Amiga MAME/MESS - anyone working on it?

Hi everybody,

Just wondering - has anyone been working on these (ultra-important) programs since Steffen Hauser's quick SDL port last year?

I might have a play myself but only if I'm not duplicating someone else's work....

(AOS4 primarily, then WarpOS second, then m68K third priority, naturally. :) )

Sounds like a great idea.

Mame seems to have a problem with sound on my MicroA1 it stutters.

So, a port that fixes that would be most welcome.



Mikey C

Actually it would be nice to here about some of the other emulators as well like FPSE. WarpSnes recently added amigainput capability and that improves the experience ten fold. Having Mame with amigainput would be fantastic.

ace

Yepp, a simple recompile of MAME for OS4 would be good.
It should automatically be faster and get AmigaInput support as SDL has been updated since the last release of MAME-OS4.

MAME exists but should be improved as the only version made by Steffen Heuser is SDL.. it' s ok for simple game but if you want to play with more huge game we need an os4 native version of this emulator.. We also need the support for amiga input, but unfortunatly this doesn't work well now it is a little buggy..

The sound is ok here on my amiga micro.. i used mame with the on chip audio of the micro and with a SoundBlaster Audigy without problem..

Please consider to make a native version instead of a simple recompiling..

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I read in another topic here that there is a problem with the micro AmigaOne and DMA.

Could this be the problem?

@RomanceClip

Both yes and no.

Sometimes the stutters can be fixed by software. Alot of work has gone into fixing the audio problems.
But the VIA686B southbridge chip suffers from interrupt problems (stated several times by OS4 audio driver author DaveAE). So heavy bus usage like advanced 3D games or such will probably never work without stuttering on A1's.
This is of course not a issue on any new hardware that may/will be released for OS4.

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What?? 68k for life! Ok, maybe I am glad I never got that 68k tatoo.

Hey there.

You may remember a port of MAME to the Amiga from a few years ago called WarpMAME. It was a Warp Up specific version that I myself ported and that was a dual CPU port. The PPC did the emulation and the 68k did the graphics rendering and sound. I put a huge amount of effort into it and it was the fastest version of MAME for the Amiga - certainly much faster than a quick SDL port.

However I was forced to abandon the port because MAME is actually a really badly written program. The separation between the OS independent parts and the OS depdendent parts is not done well, which means that whenever a new version of MAME was released, I basically had to re-port it to the Amiga, repeating the same work again and again. Sometimes it would take as long as a month to get a new version working! After a while I simply got bored and fed up with repeating this same work time after time, not to mention that each version seemed to be slower than the previous one, even when emulating older games, so it was becoming unusable on a Cyberstorm PPC.

Anyway, I guess that you are wondering why I am writing such a negative post. It's just that as an ex-maintainer of an Amiga port I wanted to let people know that it's not just a simple matter of a recompile. The SDL version is too slow and a native port is too much work! MAME is a really wonderful program but it is also very badly coded, and the MAME team seem to hide away so you can't get your patches upstream.

It's fun to play with but horrible to port!

@Hitman
Good post, put's things into a bit more perspective especially for us "want to haves". I found the SDL compiled version very usable on my a1 g4 933, it would be even better with a joystick.

cheers
ace

@hitman: does the WarpOS version runs on os4 and amigaones? I would love to try it - it doesn't matter for me that it is an old version - i had many roms in an old version file format that i can't use with the actual MAME version under linux and windows

Hi Hitman,

I am very aware of your port - I used to run it and would often check for a new version, which for reasons you've just said didn't happen very often!

The codebase for MAME is changing still, though - v1.07 (I think it was) apparently had a MAJOR video-code rewrite which I need to find out more about.

I don't like relying on SDL - I'm sure it's not optimal and I reckon we could do so much more with MAME and MESS to bring it up to the level of MAME32 with nice GUIs and stuff built in rather than third party ones (or maybe merging a 3rd-party one in so it's more tightly linked?)

I still want to try and do a WarpOS version (a simple uni-CPU one) just for the heck of it but I need to find a way of making a cross-compiler for AOS 4 and WarpOS and nobody seems to have one! Hence I may be limited to AOS 4.....

Would it help you to maintain the port if you had two people working on it? I'd really like to see MAME/MESS properly supported...

There is also a source code of the 0.97 release for MorphOS (binaries is also included in the page for the 0.104 release so if anyone want to contact the autor ...)

AFAIK Mame CVS now is arrive at 0.110 but i think that when we have this port from the original MOS version, updated isn't quite difficult ...

http://fabportnawak.free.fr/mame/

...

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I may take a look but because the video code took a major overhaul in .107 I think I'm better off starting anew...

Imho as test you can starting now with the currenty 0.104 from that site (for the latest MOS source version contact the author), after that if you find a problem you can choose another code ...
But please don't use SDL

Good luck