David Haywood＇s MAME(tm) WIP (2011/11/25)

Immediate Plans

After leaving the Fruit Machine emulation for a bit while 0.144 was put out the door I think it’s about due time I got back to looking at that. I’m effectively down a man on that front tho, because James who was providing some assistance is currently out of action due to real life goings on.

Also, as outlined below NeoGeo Multislot is in my plans, this shouldn’t actually be too difficult to implement now, just requires a bit of planning.

There are a couple of MESS-side issues I’ve noticed while going through systems with UltimateMAME which could do with some attention (not specific to my build, just general problems in MESS) For now I’m just waiting to see what the actual MAME/MESSdevs come up with as a solution as far as building a unified binary goes tho. If they are serious about doing a merge then any sensible solution would at least have the option to build an ‘UltimateMAME’ like target, so I’m going to bide my time on that for a while. I’ve shown that it can be done so the ball is very much in their court now as far as delivering anything as complete and functional as what I provided, but in an official capacity is concerned.

I _won’t_ be working on Raiden 2, Gaelco, HNG64, Later release PGM or anything along those lines, sorry.

I might do some more mini-reviews / game(s) of the week type things, pointing out some obscure, or forgotten games which are noteworthy for some reason or another. There are many interesting titles out there beyond MAME, and due to various factors (difficulty in using the systems without prior knowledge, vast size of software libraries, assumptions that old computers/consoles just weren’t as capable, lack of a popular MAME-like project for non-arcades, the number of closed source ‘best’ emulators which simply fail on modern platforms etc.) a fair number are being completely overlooked, or at most relegated to ‘best 100 games for xxx’ YouTube videos with little explanation as to why.

I’ll probably use my UltimateMAME builds, or MESS for the purpose of this, as while compatibility, and usability may be inferior to some of the standalone emulators people can actually depend on it to work as described regardless of their platform. It’s just a shame compatibility on some of the systems is so bad (PSX, Saturn, Jaguar etc.) of course being open software there is always the opportunity to improve it, although that requires people to actually know it exists, and one of the most evident things about UltimateMAME is that a lot of people apparently didn’t even realise what MESS was, so I can only guess it’s just as hidden from developers.

With the above in mind, one final thing I will say is that it MESS exists, and if you’re considering doing your own 100% accurate emulator for a platform please consider coding in MESS instead, and improving the MAME framework while you’re at it because one thing about the project(s) is they’re always going to be there and somebody is always going to be maintaining them, so if you care about things being preserved for the generations it’s a good place to do your work. It might seem like a silly ‘nothing’ project split off from MAME, and relegated to obscurity, but it really is just as important, if not more and we’re quickly approaching a period where most of the developers who are likely to be interested in these things are getting older, and moving on to other real life ventures which IMHO puts some systems at risk of never being emulated and preserved properly in an open, active project.


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