questions on mame

[Magnus Warker]

Hi,

what is the dependency between the mame version, the mame emulator and
the frontend?

I noticed the following a few days ago, when accessing a set of mame
roms with a frontend called "gmameui" on a Debian squeeze system:

- First, I installed "sdlmame", and gmameui displayed a set of games.
I missed some (e. g. rocnrope).

- Then, I installed "xmame" (which removed "sdlmame"), and gmameui
displayed a different set of games (rocnrope was present).

I also noticed some years ago that there must be a depencency between a
rom set and a specific version of [x]mame?

Given a specific mame version (e. g. xmame or sdlmame of a current
Debian repository), which rom set is the latest and most complete?

How can it be that - with the same set of roms - the different mame
emulators (xmamel, sdlmame) support different set of games?

Thank you
Magnus

[Eli the Bearded]

In alt.games.mame, Magnus Warker <war...@mailinator.com> wrote:
> I also noticed some years ago that there must be a depencency between a
> rom set and a specific version of [x]mame?

Yes.

> How can it be that - with the same set of ROMs - the different mame

> emulators (xmamel, sdlmame) support different set of games?

The emulators are coded against particular ROM dumps and then over time
corrections get made. Often (it seems) the correction is in the form
of recognizing certain settings should not be hardcoded but in fact be
considered a ROM and added to the dump. From the point of view of an
outsider who has never written a line of code for mame, I'm guessing
this allows mae to reuse emulations of particular circuit fragments
for more games.

There's a tool called ClrMAMEPro that can help you deal with this.
I found out about it after writing a crude tool that indexed the
files in all my ROM sets to find missing ROMs with the same checksum
to build new fixed ROM sets. ClrMAMEPro does that and does it better.

Elijah
------
or get a new ROM set -- this group sometimes has torrent links for ROM sets

[no...@nowhere.nonet]

It depends on which MAME base code was used to make whichever flavor
of MAME you're using. The offical is at 145 right now and at v145u6
unofficially. Also as new documentation is discovered and clone sets
found & dumped, are added. As well as bad rom dumps replaced with good
re-dumps, things change. There are also other reasons but you get the
idea.

Later...

[Man-wai Chang]

> I also noticed some years ago that there must be a depencency between a
> rom set and a specific version of [x]mame?

It still is. The latest set should be of 0.144 or 0.145!

> How can it be that - with the same set of roms - the different mame
> emulators (xmamel, sdlmame) support different set of games?

Bug-fixing, new features...

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[Man-wai Chang]

>
>> How can it be that - with the same set of roms - the different mame
>> emulators (xmamel, sdlmame) support different set of games?
>
> Bug-fixing, new features...
>

And new ROM dumps as well, adding files tot each ROM!

--
@~@ You have the right to remain silent.
/ v \ Simplicity is Beauty! May the Force and farces be with you!
/( _ )\ (Fedora 15 i686) Linux 3.3.2

^ ^ 21:19:01 up 17:16 0 users load average: 0.00 0.06 0.07

[Magnus Warker]

Thanks for the answers!

But I still wonder: How can it be that I have different games with
sdlmame and xmame from the same Debian distribution and the same rom set?

Magnus

[no...@nowhere.nonet]

As more info is found and new versions of sets are dumped the parent
set & clones may change.

I think maybe what you have are sdl & xmames that were compiles using
different source sets or were intentionally built that way for one
reason or another. Use ClrMAME Pro and an offical source to check.
Otherwise I'm not sure what you got goin' on there.