.

It’s usually got the “best” everything emulator. As long as by best you mean most accurate.

It may not be the fastest (usually never is) and may not be the most compatible (because it may not be complete vs hacks in other emulators) but what it does emulate is usually pretty close to perfect & will converge on that at least.

It’s Genesis emulator is a great example of that: about as perfect as non-hardware can get… but definitely not the fastest or most fancy

Nah, there is a whole cadre of emulators who have pushed emulation to the next step in the early 2010s, kind of spearheaded by Higan. They achieved cycle-accurate emulation of systems by eliminating the use of shortcuts. Behaviours are adequately reproduced, performance comes second. MAME has never held the crown of most acurate emulator, except in its field of expertise, the arcade.

MAME of course has gone in the same direction, but the project is known for its portability. So it means it has many emulation options to use less cycle accurate methods to run on RaspberryPi for example. From my limited experience, those far older emulators filled with performance-focused shortcuts are the default in MAME. So if you want the most acurate emulation, MAME isn't really it.

This is literally just wrong. Are you confusing MAME with RetroArch? Because that's a completely different project.

They definitely are thinking of RetroArch. It’s mame cores suuuuuck too! So it’s compounding their confusion it seems.

The rest of their post is about as accurate too

He's right, having been in the MAME source myself, it was designed as hardware documentation, not necessarily the most accurate emulator.

Just look at the source for most any 3d polygon rendering platform. Take the gaelco stuff or the Midway V platform. The CPU might be well emulated (enough), but the GPU is very frequently only simulated at the highest level. Someone might look at the displaylist generated by the CPU and pick out the vertex format, then they copy-paste a generic triangle rasterizer in its place and try to implement whatever features can be figured out. Attention is only paid to things such as interrupt timing and DMA timing, Fifo timing and so on only to the extent that is blocks operation or crashes the CPU.

This is not to dismiss the incredible work in MAME. It is frequently the first and only source of documentation at all. But parent is correct that it's common for more specialized emulators to go dig up more details and get more things correct than MAME.

Yeah, I confused MAME with retroArch. MOVE ALONG, NOTHING TO SEE.

You appear to be highly confused. None of what you said is accurate

That's not actually correct. MAME intends to be as accurate as possible (we emulate the actual microcontrollers running the actual firmware inside the keyboards for PC, AT, and PS/2 keyboards as one example) but it's not always there.

Sega Genesis is a poor example; MAME runs the entire commercially released library fine, but some homebrew stuff that seeks to stretch or break the hardware doesn't do well (notably the Titan demos).

On the other hand, MAME's 8-bit Apple II emulation is cycle-accurate and you can raster-split mid-scanline by counting cycles (as some people crazier than me have done). So it really depends on the specific driver.

You can't be serious. MAME's Genesis driver is far from perfect and most definitely less accurate than BlastEm.

mametesters.org/view_all_bug_page.php?filter=125692

BlastEm is great but—despite is vaunted accuracy claims—is buggy as hell too.

It plays more games but that’s not the same thing as accurate.

MAMEs emulation is incomplete, that’s why there are bugs.

Try playing Lightning Force aka Thunder Force IV — it’s famous for its heavy metal soundtrack. In Higan it does not work, in Genecyst the sound is crappy (on older emulators on Windows I also were out of luck). In MAME it runs just fine w/o tweaks. Haven’t tried BlastEm though.

At some point, MAME combined with MESS (Multi Emulator Super System), so now MAME is just a multi purpose emulation framework & it doesn't focus solely on arcade emulation.

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