MAME 0.276 | Hacker News Reader

MAME 0.276

mamedev.org

98 pointschungy28 comments

I keep hoping MAME will fix a few outstanding bugs in their Tandy 2000 emulation: most prominently, that there is not a visible blinking cursor in text mode, making many programs difficult to use.

MAME is the only Tandy 2000 emulator, and in the wake of the discovery of Windows 1.0 for the Tandy 2000, the emulation got good enough to take a trip down memory lane. But it can't usefully run everything...

I would strongly recommend that you try your hand at fixing these bugs, because you seem to care about them. That puts you in a much better position to get these bugs fixed than most other people. It also doesn't sound too complex, if it's just a blinking cursor. 1) Figure out how the real hardware did it (could be as simple as a 555 timer) 2) See if there's any code related to this for this machine 3) If yes, fix the code, if no, check how it's implemented for other machines

If anyone from MAME is here, please review my PR to make vector dots round: https://github.com/mamedev/mame/pull/13116

That artificial brightness limitation sounds especially diabolical, people should be able to enjoy high brightness as it (potentially) existed and not have to deal with hard-coded limitations. I'm not from mame though.

Rendering dots using circle texture sounds nice but why are the dots in your renderings the size of something from pac-man? They look comically large.

-beam_dot_size is configurable, and larger values make the screenshots more interesting.

I've never heard of MAME before, but I wish I had learned this earlier. It's a cool project.

It's not surprising, but it never fails to amaze me that people hear about projects the first time, that have been around for decades. (This is not an attack). The first time I hear about MAME was maybe in 2004 or so. At that point the project was already over 6 years old. So for me that project is ancient, but when I heard about it the first time, someone was probably also amazed how I could not have heard about it earlier.

It’s got a LinnDrum?! That is awesome!

"Most of the digital functionality is emulated. Audio is not yet emulated."

https://github.com/mamedev/mame/pull/13404/files#diff-f78737...

That has changed in time for the release. Audio works in the MAME LinnDrum driver.

Funny, I am just watching a live-stream interview with Aaron Giles (once a big name on MAME). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBRMl0e6E6k

When I hear MAME I always have to think about this Billy Mitchell sleazebag: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_King_of_Kong

But also fond memories of my favorite 80ies game Q*Bert https://www.retrogames.cc/arcade-games/q-bert-us-set-2.html

MAME is cool, and its been cool for a long time. I've got a question though: Is MAME just about emulation of historical arcade machines, or is it constantly updating emulation for arcades from the present decade?

MAME is about the emulation and preservation of basically everything electronic. Arcades, computers, consoles, calculators, LED Tiger games, you name it. If it has a CPU (sometimes, even if it doesn't have a CPU), it's fair game for MAME.

There are no hard cut-offs, but contemporary systems are rarely implemented. MAME's focus on accuracy to a low-level degree means that most modern systems would be painfully slow to emulate.

Contemporary arcade games are usually just a PC in a box with external arcade specific hardware making up everything else. Probably better to hack the game into thinking it's running on the right hardware than the other way around at this point.

Case in point: I was at an arcade the other day where they had a Beat Saber VR setup. At one point they reset the machine, which displayed a Dell UEFI boot-up splash, followed by some version of Windows 10 initializing, connecting to some arcade VPN, and then booting the game. At my wife's friend's ice cream shop which has its own attached arcade where a day pass gets you all the games you want, there are virtual pinball tables which I've seen boot similarly.

It is, indeed, just a PC with a custom software stack built on top of Windows. Some old-style arcade machines you see in the wild these days are really just PCs, or maybe ARM SBCs, running a library of ROMs via MAME, legally or illegally!

Modern arcade machines are mostly Windows Embedded. There are cracking scenes for many popular niches/franchises.

There was also the in-between era of arcade hardware based on home consoles, like the Triforce platform (derived from the GameCube) or Chihiro platform (derived from the original Xbox). For those the easiest approach is to extend console emulators to also support their related arcade platforms, or hack the arcade games to transform them into standard console games, rather than having MAME reinvent the wheel.

Chihiro and Triforce might have had significant games, but arcade hardware based on home consoles runs much older: Master System, Playstation, Genesis, Neo-Geo, Playstation 2, NES, Dreamcast, Playstation 3, Saturn, have one (or more!) arcade counterparts.

MAME emulates a ridiculous number of systems now. For example, check out a list of just the ones that require some additional setup steps: https://wiki.mamedev.org/index.php?title=System-Specific_Set...

Wow maybe by the 22th century they'll reach version 1.0 xD

I personally find it nicer than that obtuse Chrome approach that is now versioned in the hundreds.

Perhaps it is nostalgia, but things were nicer when they had sane release numbers.

MAME is versioned no differently from Chrome. v0.276 might as well be called v276.

If Chrome was versioned 0.whatever I would agree.

Since it is not, you are factually wrong.

The 0. prat is irrelevant in MAME, you can see that both projects simply increment the number on every release. They could just as well do v<timestamp> and reap the same monotonically increasing thing with a temporality aspect as well.

I'm with you about that ;)

It's just a number. What makes v102 more sane than vX.Y? It's just what you're used to and personal preference.

I guess people interpreted that as a criticism, but I have a lot of admiration for MAME.

I was just surprised to see that its version has not changed a lot since I last used it, more than 20 years ago ;)

It gives me hope that I haven't changed a lot either :D

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