MAME and the New Emulation Reality | Hacker News Reader

MAME and the New Emulation Reality

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163 pointssmacktoward46 comments

I've been following the emulation scene since the late 90s and have really come to appreciate how important a cultural preservation emulation is providing. It's more than just nostalgia, these machines were literally the focal point around which entire cultural milieus were constructed.

If you didn't grow up when arcades were healthy, there's literally nothing similar to them today. The local Dave and Busters has the games, but the mood and setting is all wrong. Stepping through the entrance at your local mall arcade was like walking out the backside of a magic wardrobe. The lights and sounds instantly drove parental units away and a curious kid could wander around with pocket change and try a few games and take control of skilled fighters, jet planes, space ships, skateboarders and on and on forever.

Forging skill, he could become a minor celebrity in this world, if he could top the high score, or compete harder than all challengers, a crowd would literally gather and start cheering the player on..and soon you had this https://youtu.be/07Upyd9EVog?t=84

With so many people in one place, all doing the same things, with competition and champions, losers and cheaters, how could a culture not spontaneously emerge?

I can't really think of any similar phenomenon today and work like this, and a few scattered preservationist barcades and personal collections might be the only thing that comes close.

I'm just sad I never made it to Luna City before it closed http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02...

Ground Kontrol (http://groundkontrol.com/) has generally done an awesome job imparting the vibe I remember. And The 1-Up (http://www.the-1up.com/) has given me similar goose-bumps.

Of course, now that I can enjoy a beer, the fact that both these arcades serve fantastic beer and some food sure doesn't hurt. I'm only sad that I don't live in Portland or Denver near these arcades...

Ground Kontrol is absolutely awesome. I've only been there once, but it was as close to those glory days as I've ever experienced. Absolutely amazing place to go hang out for a few hours. I can't believe the ages of some of the hardware they have working there, stuff that would normally be in a museum behind glass, you can walk right up to and play in anger.

> I can't really think of any similar phenomenon today and work like this

Japan still have a lively arcade scene. True, it's much less alive than how it was 25 years ago, but there's still many places where you can play games, retro and recent ones. There's a famous place in Tokyo where fans of Street Fighter 2 gather to fight against each other, following the rule "if you lose your fight, you let your seat to someone else and go wait in the queue". Those are some of the best players of SF2, and I could not even manage to every win a fight :/

There's always a bunch of 40 year old guys as well who regularly finish a famous shoot'em up with one credit, which is just amazing seeing how hard some of them are. (And this tells you how much cash they spent on them to reach that kind of level!).

The only thing I don't enjoy so much about these places in Japan: most people are smoking, and therefore it smells like shit there and you can throw your shirt in the trash after an evening there.

I can so relate to this notion of a lost culture or era.

In grades 4-6 I lived near Olympia, Washington, as my father was stationed at Ft. Lewis. Me and my peers were all gaming/computer types. I had an Atari 2600 and a TI-99/4A, another had a Timex Sinclair and Intellivision, another a ColecoVision (no computer), and 2 others had an Apple II (no consoles). All of us played games on the computers, of course, and all of us tried our hands at programming, whether it was copying lines of BASIC from a computer book (I had BASIC Computer Games, Vol 1, I think) or exploring the rabbit hole of peeks and pokes found in magazines. In hindsight, I suppose this fact alone in the early 80s was a sign of privilege many never had.

There was a local arcade called Shadowfax, and my buddies and I would spend hours there on Friday or Saturday nights. The place ran on tokens, not quarters. And if you bought $10 worth, you'd get double the tokens -- 2 whole rolls. So $20 would set us young dudes up for hours of fun.

The low lighting, the neon, the thumping bass from the cabinets themselves, and the ambient music. It all set the mood. I'm pretty certain there was even smoking allowed back then, well before the Clean Air Act stuff kicked in.

A row of quarters on the marquee marking one's place in line for a chance to be the next winner or loser in the PvP game of choice. The thrill of making that pattern work in Pacman, and the rage of your last man getting eaten a mere 3 dots away from getting to see the 3rd intermission. The awesomeness of those vector graphics games (Star Wars, Tempest, Asteroids, etc.). The odd combination of annoyance, envy, and admiration of that one dude who through raw skill could monopolize a favorite game of yours for hours at a stretch. The token weasley kid who slyly showed you how to get free credits by using washers or jamming a flattened soda straw into the coin slot. Or that asshole who unplugged the cabinet and erased your hard-earned initials from the #1 rank.

Such good times.

Sure, some of the above can be chalked up to the rose-colored tint of reminiscing about a long-lost youth -- I'm sure guys 20+ years my senior can similarly wax poetic about the pinball era. But that time was so exciting for me, as it was for so many here I'm sure. The atmosphere and culture was so unique and interesting, with a camaraderie that was unique at the time. Video games were becoming big, and personal computing was just ramping up. I'm glad I was able to enjoy that era at the age in which I did. It had no small influence on who I am today. And while my kids were playing and loving the old classics thanks to MAME at a very young age, they'll never truly know the joy of the arcade.

I did some fun work on MAME back in the day. I managed to get a hold of a PAL fusemap that was used in the Jr. Pac-man ROM encryption hardware. From there I created a little schematic and then implemented it in software inside MAME. The logic was stateful (it had registers) and so it wasn't something I could just run the ROM image through, so I ran the game with the encryption emulation running for each ROM fetch and built an unencrypted ROM image for the game while playing. After that I just released the unencrypted ROM image, but the decryption stuff was still sitting around in the MAME source last time I checked.

I think I may have done the actual game emulation stuff for Jr. Pac, too—it was basically the same as Pac-Mac/Ms. Pac-Man with the addition of scrolling hardware and a bit that controlled whether the sprites showed up on top of or underneath the character/text graphics. That bit is so that during the cutscenes the sprites could be on one side of a fence or the other, or go inside a house. It's a single bit for all the sprites though, so if you pay attention to the cut scenes, when a character sprite goes behind something, all the other character sprites are away from the text graphics so that they don't go behind things as well.

Do you still have that PAL fusemap (or .jed file)? The MAME team could use it for the jrpacman.c driver for preservation purposes at the very least.

It is good that they are changing the license for MAME/MESS so that the code is more free and open. They have to get permission of the original programmers and if not they have to rewrite those parts so that they are free and open.

This is a key to emulation history. A lot of arcade machines no longer work and with the rise of the video game consoles with Internet access nobody plays arcade games anymore. With MESS a lot of the old video game consoles and home computers are emulated even if they are no longer supported or made anymore.

With the JavaScript versions of MESS and MAME once they finish them you can play all of those games in the web browser.

ROMs and Disk Images can be found on web sites and BitTorrent sites, but be aware some of the DOS floppy disks and EXE files might be virus infected, hacked, or modified in some way to make a crack work. I say this as a warning because when people archive these DOS games they don't check for viruses and other stuff. In QEMU there is a Venom vulnerability for floppy drive emulation: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=QEMU-VENO... there might be a similar one in MESS.

They have to get permission of the original programmers and if not they have to rewrite those parts so that they are free and open.

How considerate. I wonder if the programmers and copyright holders that published these games are getting the same consideration...

"ROMs and Disk Images can be found on web sites and BitTorrent sites"

Nah, fuck that.

They are emulating the hardware, not pirating the software.

I don't think DOSBox needs to get permission from id Software because it can run Commander Keen.

If the game publishers want to sell their ROMs, they are free to. In fact, because MAME exists, they actually might find some customers to sell to!

Or to take a concrete example, I believe several re-releases on GOG take advantage of DOSBox to ensure games are playable on modern systems.

Right. Because they are still making and selling classic arcade machines... oh right. But some folks refuse to just let all that code go extinct in dead arcade machines in barns and sheds around the world.

Actually, some still are:

http://www.namcoamerica.com/game.php?gameid=32

Point is: what qualifies you to decide how those old assets should be used? Because you love the game more than the original publisher allegedly does?

So by that logic, why does anyone care at all what the original MAME contributors think of their code being switched into an open-source license? Why are their requests any more or less important than the publishers?

The point of this hand-grenade was merely to point this out, unpopular an opinion as it is. This whole thinking of "I'm a fan therefore I decide" took us over the cliff a long time ago and there's no going back.

Joezy, I am concerned you might not be working towards an offer of code contribution.

My contributions are involuntary, Jason. They're in some of those ROM images being freely traded about these last couple of decades.

Unfortunately I never had any contracts offering me royalties on future republished or derivative works unlike some of my peers. Not that they could claim any these days, anyway. But I think it still should be put in the discourse for posterity.

So, what you been up to, lately?

And, more importantly, what changed your mind? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1997159

I suspect joezydeco is reacting less against MAME and more against orionblastar's suggestion to, in effect, pirate.

Since there is no legal way to buy the ROMs, most arcade machines have been recycled and trashed by now, it isn't possible to buy the original arcade machine, and the only way to play these arcade games now is via MAME, it seems as if piracy is the only way to get ROMs until someone gets permission from ROM developers to sell their ROMs.

MAME has thousands of ROMs and games, it would be near impossible to get a license to sell each and every ROM.

StarROMs tried that with the Atari arcade ROMs but failed.

Your point is accepted. FWIW, I think software licenses are every bit as stupid as copyright over sequences of bytes that can be interpreted as Mario.

One can't own information as if it were property.

The developers of MAME/MESS get to decide on the license of the MAME/MESS source because they wrote it. That source does not include any roms, because they didn't write those. They're not asking you to open source your game because they're not proposing to open source your game.

Sounds like you're angry at the wrong people.

The MAME software does not include the ROMs and Disk images.

http://mamedev.org/legal.html

It depends on the country if downloading the ROMs or Disk Images is legal or not.

Some of the ROMs to released for free for use with MAME: http://mamedev.org/roms/

The creators of those arcade games made the ROM images free.

There was a Starroms company that sold the Atari arcade ROMs for a price. But they went out of business.

I'm sorry your ROMs you helped make are pirated all over the Internet. In some places they are archived like at the Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/messmame

It is like a museum that tries to save the older tech stuff that few people care about. Once JSMAME is finished the arcade games will run in a web browser.

I want to thank you for making these classic arcade games and say sorry that people pirate your work, but MAME does not distribute ROMs it is select websites on the Internet and BitTorrent sites as well that distribute them.

MAME assumes that the user has access to the arcade game and dumped the ROM themselves because they legally own it. But in truth most people just pirate the ROMs, and I wanted to be honest about that.

I think his point was that if most pirate the ROMs, why bother with relicensing the source - just redistribute that without appropriate licensing, too.

Both are the work of developers, both are used by all users of MAME.

But the MAME developers are not distributing ROMs at all. Just because someone else is doing something illegal, doesn't mean they should too.

I am willing to bet that effectively every single MAME developer has pirated one or more ROMs at one point. Infringement is infringement. The "they don't distribute it with ROMs" is a red herring if those same people are themselves pirating ROMs.

So are you arguing that people shouldn't even attempt to emulate older hardware, or that they shouldn't worry about the law when doing it?

My feeling is they should remember that they are still handling pirated material - even though using it these days might as well be considered a zero risk.

With the future open-sourcing of MAME this stuff will be everywhere. And, unless you're playing Roto or Gridlee, you're most certainly handling pirated material. Doesn't matter if it's on your local hard drive or archive.org.

In order to make the game work, they need the ROM and/or CHD file. I doubt every developer has gotten the rights to license the ROM etc and just pirated it to get it to work.

In the late 1990s people used to earn money selling MAME CDs with the ROMs on them. People thought they were getting legit ROMs, but it was just more pirating.

StarROMS sold some Atari ROMs and I think it was legit but they got shut down.

If only there was some sort of system that sells ROMs legally and gets permission to sell the ROMs and build it into MAME or MESS so each ROM or Floppy can be bought and the original ROM developers make money from the sales. But such a system isn't in place so most get their ROMs via piracy.

MAME is the answer to preserving our culture through preserving the ability to use older media. We save the original bits of the media, and write an emulator for the player hardware. 6502 lives.

MAME is great. I can play all the arcade games I used to enjoy when I was younger.

Another good bit is MESS and the emulators for the older consoles. Retroarch is another good collection of emulators.

>Another good bit is MESS and the emulators for the older consoles.

Yes! It's very much in the shadow of MAME but it's a great project documenting old computers and consoles in the same way MAME documents arcade machines, as in through working emulation.

Recently the projects merged so now MAME contains MESS, I don't know why it took so long since the same devs working on MAME were often working on MESS, and the codebase was practically the same outside drivers, but finally it's done!

RetroArch is commonly used with emulators but it's not an emulator itself. RetroArch is just an A/V frontend for software using the libretro API ("libretro cores"). It's well suited to all applications that need very low latency and tight A/V synchronization, using only limited types of hardware device (libretro cores are not sandboxed so they can technically access any hardware, but they work best if they use the libretro abstractions).

I did some Mame hacking the other day. Basically, I added code that would let me automatically reload a state and record my inputs at the touch of a button on my fight stick. I wanted this functionality so that I could test various glitches in games and then replay and record the event.

While I'm not the biggest fan of Mame's source code (it's still got a lot of macros from it's C heritage), it is fairly simple to understand, and you can gain a lot of insight into how the hardware worked back in those days. I hope this project lives on for a very long time.

Let's not forget to praise MESS, MAME's little brother which emulates old computers and was merged back into MAME a little while ago. This allowed me to revive my old 8-bit games I wrote as a kid in the 80's for an obscure East-German home computer line, and even put the demos on my web page (reminds me that I should try to update them to a newer MESS and emscripten version) :)

(http://www.flohofwoe.net/history.html)

did you just read the headline? the article talks about MESS

MESS is awesome (and was praised in the article, btw) .. incidentally what was your obscure East-German home computer? I'm a huge fan of 8-bit emulation and am always interested in hearing stories from folks who return to their code from 30 years ago ..

These were KC85/3 and KC85/4, small and neat Z80 machines with 16 to 128 kByte RAM, and a BASIC interpreter and pretty nice 'modular' OS in ROM. Unlike later machines (like the KC Compact which was a CPC clone), the KC85/2 to /4 haven't been straight copies of western 8-bitters (the chips were Z80 bootlegs, but the actual system and OS were quite unique, similar in performance and capabilities to the ZX Spectrum, but better color resolution (you could give a block of 8x4 or 8x1 pixels one out of 16 fore- and background colors) and completely different OS.

There's a bit more info about these machines on the About page here: http://flohofwoe.net/about.html

And I wrote a couple blog posts about the topic:

http://flohofwoe.blogspot.de/2013/11/messing-around-with-mes...

http://flohofwoe.blogspot.de/2014/11/new-adventures-in-8-bit...

Enjoy :)

Cool - thanks for the links, I'll check 'em out! Love to hear about these obscure systems. I was an Oric-1 user back in the day and am thoroughly enjoying its revival .. new stuff being made for it every few months!

I wonder what documentaries he's editing.

A documentary on the 6502 chip, a documentary on the place of arcades, and a documentary on the medium of tape.

Thanks! You know the titles and where I will be able to find these documentaries when released?

see https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/textfiles/the-jason-sco... for the detail of each.

you will find them on his site, once they are ready.

I'd love it if the MAME project produced an emulator for the Motorola 56k DSP models .. anyone know of any effort to do that? I know its a gargantuan task, but .. so?

If this were to happen, MAME could start to take over the synthesizer (musical instrument) world as well .. imagine a Virus in MAME! :)

MAME does already emulate the Motorola dsp56k, IIRC. It is used in the Polygonet driver.

Wow, thats very interesting .. off to port some code!

Oh lookee here, src/emu/cpu/dsp56k

OG.

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