MAME v0.148u1 - 模擬器

Delia avatar
By Delia
at 2013-02-13T21:59

Table of Contents


"What’s New in 0.148u1"

With MAME/MESS/UME 0.148 out (see below) I’m going to take the time to write
a bit about it and show you some screenshots, as I’ve done several other
releases, simply because I believe that it is more meaningful than some
jargon in a whatsnew file.

Talk of the town is are of course the improvements made to the original
Playstation emulation, you can follow the thread at bannister.org (the MESS
forums) for some screenshots of that one, and I’ll be picking some choice
cuts out of it later in this update but for now I’m going to shift the
attention to something else.

0.148u1 also sees numerous improvements made to the Sega Saturn driver, and
while it still has a long way to go before compatibility can be considered
good the changes do bring a couple more titles into the realm of playable
with fixes allowing inputs to work in several games in addition to other
changes giving an overall compatibility boost. If you’ve followed this blog
for a while you’ll know I like my puzzle games, and even did a feature in
the past on them, covering a number of Saturn titles. I’m happy to say that
changes made in the latest build bring another one “Heisei Tensai Bakabon
Susume! Bakabons” (bakabons in the saturnjp softlist) into the realm of
playable thanks to Kale fixing an issue with the controllers.

It’s your traditional ‘block dropping’ puzzle game, but in this case you
have to surround 2+ objects of one colour with 2 of another, for example
creating a chains of ‘Red, Blue, Blue, Red’ or ‘Yellow, Red, Red, Red,
Yellow’ It’s also full of quirky Japanese FMV clips between rounds, and
while the whole thing has a distinct low-budget feel to it I find it to be
another enjoyable game in the Saturn library and is definitely a title which
would have been fully suited to an arcade release.

http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/bakabons_1.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/bakabons_2.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/bakabons_3.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/bakabons_4.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/bakabons_5.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/bakabons_6.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/bakabons_7.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/bakabons_8.png

(Kale’s work on the Saturn driver makes Japanese Saturn game Heisei Tensai
Bakabon Susume! Bakabons playable in UME/MESS 0.148u1)

Other Saturn games have benefited too, platformer Rayman has also seen a
marked improvement and while it still has some graphical issues, you can at
least play it a bit now (I’ve only tested the first level mind you)

http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/rayman_1.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/rayman_2.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/rayman_3.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/rayman_4.png

(Rayman, the happiest character in any video game, now less likely to make
you sad)

A few tweaks to the SCU DSP emulation also helped games like Croc, and
certainly improves things despite it being more of a kludge than a real fix,
the entire thing could do with being made a CPU core, even if the cost to
performance might not be desirable. Actually the performance already isn’t
desirable for many of the 3D games, hopefully there is room to optimize at
least some of them, although a couple of ones I profiled didn’t look hopeful.

http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/croc_1.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/croc_2.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/croc_3.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/croc_4.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/croc_5.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/croc_6.png

Croc also benefited from Saturn improvements, although currently runs slow
and still has glitches)

It’s with a word of caution I mention this next thing, because battery saves
in Sonic 3 are actually broken in 148u1 (although they have since been fixed)

You might be aware that Sonic and Knuckles for the Genesis employed ‘Lock-on
’ technology, allowing you to plug Sonic 2 and Sonic 3 in to them to give
special games, in the former case a version of Sonic 2 with Knuckles in it,
and in the latter the ‘complete’ version of Sonic 3, featuring all the
Sonic 3 and Sonic + Knuckles stages as well as the ability to play as
Knuckles in Sonic 3 with brand new routes etc.

Most Genesis emulators (all PC ones?) simple use a hacked up ROM to support
this, merging the data from Sonic and Knuckles with the data from Sonic 2/3
to allow this to work, and it works fine but you miss one key feature. On
real hardware you could plug ANY cartridge into the Sonic and Knuckles one,
and while you’re presented with an initial ‘No-Way’ screen that can be
bypassed by pressing buttons A+B+C on the pad to give you a single unique
special stage level generated using the cartridge you plugged in as the
random seed.

http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/sk_sonic2.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/sk_sonic3.png

The well known cases of Sonic & Knuckles being locked on to Sonic 2 and Sonic
3)

As of 148u1 MESS has moved Sonic & Knuckles ‘lock-on’ support to the slot
system, meaning that launch syntax of “ume genesis sk -cart2 waniwani” will
tell UME/MESS to launch Sonic & Knuckles with ‘waniwani’ (Wani Wani World,
one of my favourite Japanese Megadrive games) in ‘cart2′ which is the name
MESS assigns to the slot on top of the Sonic + Knuckles cart. This is
actually the best case to demonstrate the new feature in MESS, because with
other emulators you’d have to glue the rom files together manually to try
random game carts with it but with MESS it’s now a breeze and you can easily
get the expected ‘No Way’ screen and unique level for any cart you fancy
plugging in.

http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/sk_other_1.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/sk_other_2.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/sk_other_3.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/sk_other_4.png

(Sonic & Knuckles locked on to a random game, in this case Wani Wani World)

Sonic 1 is actually another special case like Sonic 2 and 3, although
slightly less known. Like inserting any random cart you’ll get the ‘No Way’
screen, but with Sonic 1 the screen isn’t dimmed, and doing the A+B+C combo
gives you a game based on the special stages with literally thousands of
stages (134217728 apparently) and a password system. There are so many stages
it would actually take several hundred years to play them all ;-) “ume
genesis sk -cart2 sonic” gives you that lock-on combination anyway.

http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/sk_sonic1.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/sk_sonic1_2.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/sk_sonic1_3.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/sk_sonic1_4.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/sk_sonic1_5.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/sk_sonic1_6.png

(Sonic & Knuckles with Sonic 1 locked on)

Anyway this progress from etabeta shows how the MESS slot system can be
flexible and allow you to use the systems in a way that closely mimics how
you would use the real hardware and while it was possible to run the
pre-merged locked on files before, this still manages to bring something new
to the table. The downside of this is it’s now a little less convenient to
launch the combined Sonic & Knuckles + Sonic 2/3 combo because you have to
manually specify it, although I hope maybe one day the softlist can simply
have an alias that does it for you.

In MAME you have just the solitary new playable game if you ignore the video
poker titles, that being Brixian as featured in a previous update here. There
are some worthwhile clones supported tho, a complete dump of the Japanese
version of WWF Superstars means you can see a very American product presented
in a Japanese way, with the use of Japanese text being significant enough
that the version released over there required a different graphic rom to
accommodate it, something of a rarity.

http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/new_brixian.jpg

(Brixian was the only newly working game in MAME 0.148u1 not falling under
the gambling category)

http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/wwfsstarj_1.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/wwfsstarj_2.png

(..but it’s good to see new clones still turning up as well, including the
Japanese version of WWF Superstars)

The other big thing across both projects is a round of cleanups. A lot of
drivers are affected by these so-called ‘tagmap’ cleanups, something I
hinted on in my 2012 article. While claims of miraculous speed increases
across the board are somewhat unfounded these code cleanups have helped win
back some long-lost performance in several drivers, and for some really
abusive ones the gains are significant although those cases are few in
number. It’s not going to make much difference to high-end drivers where the
overhead caused by even high levels of hash lookups isn’t significant
compared to the rest of the emulation, but for a number of lower-end drivers
it provides a timely speed boost.

PSX, as I mentioned at the very start has seen some significant improvements
over the past few weeks. Primarily the controller and memcard support was
fixed, meaning games built using the dualshock libraries now accept inputs.
Fixes were also made to the CD code allowing many more games to actually boot
in the first place.

I should probably start by saying that it isn’t perfect, many games are
missing FMVs, showing only blank screens, and for a large chunk of the
Japanese library such conditions can’t be bypassed, leaving you often with
nothing but a blank screen and some looping audio from the FMV. Furthermore
almost every game using CDDA for the audio has severe issues of bad audio
being played, often ear-popping data tracks being played instead of the
actual audio ones. Some games also still fail protection checks so only
cracked copies work, and for games using libcrypt protection (of which there
are many in Europe at least) don’t currently work because there is no way to
integrate the SBI subdata files from redump.org into the CHDs; some of those
protections are subtle and will only crash the games after a few levels (eg.
Spyro 2)

With that out the way I’ll say that many, many games are playable; European
exclusive Terracon is one such game and a game I really enjoyed back in the
day although I’d completely forgotten what it was called and was unable to
find anything to point me in the right direction until somebody else
remembered what it was called for me and I gave it a spin in MESS.

http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2012/terracon_4.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2012/terracon_7.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2012/terracon_9.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2012/terracon_15.png

Harmful Park is a Japanese PSX game, a great Parodius style shooter to boot.
For all people go on about how great the 2D games were on the Saturn I’d
argue that the PSX actually had the better titles overall, at least in Japan,
even if the Saturn had stronger arcade conversions of the Capcom titles.
Anyway Harmful Park would have been right at home in the arcades, it’s
bizarre, well themed and throws in some imaginative ideas to provide a
memorable experience.

http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/harmful_1.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/harmful_9.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/harmful_27.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/harmful_30.png

The Playstation is also home to a number of games where the arcade originals
are not yet emulated. Raiden DX is one of these, and thanks to the
flexibility of MESS when it comes to screen rotations you can easily run it
in the mode designed for a rotated TV and get the full arcade-like experience
from it. This is one where the intro movie is black, but luckily if you leave
it the game will get to the title screen and play beautifully.

http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/raiden_dx_1.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/raiden_dx_2.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/raiden_dx_3.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/raiden_dx_4.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/raiden_dx_5.png

One version of ‘The Block Kuzushi’ was released for the Arcades, but
several others were released for the Playstation as part of the budget ranges
in Japan, including a Hello Kitty themed one! They’re actually very good
Breakout / Arkanoid style games.

http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/kitty_1.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/kitty_2.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/kitty_3.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/kitty_4.png

Another genre I enjoy is the ‘clear the screen of enemies’ type of games,
best known in the arcades in the form of games like Bubble Bobble and Tumble
Pop. On the Playstation IREM put out a fine example of this Genre in the
forum of Gussun Paradise, which takes the characters from their popular
Gussun Oyoyo (Risky Challenge) and puts them in a unique game in said genre.
It’s a perfect example of how 3D hardware can help this type of game too,
just by adding little effects here and there like spinning the playfield
around in certain situations.

http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/gussun_paradise_1.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/gussun_paradise_2.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/gussun_paradise_3.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/gussun_paradise_4.png

Anyway, that’s enough talking about the Playstation, and while I’ve
highlighted mostly 2D arcade-like games a great number of others are fully
playable too and I’ll probably do an article showing even more of them at
some point in the future. Not everything mentioned here is listed in the
softlists yet, so don’t worry if you can’t see them.

Back to MAME, a couple of dumps of IGS036 based games showed up, mostly
gambling / mahjong type games, but it’s interesting to note because it’s
the CPU used on PGM2 titles. Unfortunately the CPU is the successor to the
dreaded IGS027A used on many PGM1 games and IGS gambling boards before it,
and we still have no way to deal with that one and this is already confirmed
to have per-game internal ROMs just like the 027A does, and they’re likely
secured just as well. Furthermore the external part of the program ROMs are
well encrypted (some of the best guys on the MAME team say it’s not obvious)
and the more recent ones even use secure modules to store the external roms
as yet another level of security. The new dumps there only confirm what we
didn’t want to know, and that is that these things are very, very nasty, don
’t expect to see them emulated any time soon, if ever.

A couple of other interesting bits did turn up, the prototype of Super
Pinball Action is very interesting, if not slightly confusing. It dates from
2 years earlier than the release build and has significant changes to both
the hardware and the way the game is programmed. Even simple things like the
palette format differs on this compared to the final build, as do the bits in
spriteram used for priority and colour selection (they appear to be swapped
around) Furthermore the prototype uploads data for all 4 background tilemaps
on startup and uses the scroll registers to show the correct backgrounds,
whereas the final build simply uploads them as and when it needs them, always
keeping the scroll registers at 0. Registers are also moved around, inputs
are moved around and I’m actually amazed by how much the final display does
still resemble the release version. The most confusing aspect of all tho is
that there is an extra Z80 on the prototype, and a graphic rom for a
horizontally orientated tilemap of some sort, containing the ‘gal’ graphics
which aren’t present in the regular graphic roms. This leaves me wondering
if the prototype version is some kind of dual screen setup. Unfortunately the
board had already been partially stripped for parts, with the sound Z80
removed, but hopefully all the roms are intact; we at least *seem* to be ok
aside this mysterious extra program ROM and tile rom I wish I could make more
sense of. Ignore the graphical glitch on the screenshots below, it’s caused
by missing priority handling in the proto which isn’t yet playable.

http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/spbactn_release.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/spbactn_proto.png

(The prototype version dates from 2 years earlier and has an extra CPU and
tile rom for unknown purposes, possibly a 2nd screen?)

I mentioned gamblers earlier, the work done on ‘New York Joker’ and ‘
Number One’ was all included, with both games in working state. I’ve also
been sifting through some new dumps and found that the roms from a ‘Hot Mind
/ Hard Times’ board ANY dumped were actually another version of Lucky Boom,
this one on different hardware using a PIC for sound like Hard Times
(unfortunately protected, but the Hot Mind one appears to work) It seems
Playmark liked to put their gamblers on multiple platforms because as
mentioned in the 2012 update we’ve seen Hot Mind on multiple boards too. It’
s a handy dump to have too because it should hopefully point us in the right
direction for some video registers and allow per-game kludges to be removed.
Another thing ANY dumped is a game called ‘Fruit Fresh’ (although startup
messages call it ‘Dream World’) I haven’t figured out how the reels work
on it yet tho, might be some kind of raster effect / partial update scheme as
the scroll values appear to be written multiple times in a frame.

http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/fresh_1.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/fresh_2.png

(Work in progress on a Fresh dump of a Fruity game)

Bug fixes are important to, be they for regressions, or long-standing issues
with games which have been present from when they were first emulated. GTI
Club is the recipient of a set of such fixes, with improvements to the ROZ
layer amongst other things allowing for the sun in the sky to be correctly
rendered instead of the Winners Don’t Use Drugs logo hovering up there, and
while that was certainly cool in a surreal kind of way it definitely wasn’t
correct until now, it’s good to see Ville active again!

http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/gticlub_new_1.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/gticlub_new_2.png

(The sun is out and shining bright thanks to fixes to the Konami ROZ layer
emulation used by GTI Club)

One bugfix that isn’t specific to a driver comes from Phil. B who has
mentioned in the comments below that he fixed an important core bug relating
to -aviwrite for 0.148u1 as well. All prior versions would introduce a
glitchy frame in the video when crossing 2GB boundaries on the output file
and this is evident in many of the videos I’ve uploaded to my YouTube
account. While it might sound like a minor niggly issue it was certainly a
major source of irritation if you wanted glitch-free videos prior to this
release.

There have been system / game specific fixes in MESS too, and while the
Chinese release ‘Ya Se Chuan Shuo (Chi)’ for the Megadrive / Genesis is
listed as one such case where the protection has been emulated and the game
should now be working it appears to have other issues here, crashing on
startup so I’ll be leaving that one until u2 I think. The unlicensed Wisdom
Tree games for the Gameboy also suffered a regression at some unknown point
in the last year or two, 0.148u1 brings those back up to working state, and
while the religious overtones might not be to everybody’s tastes several of
the games are actually just takes on the Boulderdash theme.

http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/gb_exodus_1.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/gb_exodus_2.png

http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/gb_josh_1.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/gb_josh_2.png

http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/gb_lost_1.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/gb_lost_2.png

http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/gb_spirit_1.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/gb_spirit_2.png

(The Gameboy Wisdom Tree releases had regressed at some point, 0.148u1 fixes
them again)

While the above Gameboy games almost certainly worked at one point in the
past several NeoGeo Pocket games didn’t due to bugs in the TLC900 CPU core,
a number of those bugs were identified and fixed by Wilbert Pol, resulting in
additional working / less glitchy games. Noted improvements include the
original NGP Pocket Tennis as well as NGPC games ‘SNK Gals Fighter’ and ‘
Mezase! Kanji Ou’.

http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/ngp_ptennis_2.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/ngp_ptennis_1.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/ngp_ptennis_3.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/ngp_ptennis_4.png

http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/ngpc_gals_1.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/ngpc_gals_2.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/ngpc_gals_3.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/ngpc_gals_4.png

http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/ngpc_mez_1.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/ngpc_mez_2.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/ngpc_mez_3.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/ngpc_mez_4.png

Tweaks were also made to the Master System drivers, with subtle behavioral
differences of the Korean systems emulated, needed in order for the numerous
MSX conversions that were released over there to work, those games were often
incompatible with the official baseline systems from Sega.

Continued updates and improvements to the Software Lists, including new
lists, compatibility status updates as well as fleshing out a number of the
skeleton listings also occurred between 0.148 and 0.148u1 with special
mentions to Microvision and also the Philips Videopac G7400 and Videopac+
G7400 where there were also some significant driver improvements made (US
users will likely know them as the Magnavox Odyssey 2/3)

I mentioned Microvision, and it’s certainly a significant one. The driver
was added in 0.148, and is still considered non-working and from my brief
testing of Connect 4 it’s easy to see why, the pieces rarely end up where
you tell them to drop and, an it seems entirely random that the computer
decides to drop a piece where it wants one. Clearly there is still work to
do, but it’s an important system to have emulated, it’s generally
considered to be the first handheld video system, and the actual game
cartridges contain no ROM chips, but instead MCUs with internal ROMs, so
simply having them dumped is a miracle (even if I think there is some
question over possible bad bits) Here are some screenshots from Connect 4
running.

http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/micro_1.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/micro_2.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/micro_3.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/micro_4.png

(Microvision screenshots.. not specs of dirt on your screen)

So before you ask if I’m serious, yes, I’m serious, those are the
screenshots, the unit is so early it had a resolution of just 16×16 pixels,
and the pieces for one player are represented with a 2×2 cross-hatch
pattern, and the other solid 2×2 squares. That’s it, here are some enlarged
versions of the same thing, just so that you can see them on a monitor! You’
ll definitely want to run these with a high -prescale value in MESS if you don
’t just want to see a washed out blur!

http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/micro_1_big.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/micro_2_big.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/micro_3_big.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/micro_4_big.png

(Microvision screenshots.. magnified 1600%)

As I said, keep in mind it isn’t considered working yet, but at the same
time understand how incredibly cool just being able to run that is, well
unless you were expecting the Microvision to be something made by Microsoft
before the Xbox I guess.

Going back to the previously mentioned VideoPac/Odyssey systems, not only
have they received basic softlists in 0.148u1 (with plenty of todo notes
indicating where things could be cleaned up, and what still need sourcing)
but the emulation has improved significantly, from timing details etc. on the
basic unit to huge improvements to the G7400 (which is still marked as
non-working, but has several playable games now) Let’s start by looking at
some G7000 titles in the form of Pick Axe Pete, and Attack of the Timelord!
(likely released as Terrahawks in Europe)

http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/timelord_1.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/timelord_3.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/pete_old_1.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/pete_old_2.png

(The original G7000 / Odyssey 2 releases of Attack of the Timelord /
Terrahawks and Pickaxe Pete)

Fairly basic looking games, but Attack of the Timelord does make use of the
speech unit like several games on the platform (actually there’s a
MameTesters bug stating that several others should, but it doesn’t always
work)

Now the G7400 received enhanced versions of both these games (as Terrahawks
and Pickaxe Pete) and the emulation of them is much better in 148u1 than it
was before now. The screenshots below show the additional backgrounds present
in the G7400 versions

http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/hawk_1.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/hawk_3.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/pete_1.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/pete_2.png

(The enhanced G7400 / Odyssey 2 releases of Terrahawks and Pickaxe Pete)

Both are actually charming little systems with games, that while often
conforming to standard genres do try to do things a bit differently, even if
it can make some of them a little difficult to understand at times. The
pictured games might not be the best example of this, but still it’s a
curious early system for those willing to do a bit of digging, just be warned
not all games are fully compatible across NTSC/PAL regions, so running the
Euro version of Frogger on an NTSC Odyssey will give you a flickery mess, the
softlists, while making things easier, only currently list the regions not
the compatibility, also like I mentioned the G7400 is still marked as NOT
WORKING, so your mileage may vary.

The ZX Spectrum emulation hasn’t seen any improvements in 0.148u1, but it’s
another one where the softlists have been fleshed out a bit, specifically the
Spectrum +3 Disk listings have had the SPS releases incorporated, and having
A-grade dumps listed as being known is obviously a good thing as they provide
an absolute reference for quality so when they fail we know it’s our
emulation that’s to blame, not the images.

http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/lightcor_1.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/lightcor_2.png

(The ZX Spectrum +3 Software List now lists the SPS dumped IPF images, which
are a good benchmark to assess driver compatibility against)

The MSX is another system where we haven’t really seen any improvements in
the new release, but the softlists have been improved, and are now a lot more
complete. This again allows for testing and building of compatibility lists,
as well as providing a more complete view of what was released on a system.
When I did my writeup looking at some ports of classic games the coverage of
the MSX was weaker than it should have been because the lists were incomplete.

http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/msx_digdug_1.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/msx_digdug_2.png

http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/msx_galaga_1.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/msx_galaga_2.png

http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/msx_rally_1.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/msx_rally_2.png

(The MSX Software List now better represents the platform)

It’s interesting to see how official Home ports of things like Galaga
compare to the unofficial ‘Fantastic’ Arcade port mentioned in the 2012
writeup.

The whatsnew for 0.148u1 lists the Vector HLSL, but it’s still turned off at
source level, so any changes to settings will have no effect, that’s one for
the future rather than something you’re going to play with in u1.

Fixes for a couple of things mentioned in the 2012 write-up have also been
made by the developers, including improvements to the control handling in
Armadillo Racing. The problem with Winning Run was also identified, but not
fixed; the game turns on the TMS co-processors before it has uploaded code to
them, this makes the behavior unpredictable and can cause out of bounds
accesses that will crash MAME on some systems (like mine..)

The tagmap optimizations weren’t the only ones made for this release either,
some drivers got specific attention, for example I put a lot of work into
optimizing and improving stability of the Virtual Boy driver, you can now
tell that Bound High is actually running too fast, although it’s still
strangely addictive and I’d actually class it as my favourite game on the
platform even if it’s a prototype and didn’t see a release back in the day.

http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/vboy_bound_1.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2013/vboy_bound_2.png


(Bound High on the Virtual Boy, aim your bounces to land on the enemies, now
with optimized driver)

The work on MIDI related technology has continued in u1 with Midi-out now
being supported and hooked up to both the Apple 2 and PC drivers, allowing
said emulated drivers to control external MIDI devices.

For general use you’re unlikely to notice too much, but there is one slight
issue with this in that the timing when communicating with Midi devices isn’
t quite right. The reason for this is due to the way MAME time and REAL time
are only synced on a per-frame basis (and thus real world inputs and outputs
if we don’t want to buffer them). A change was temporarily made to sync
screenless systems at a far higher frequency but doing so makes MAME/MESS
more prone to slowdowns as you can’t have any performance spikes within any
single sub-division of the time within each ‘frame’ or the overall speed
will drop below 100% and several drivers were doing that (CPU usage over a
frame is a lot less smooth than you’d expect, and would be even worse with
video based systems where the render call tends to happen as one single ‘
spike’) Anyway, it’s possible that will be configurable in the future, at
least for screenless systems, and maybe even ones with screens too, just be
weary of the performance issues.

As an aside you can actually notice a similar performance spiking in a game
in MAME already for other reasons. Pasha Pasha 2 (pasha2) as a game runs the
game logic at 30fps, but the screen update is 60fps, this means that it
spends an entire frame each frame doing NOTHING, and then has a heavy frame
where it does everything. As a result you can unthrottle it to run at 120%
(because the ‘nothing’ frames then take no time at all to process even if
the heavy frames are still significant and this skew the results) but if you
leave it throttled it only runs at 75% because the real bottleneck is the
heavier frames. You’d start to see the same (confusing) behavior for many
unexpected drivers if you attempted to sync MAME time and REAL time at a
higher rate than once per frame.

As you can probably tell by now 148u1 has been a very MESS-centric update, at
least as far as the interesting bits of progress go but hopefully I’ve also
highlighted enough smaller bits of MAME progress to show that we’re still
giving it plenty of attention. I expect this general trend to continue in the
future as the amount of arcade bits we can work on and realistically make any
progress with in a short space of time continue to wind down, especially with
the likes of The Dumping Union struggling due to an issue with their donation
system. I do have some MAME targets still in mind, so if you really only care
about the arcade stuff then don’t worry, but I do hope some of the coverage
here opens up eyes as to where the progress is heading, and how, especially
in Japan, there really were a lot of arcade style games even on the
non-arcade platforms.

新春賀歲版本無誤!
______________________________________________________________________________

來源:http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/2013/02/11/whats-new-in-0-148u1/

   Wrapping things up..
   http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/2013/02/13/wrapping-things-up/

--

ポーラステーション
http://perryt0517.wordpress.com/

--

All Comments

紅忍~血河之舞-中-理應扼殺的感情

Bethany avatar
By Bethany
at 2013-02-12T23:09
這片值得稱讚的地方還不少, 像是音樂其實非常秀逸,聽起來非常舒服的和風,只可惜被發現時才有太鼓節奏。 然後包括紅會因為冷而吐白氣、從河上爬上來時會發抖,可以用苦無吸引敵人注意等等 賣點的色誘也會因為關卡推進,紅還會多出新的動作,太多地方很細膩! 但就是敗在攝影機視角,這真的很嚴重,有看過實況影片都會知道嚴重到 ...

SS炸彈超人 SATURN Bomberman

Susan avatar
By Susan
at 2013-02-12T12:00
真的很懷念這款遊戲!!! 當初小學整個暑假都在玩這個遊戲 因為可以騎龍!!! 很帥 每種能力都不同 這幾天找到這個檔案了 阿呆的部落格 抓的 可是我按照他的方式 弄虛擬硬碟 還是沒成功 從大年初一11點多 弄到大年初二早上5點多 還是不能玩 睡到中午起床 不死心繼續弄 還是一樣 ...

Best fails of 2012

Carol avatar
By Carol
at 2013-02-12T09:52
這是由知名的影音網站 Game Fails所選出的一些2012年代表性遊戲搞笑bug影片, 影片還有解說員的搞笑配白,大家可以花點時間看一下,真的滿好笑的(過年就是 要看些開心的事物呀)。對了,該網站每個月也會選出一些具代表性的影片,有興 趣的板友可以往下瀏覽點閱。 連結:http://www.youtub ...

Xenogears 異域神兵 執行問題

Zanna avatar
By Zanna
at 2013-02-12T02:15
板上之前有先進的黑掉問題 這個我自己是用切換圖像plugin可以勉強解決 (過第三gate的時候暫時用低畫質的plugin 就不會黑掉了) 不過下面這個我換了幾個不同的模擬器好像也無法解決 (epsxe 1.5 1.6 1.72 1.8 、 pcsxr) 打deus第一型態(會使用全體現有hp減半的攻擊)時 ...

HalfNES 053

Thomas avatar
By Thomas
at 2013-02-11T22:50
http://code.google.com/p/halfnes/ 053 (2/10/2013) -Added Action Replay and Game Genie code support -Now turning on sound filtering by default - ...