5 ms·

MAME 0.242

61 points by chungy 5y ago

chungy 5y ago
Of particular interest to me is the arcade game Time Traveler, even though by most accounts it is a cheesy FMV game, the technical achievement embraced in MAME is the fascinating bit: the LaserDisc CHD for it is the first of its kind that was dumped by deep signal analysis on the disc and obtaining a level of quality never before seen from a LaserDisc dump; sharp visuals (at least, as far as 480i can be sharp), deep blacks, vibrant colors. I don't know all the details, but the results speak for themselves. I wholeheartedly believe this should be the present and future standard of LaserDisc preservation.
- colordrops 5y ago
  I could never get Dragon's Lair to work with MAME. Going to give that another shot.
  - zxcvbn4038 5y ago
    I’m not sure if the Dragon’s Lair emulation in Mame ever worked - I think Daphne http://www.daphne-emu.com/site3/index_low.php http://www.daphne-emu.com/site3/index_low.php is the go-to for that one. Unfortunately the laser disc games didn’t really withstand the test if time between defects in the media and the general failure rates of the consumer quality electronics inside them. Emulation seems to be the only way to enjoy them now. I’ve not seen a working cabinet in many years.
- brimble 5y ago
  If anyone else went "wait, WTF? Surely it can't be..." on reading that post: I checked, and yes, it can. Wikipedia: > Although similar in appearance to compact discs or DVDs, early LaserDiscs used analog video stored in the composite domain (having a video bandwidth and resolution approximately equivalent to the 1-inch (25 mm) Type C videotape format) with analog FM stereo sound and PCM digital audio. Later discs used D-2 instead of Type C videotape for mastering. The LaserDisc at its most fundamental level was still recorded as a series of pits and lands much like CDs, DVDs, and even Blu-ray Discs are today. In true digital media the pits, or their edges, directly represent 1s and 0s of a binary digital information stream. On a LaserDisc, the information is encoded as analog frequency modulation and is contained in the lengths and spacing of the pits.
  - schmichael 5y ago
    I absolutely thought it was a joke! Thanks for the context! Any clue it’s possible to read vinyl records this way or are the grooves/material too ill suited for lasers to easily read? Reading deformities of grooves seems like it would require orders of magnitude more precision than the length and spacing of pits, but I know nothing about the physics and hardware here.
    - brimble 5y ago
      Contact-free laser record players exist and have for quite a while, yeah. Main benefit AFAI can tell is avoiding wear on the vinyl.
      - unkoman 5y ago
        None are sold to the common consumer or even usable if you had the money [1]. Vinyl wear by using a needle is overstated anyway [2]. [1]: https://youtu.be/2oeTqAogMvA?t=248 https://youtu.be/2oeTqAogMvA?t=248 [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xf_cPU8gtd8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xf_cPU8gtd8
    - smitty1110 5y ago
      ELP Japan has you covered! https://www.elpj.com/ https://www.elpj.com/ Last time I looked into this, I heard it was good if you had a REALLY good record cleaner. It’s extremely sensitive to dust in the groove.
  - chungy 5y ago
    I sort of assumed that Hacker News types would have already known that video on LaserDisc is analog. :) Audio is somewhat more complicated; the original standards had that as analog too, but digital options were introduced (I'd like to say early 1980s, but not entirely sure).
    - chiph 5y ago
      The first digital audio laserdiscs I bought were in/around 1986. They used AC-3 encoding (later known as Dolby Digital 5.1) but were recorded as an RF signal onto the discs, because the format was analog. You needed a decoder to turn it into discrete channels, which a few receivers had. But most often you would get an external box, like the Yamaha DDP-1
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
b20000 5y ago
is there a mame distro you can install on some mini pc? i have used mame on desktops but would really like to have a small dedicated retro gaming setup that you just switch on and works. at the same time i don’t want to spend 2k on some ready to go cabinet.
- m-p-3 5y ago
  Maybe something like Lakka[1]? It emulates many game consoles and I believe MAME is part of it. [1]: https://lakka.tv/ https://lakka.tv/
  - brimble 5y ago
    Lakka is Retroarch packaged on top of a minimal Linux distro—like those distros that exist just to run Kodi, and, in fact, last I checked, it's build on exactly one of those (Libreelec, I think?). Retroarch is a frontend for libretro, which provides a set of APIs that emulators can use for I/O. If you can produce a library from an emulator that conforms to the APIs, then you've got what Retroarch calls a "core". Thus retroarch acts as a kind of target for emulators, that lets them all use a common frontend, including for things like button mapping (each emulator maps to a set of "fake" Retroarch inputs, which Retroarch then maps to your actual controller) or video output/filter settings. This is a different approach from other meta-emulators that typically invoke full, independent emulators as if running them from the command line, and try to manage them externally. And yes, there are multiple mame cores for Retroarch: https://github.com/search?q=libretro%20mame&type=Everything https://github.com/search?q=libretro%20mame&type=Everything [EDIT] Also, I've run Lakka on hardware as weak as a Raspberry Pi 2. You can't use fancy video filters (say, to make games look the way they did on a CRT TV or monitor) but it'll run a whole bunch of Mame games, plus all 8-bit console games and most from the 16-bit era at acceptable frame rates and latency. It also worked well enough to be comfortably playable for a surprising number of Playstation (PSX/PS1, the first one, that is) games and for exactly one of the N64 games I tried on it (Super Mario 64—all other N64 games were a lag-fest, if they ran at all, but that one was smooth and snappy). Any mini PC from the last 10 years is probably more powerful than an RPi2, so should do even better. RPi4 takes that "most" on the 16 bit era and makes it "all" and makes a bunch more N64 and Playstation games playable. Probably many Playstation 2 games as well, but I've not tried it.
nonrandomstring 5y ago
MAME is a great emulator. The big issue is of course locating and installing grey-area ROMS from potentially shady sites and torrents. Isn't it time the rights holders like Namco, Williams, Nintendo and Sony just quit living in the past and gave up on trying to restrict distribution of old games that are arguably a part of modern heritage. It seems petty and anachronistic to do anything other than just let go and give these ROMS their deserved freedom in the public domain.
- mumphster 5y ago
  It's actually easier than ever nowadays. Do a quick search on archive.org and you'd be surprised on what you can find.
  - Underphil 5y ago
    Yeah, it's really trivial to find full and complete sets of games for any system now.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  Isn't it time for copyright to be abolished? Or at least fixed so that these companies no longer have functionally eternal monopolies? It's insane that stuff created 40+ years ago is still covered. They've already made their fortunes several times over, it's time to let go.
paskozdilar 5y ago
I remember buying a CD with MAME emulator and a game pack from a local CD shop back in 2000 something and playing them on my old Pentium. Fun times.
notum 5y ago
The fact that there, in fact, is someone who can write a joke like that on the project's official website makes it only 90% funny, and 10% very much real.
ur-whale 5y ago
The sheer number of man-years of work and sheer ingenuity that went into MAME is nothing short of amazing. All for the sake of re-living one's teenage years :D
- Underphil 5y ago
  I would argue that the overarching goal is preservation, and the nostalgia is just a happy side-effect.
akeck 5y ago
Half the people I know who use MAME say "maim". The other half say "mah-mei". What's the preferred pronunciation?
- hannyaharamita 5y ago
  Living in Japan, I have always said "ma-me", but it turns out that it should be "maim": "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). ..."

61 points by chungy 5y ago

Of particular interest to me is the arcade game Time Traveler, even though by most accounts it is a cheesy FMV game, the technical achievement embraced in MAME is the fascinating bit: the LaserDisc CHD for it is the first of its kind that was dumped by deep signal analysis on the disc and obtaining a level of quality never before seen from a LaserDisc dump; sharp visuals (at least, as far as 480i can be sharp), deep blacks, vibrant colors. I don't know all the details, but the results speak for themselves. I wholeheartedly believe this should be the present and future standard of LaserDisc preservation.

colordrops 5y ago
I could never get Dragon's Lair to work with MAME. Going to give that another shot.
- zxcvbn4038 5y ago
  I’m not sure if the Dragon’s Lair emulation in Mame ever worked - I think Daphne http://www.daphne-emu.com/site3/index_low.php http://www.daphne-emu.com/site3/index_low.php is the go-to for that one. Unfortunately the laser disc games didn’t really withstand the test if time between defects in the media and the general failure rates of the consumer quality electronics inside them. Emulation seems to be the only way to enjoy them now. I’ve not seen a working cabinet in many years.
brimble 5y ago
If anyone else went "wait, WTF? Surely it can't be..." on reading that post: I checked, and yes, it can. Wikipedia: > Although similar in appearance to compact discs or DVDs, early LaserDiscs used analog video stored in the composite domain (having a video bandwidth and resolution approximately equivalent to the 1-inch (25 mm) Type C videotape format) with analog FM stereo sound and PCM digital audio. Later discs used D-2 instead of Type C videotape for mastering. The LaserDisc at its most fundamental level was still recorded as a series of pits and lands much like CDs, DVDs, and even Blu-ray Discs are today. In true digital media the pits, or their edges, directly represent 1s and 0s of a binary digital information stream. On a LaserDisc, the information is encoded as analog frequency modulation and is contained in the lengths and spacing of the pits.
- schmichael 5y ago
  I absolutely thought it was a joke! Thanks for the context! Any clue it’s possible to read vinyl records this way or are the grooves/material too ill suited for lasers to easily read? Reading deformities of grooves seems like it would require orders of magnitude more precision than the length and spacing of pits, but I know nothing about the physics and hardware here.
  - brimble 5y ago
    Contact-free laser record players exist and have for quite a while, yeah. Main benefit AFAI can tell is avoiding wear on the vinyl.
    - unkoman 5y ago
      None are sold to the common consumer or even usable if you had the money [1]. Vinyl wear by using a needle is overstated anyway [2]. [1]: https://youtu.be/2oeTqAogMvA?t=248 https://youtu.be/2oeTqAogMvA?t=248 [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xf_cPU8gtd8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xf_cPU8gtd8
  - smitty1110 5y ago
    ELP Japan has you covered! https://www.elpj.com/ https://www.elpj.com/ Last time I looked into this, I heard it was good if you had a REALLY good record cleaner. It’s extremely sensitive to dust in the groove.
- chungy 5y ago
  I sort of assumed that Hacker News types would have already known that video on LaserDisc is analog. :) Audio is somewhat more complicated; the original standards had that as analog too, but digital options were introduced (I'd like to say early 1980s, but not entirely sure).
  - chiph 5y ago
    The first digital audio laserdiscs I bought were in/around 1986. They used AC-3 encoding (later known as Dolby Digital 5.1) but were recorded as an RF signal onto the discs, because the format was analog. You needed a decoder to turn it into discrete channels, which a few receivers had. But most often you would get an external box, like the Yamaha DDP-1
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

b20000 5y ago

is there a mame distro you can install on some mini pc? i have used mame on desktops but would really like to have a small dedicated retro gaming setup that you just switch on and works. at the same time i don’t want to spend 2k on some ready to go cabinet.

m-p-3 5y ago
Maybe something like Lakka[1]? It emulates many game consoles and I believe MAME is part of it. [1]: https://lakka.tv/ https://lakka.tv/
- brimble 5y ago
  Lakka is Retroarch packaged on top of a minimal Linux distro—like those distros that exist just to run Kodi, and, in fact, last I checked, it's build on exactly one of those (Libreelec, I think?). Retroarch is a frontend for libretro, which provides a set of APIs that emulators can use for I/O. If you can produce a library from an emulator that conforms to the APIs, then you've got what Retroarch calls a "core". Thus retroarch acts as a kind of target for emulators, that lets them all use a common frontend, including for things like button mapping (each emulator maps to a set of "fake" Retroarch inputs, which Retroarch then maps to your actual controller) or video output/filter settings. This is a different approach from other meta-emulators that typically invoke full, independent emulators as if running them from the command line, and try to manage them externally. And yes, there are multiple mame cores for Retroarch: https://github.com/search?q=libretro%20mame&type=Everything https://github.com/search?q=libretro%20mame&type=Everything [EDIT] Also, I've run Lakka on hardware as weak as a Raspberry Pi 2. You can't use fancy video filters (say, to make games look the way they did on a CRT TV or monitor) but it'll run a whole bunch of Mame games, plus all 8-bit console games and most from the 16-bit era at acceptable frame rates and latency. It also worked well enough to be comfortably playable for a surprising number of Playstation (PSX/PS1, the first one, that is) games and for exactly one of the N64 games I tried on it (Super Mario 64—all other N64 games were a lag-fest, if they ran at all, but that one was smooth and snappy). Any mini PC from the last 10 years is probably more powerful than an RPi2, so should do even better. RPi4 takes that "most" on the 16 bit era and makes it "all" and makes a bunch more N64 and Playstation games playable. Probably many Playstation 2 games as well, but I've not tried it.

nonrandomstring 5y ago

MAME is a great emulator. The big issue is of course locating and installing grey-area ROMS from potentially shady sites and torrents. Isn't it time the rights holders like Namco, Williams, Nintendo and Sony just quit living in the past and gave up on trying to restrict distribution of old games that are arguably a part of modern heritage. It seems petty and anachronistic to do anything other than just let go and give these ROMS their deserved freedom in the public domain.

mumphster 5y ago
It's actually easier than ever nowadays. Do a quick search on archive.org and you'd be surprised on what you can find.
- Underphil 5y ago
  Yeah, it's really trivial to find full and complete sets of games for any system now.
matheusmoreira 5y ago
Isn't it time for copyright to be abolished? Or at least fixed so that these companies no longer have functionally eternal monopolies? It's insane that stuff created 40+ years ago is still covered. They've already made their fortunes several times over, it's time to let go.

paskozdilar 5y ago

I remember buying a CD with MAME emulator and a game pack from a local CD shop back in 2000 something and playing them on my old Pentium. Fun times.

notum 5y ago

The fact that there, in fact, is someone who can write a joke like that on the project's official website makes it only 90% funny, and 10% very much real.

ur-whale 5y ago

The sheer number of man-years of work and sheer ingenuity that went into MAME is nothing short of amazing. All for the sake of re-living one's teenage years :D

Underphil 5y ago
I would argue that the overarching goal is preservation, and the nostalgia is just a happy side-effect.

akeck 5y ago

Half the people I know who use MAME say "maim". The other half say "mah-mei". What's the preferred pronunciation?

hannyaharamita 5y ago
Living in Japan, I have always said "ma-me", but it turns out that it should be "maim": "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). ..."