Why does MAME suck?

[Wizard]

After using mame for KOF2k3, i've been thinking of changing to it. The problem is, it runs sluggish untill i close everything but the task bar and explorer.

[Weirdy]

I frrigin' love mame man!! I don't see what the problem is? Hell...even when I was a newbie more than a year ago I knew how to configure it well. I don't see what ppl have against mame anways, it doesn't even eat up a lot of cpu if you know what to configure your settings to *cough*d3d renderring*cough*, I even have p2p programs open and it still runs good at full screen+smoothness and no slowdown. If you don't want to configure the stuff thats on the imterface, then just use the gott damn command line.

 

wtf is so ugly about the interface anyways?

 

If there's one emulator I don't like its neorage. Its stupid because it can only play a hacked p1 file and kof99 and any game later can only be a bootleg(or decrypted) set.

 

btw, that choice

Its lack of external dats makes the process of adding new games too time consuming

its not hard, nor is it time consuming. It only takes me like 5mins to whip up a mame driver(unless its encrypted). Hell...if you were gonna attempt to compile mame, you coulda just asked me and I would've given you a guide on how to add decrypted drivers....same goes for fba, I compile that too

[Cominus]

Screw you guys *throws brick though computer screen* Shizzle!!! umm...Mame rules.....

[Gryph]

My only problem with MAME is the lack of external DATs. Since I don't know how to program, I have to wait for someone else to compile a copy for me to leech of off. I don't mind it much because it'll only be a matter of time before somebody gets it working.

 

It is much easier to copy and paste the DAT files into Nebula/Kawaks but I'm not going to hate MAME just for that reason. Sure it's inconvenient, but that's it. It's only an inconveience.

[ugenn]

I'm ok with the whole command-line interface, but I dislike MAME because of the static game list which requires rebuilds to run new stuff. In general, I prefer a machine specific emulator like NRX as opposed to general purpose multi-system emulators like MAME.

 

MAME also has the wrong design goals, IMO, as it favours emulation accuracy over performance. I mean, a game emu's meant to emulate games, not some scientific simulation for cripe's sake. NRX is a living proof of concept that you can still have a fairly good emulator at the expense of 100% accuracy. And it outperforms all the other Neo emus.

[Diso]

Why mame is better? Even though people have to keep rebuilding it, coders from around the world are putting their knowledge to compile it making better and better with each version.

 

Pretty soon, most games will work 100% with sound and video

Does Kawaks run 3d games, NO it doesn't

[Mechjose]

i like kawaks but now im starting to like mame

[Weirdy]

My only problem with MAME is the lack of external DATs. Since I don't know how to program, I have to wait for someone else to compile a copy for me to leech of off. I don't mind it much because it'll only be a matter of time before somebody gets it working.

 

It is much easier to copy and paste the DAT files into Nebula/Kawaks but I'm not going to hate MAME just for that reason. Sure it's inconvenient, but that's it. It's only an inconveience.

you act like I know about programming. Dude, if you wanna start compiling it, I can give you a guide a friend of mine gave me. If its MAME32 Plus you wanna compile, the drivers for kof 2002 and earlier are already on the source, but they're disabled, the other games you have to add yourself(which isn't hard because all of the games that came out in 2003 are decryted)

[James]

I'm ok with the whole command-line interface, but I dislike MAME because of the static game list which requires rebuilds to run new stuff. In general, I prefer a machine specific emulator like NRX as opposed to general purpose multi-system emulators like MAME.

 

MAME also has the wrong design goals, IMO, as it favours emulation accuracy over performance. I mean, a game emu's meant to emulate games, not some scientific simulation for cripe's sake. NRX is a living proof of concept that you can still have a fairly good emulator at the expense of 100% accuracy. And it outperforms all the other Neo emus.

From the mame home page http://www.mame.net/

 

 

 

On December 24th, 1996, Nicola Salmoria began working on his single hardware emulators (for example Multi-Pac), which he merged into one program during January 1997. He named the accomplishment by the name of Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, or MAME for short (pronounced as the word 'maim' in English, other languages may differ).

The first official release was MAME 0.1, which was released on the evening of February 5th, 1997 (23:32 +0100). Using a modular and portable driver oriented architecture with an open source philosophy, it soon grew into immense proportions. The current version supports 4752 ROM sets, 2679 unique games. Because MAME releases happen whenever they are ready, at one point the wait between new versions was almost 4 months. To help the agony of the users, a public beta system was used, with a beta release happening every 2-3 weeks on an average. However, now the beta designation has been removed in favor of a good old 0.xx version number. Also a work-in-progress -page exists, if you really want to know the latest information.

 

Even though MAME allows people to enjoy the long-lost arcade games and even some newer ones, the main purpose of the project is to document the hardware (and software) of the arcade games. There are already many dead arcade boards, whose function has been brought to life in MAME. Being able to play the games is just a nice side-effect. The huge success of MAME would not be possible without the talent of the programmers who joined to form the MAME team. At the moment, there are about 100 people on the team, but there is a large number of contributors outside the team too. Nicola Salmoria is still the coordinator of the project.

[James]

anyway check here http://www.mame.net/mamefaq.html#m14 this might help you understand mame a bit better.

 

M13. Why does MAME become slower all the time?

 

Contrary to popular belief, the amount of drivers alone does not make MAME slower.

The point is that the drivers are constantly improved and the improved emulation is more accurate to the actual original hardware so for MAME's purposes it's superior. Emulation accuracy trumps playability concerns in MAME.

 

Another thing to consider is a paradigm called "moving the optimization point". MAME's "sweet spot" is currently aimed at hardware with tilemaps, sprites, more than 256 colors on screen, and at least 2 CPUs, which is a common late-80s paradigm. Real-world examples of this include the Konami Twin16 games, the Sega X and Y boards, Namco System 2, Taito Z System, etc. It means that MAME makes more advanced games run faster at the expense of simpler hardware. The simpler hardware will work out in the end anyway due to ever-faster PCs (Pac-Man is very sub-optimal now vs. e.g. 0.29 for instance, but you'd be hard pressed to find a PC less than 4-5 years old where it doesn't run 60/60).

 

M14. Why is MAME so slow? These games ran at less than 10 MHz, and my CPU is 500 MHz!

 

You are comparing the following objects.

 

and

 

In emulation world, megahertz is not analogous from your main CPU to the emulated CPU. MAME not only rigorously emulates every opcode of the emulated CPU(s), but also memory interfaces, video output and sound emulation, and all this in portable C code. See also the next question.

 

Back

 

M15. Is MAME a simulator or an emulator?

 

That depends entirely on the definition of those words. In electrical engineering, the word "emulation" has traditionally been used to mean a very low-level reproduction of real life electrical signals. For example, professional microprocessor emulator software comes with a processor-shaped connection, which you can actually plug into a motherboard and run instructions with it.

MAME runs simulated CPU instructions on top of simulated memory maps and I/O spaces. If simulation had to be defined, there would be three levels:

 

Signal level (simulating in/out of actual pins of ICs). This would be necessary to allow older games like PONG into MAME, because the association of ICs on the board IS the game logic, not just following a set of instructions from a ROM.

Logical level (simulating fetch/execute CPU cycles on simulated memory/io addresses). All games in MAME currently run simulations at this level.

HLE level (combination of logical level with some "acceleration" added). Implemented in some other emulators, they attempt to skip certain areas of the simulation by dealing with the code in a manner alien to the original hardware. Generally complicated to implement, and very specifically tied to a particular game code.

Most people make the simulation/emulation cut based on a couple of factors, including if you can support all the same games the original hardware did without game-specific hacks. MAME's CPU and sound cores pass that test literally every day as new games are added. Some other emulators that rely on a HLE approach fail it badly. A descriptive comment about the detail level of MAME's drivers is "if someone can make an FPGA version of the game, the driver documents well enough", and that's actually happened for Pacman using MAME as a reference.

In other words, MAME is against simulating games, it's not against simulating components. The only way you can emulate a game is to simulate all the components. All those chips weren't really created in C.

[Gryph]

My only problem with MAME is the lack of external DATs. Since I don't know how to program, I have to wait for someone else to compile a copy for me to leech of off. I don't mind it much because it'll only be a matter of time before somebody gets it working.

 

It is much easier to copy and paste the DAT files into Nebula/Kawaks but I'm not going to hate MAME just for that reason. Sure it's inconvenient, but that's it. It's only an inconveience.

you act like I know about programming. Dude, if you wanna start compiling it, I can give you a guide a friend of mine gave me. If its MAME32 Plus you wanna compile, the drivers for kof 2002 and earlier are already on the source, but they're disabled, the other games you have to add yourself(which isn't hard because all of the games that came out in 2003 are decryted)

Oh I assumed you knew some programming. Alright send me the link to this guide. I'm always eager to learn more, especially if it helps me in future emulation needs. And it'll be cool to know something about compiling so I can make fun of n00bs