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MAME 0.260
- ur-whale 3y ago> MAME 0.260 How large is a full ROM set these days, I wonder?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- LeoPanthera 3y agoCompressed (and so sizes are approximate): 74GiB for the arcade ROMs 83GiB for the software ROMs (which used to be for MESS) 937GiB for the arcade hard disk images 2.6TiB for the software hard disk images BitTorrent makes distribution less painful these days, since you can point your client at your existing roms folder and it won't bother to re-download things you already have. Only a small percentage of the set changes with each version.
- plugin-baby 3y agoWhat’s the difference between arcade ROMs and arcade hard disk images? Do these cover different games?
- LeoPanthera 3y agoYes, although some need both. ROMs are images of physical ROM chips. The hard disk images are called "CHDs" and are usually hard disk images but can also be laserdiscs.
- unnah 3y agoI didn't know they used hard disks in arcade games... were those games implemented on some sort of embedded PC hardware?
- LeoPanthera 3y agoVirtually all arcade games made since the 2000s (ish) run on standard PC hardware.
- TheMogMiner 3y agoMaybe, but Konami "djmain" (first-gen Beatmania series) didn't. Neither did their "Twinkle" hardware (Beatmania IIDX series). Nor did their "Firebeat" hardware (Beatmania III series, Pop'n Music series, Keyboardmania series, Para Para Paradise series). Neither did their "GQ" board (Crypt Killers). Also, Taito's "Type Zero" board (9 games, look it up on System16). Oh, and Atari/Midway/Williams's Seattle, Vegas, Denver, Atlantis, Phoenix, and Flagstaff boards (SF Rush, SF Rush 2049, NFL Blitz, Gauntlet: Dark Legacy, Gauntlet: Legends, others). Incredible Technologies' "Eagle" board (Golden Tee Fore, Big Buck Hunter, Virtual Pool). I have omitted quite a few.
- photonerd 3y agoBasically hdd arcade games are PCs or similar (occasionally customized console hardware) with HDDs attached. Pretty much anything made post 2002 is that. It started a few years earlier tho. Before that: custom roms (or at least some custom Roms on standard arcade platform hardware for that company)
- jandrese 3y agoFamously games like Dragon's Lair from the 90s require a CHD for all of the full motion video.
- TheMogMiner 3y agoWhile MAME does support some Laserdisc-based games - Firefox, Us vs. Them, Mach 3, Cube Quest, and Time Traveler, along with a couple of others - Dragon's Lair is not among them. It's complicated.
- photonerd 3y agoYeah, they’re originally laserdiscs so a bit of a special case, but same basic idea. However it famously doesn’t support Dragons Lair! Not properly (it can play the video but that’s about it). Tho work has been ongoing. Daphne is the only emulator of Dragons Lair I know of
- dfxm12 3y agoCHD's also represent optical media, not just HDD's. For example the SEGA NAOMI arcade hardware was based on the Dreamcast. As such, GD-ROM was one medium for games. the GD-ROMs are dumped as CHD's.
- sumtechguy 3y agoCHD (compressed hunks of data) They represent a CD DVD or hard drive. Now for most items in MAME you will need both some ROMs and CHDs. The ROMs usually in that case are the firmware of the device that loads up the CHD. The arcade platforms basically ended up being fairly beefy PCs or in some cases retooled game consoles. At one point the ROMs for those devices were split out into their own torrent. They usually represent something like an playstation. With the CHDs being the CDs. It is also used in places like the Atari platform that runs some of its hardware that has basically different hard drives and some roms to switch out the board being the same between all the arcade games. It is also used for laserdisc games but those probably will change in the next few years as the doomsday project gets its preservation setup the way they want it. In the laserdisc game it would represent the console the arcade game used to load up the disc. Many of the emus out there are adopting the CHD format for CD/DVD support.
- amlib 3y agoUsing bit torrent to do partial downloads is nice but it will not remove deleted or renamed files. Over the years, specially if you update each release, you will end up with lots of files that shouldn't be there. You can of course have some kind of script that checks file lists for each set and delete anything not in there.
- LeoPanthera 3y agoI use qBittorrent, and all I have to do is tell it to "Move" the torrent after the download is complete. It only moves files in the torrent, and leaves redundant stuff in the old directory.
- happymellon 3y agoI read the parent post to imply that there were ROMs or hacks distributed previously that are no longer distributed as part of the set because the hack is no longer needed. I'm not sure how your "move" would resolve this if it was already copied in a previous release.
- LeoPanthera 3y agoIf you point the current torrent at the same rom directory, wait for it to finish, and then tell the client to move the downloaded files, it won't move anything that is no longer part of the current torrent.
- happymellon 3y agoUnless Im really missing something, it would have already been moved by the previous torrent?
- bdsa 3y agoYes, into the directory you're moving the files from...
- 3y ago
- TheRealDunkirk 3y agoThey should break it up by year. I've had it all downloaded and installed and working in several ways over the years, but I only really care about stuff released before, say, 2000.
- TheMogMiner 3y agoWow
- rnd0 3y agoI can kinda understand. I'm looking at MAME (again) because I'm seeing people here say it emulates synths and because I'm interested in some older systems it emulates that simh and qemu don't quite (eg SGI, though qemu may do that one now?). So it would be nice to be able to pick by category (game,arcade,instrument,computer ...just a for instance) and by year (nothing after 2000, for instance).
- ShadowBanThis01 3y agoI'm looking at the torrents but I don't know what I need to just have the complete arcade collection and the software to run it. Right now I'm downloading the ROMs torrent, which does add up to 74 GB. But what else do I need for arcade emulation only? Thanks for any insight!
- TheMogMiner 3y agoThe "arcade hard disk images" torrent, too. Lots of arcade machines weren't purely based on ROM chips.
- ShadowBanThis01 3y agoThanks. I think I'm clear on it now. Looks like I gotta commit a full terabyte for the complete collection!
- chongli 3y agoHuge, if you include all the laserdisc games!
- m463 3y agoLooks like > 1tb a full set for 0.258 is 1073gb (CHDs + ROMs + Extras): https://archive.org/details/mame-chds-roms-extras-complete https://archive.org/details/mame-chds-roms-extras-complete
- ShadowBanThis01 3y agoWhat are ROMs vs. CHDs vs. extras?
- rnd0 3y agoIt sounds ike CHDs are hard disk images -similar to vhd files? While ROMS is semi-obvious (game images or firmware), "extras" can probably mean just about anything ...
- ShadowBanThis01 3y agoI've gathered that the ROMs are the firmware that runs on the "hardware" to create the computing platform inside the arcade machine or console, which was similar or the same across many games (essentially the computer inside the cabinet). Therefore it's separated out to prevent massive duplication. The CHDs are the game-specific material that ran on the platform to present a particular game.
- photonerd 3y agoIt’s 2.5tb for the software archive alone. But for games 1tb is roughly correct. Assuming no deduplication
- rebolek 3y agoMAME supports Casio CZ-101? My favourite synth? I thought MAME is for arcade emulation. Anyway, I need to try it, I love it'đ sound, I wonder how close it is to original.
- LeoPanthera 3y agoMAME absorbed MESS and became a more generic multi-system emulator. It aims for 100% accuracy in emulation, even at the expense of speed, and so it is quite resource hungry for a lot of things.
- rbanffy 3y agoI remember I have started using MESS (because I care more about computers than games) before the merge. One thing I notice in many drivers (the "plugboards" where various emulator parts are connected) is that they could, with some work, be compiled to some HDL. Would be quite a thing.
- codetrotter 3y agoSpeaking of which, see also Bintracker. A Chiptune Audio Workstation that uses MAME as emulation backend. https://bintracker.org/ https://bintracker.org/ Recently discussed on HN about 49 days ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37377529 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37377529
- chungy 3y agoMAME stopped being "just arcade" long ago. It's basically an "emulate every hardware thing ever made" project :)
- anthk 3y agoEven Tamagotchis, plus Casio assistants, even that one which was made for girls.
- philistine 3y ago
- mdtrooper 3y agoI wonder that I am only one enjoy with reading of changelog files. Hahaha. For example: whith mame, for years ago I have the same bunch of favorite games (that run fine from years ago) but it is a party for me each new version of mame because there is new changelog.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- rere-2525 3y agoOut of curiosity what are your favorites games ?
- mdtrooper 3y agoAbout this, I have a old frontend for mame in python2 (and old pygame): https://gitlab.com/tres-14159/pyretro https://gitlab.com/tres-14159/pyretro More or less in 2011 we made a arcade cabinet for a public social center and I was looking for a frontend for mame for public spaces (not home or private spaces), unsupervised. I did not find one. Well I thought "I am going make a new mame frontend" and yes, I made it (but now it need a lot of work for update to python3 an pygame3). PyRetro has the next features: - the users can not the config of frontend by the joystick or buttons. For example, in others frontends a naughty boys (or adult person) can delete games of the list or change something. - you can manage the frontend (and other things of GNU/Linux) by webpanel. For example, there is a bad boy (or adult person) greedy playing and he does not let another person play to the arcade. You can force exit the game and return to frontend or restart all cabinet. - it has as screensaver mode when nobody plays it.
- Tajnymag 3y agoFirstly, kudos for the project. If I may ask, as python3 came out in 2008, why did you choose python2 for the frontend in 2011?
- EDevil 3y agoIt took a long time for projects to begin using Python 3 due to it being backwards incompatible. Django 1.5 for example, the first version that had Python 3 support, came out in 2013.
- ynik 3y agopython3 in 2008 was practically unusable. It was incompatible, none of the libraries on pypi supported it; and it was extremely hard to write a code base that was compatible with both python2.6 and python3.0 at the same time, so almost none of the library authors bothered to add python3 support. In 2010, python2.7 was released, backporting a bunch of python3 features. In 2012, python3.3 was released, fixing a bunch of needless incompatibilities. This finally made it viable to support both 2.7 and 3.3 in the same code base. For the most part, the migration of the Python library ecosystem only started in/after 2012. python3 wasn't really a viable choice for application development until most libraries were ported (2014? 2015?).
- nperez 3y agoIs the versioning scheme only in .001 increments? I know version numbers aren't indicative of progress, but I still find it fascinating that a 26 year old project is just releasing 0.260
- LeoPanthera 3y agoYes. Although some numbers were skipped. 0.32, and 0.38 through 0.52 don't exist.
- sumtechguy 3y agoah yes they skipped because there were a ton of releases from .38 to .52 that where basically .39 v6 (fixes something). So they figured out how many then added it.
- photonerd 3y agoTheir idea is that v1 is when all machines they support are perfectly emulated. So… it’s asymptoticly approaching v1 you could say. Of course they keep adding more machines… so…
- MegaDeKay 3y agoYep. In fact, the first releases of MAME had 0.01 increments. Not sure when they went to finer steps, but it is pretty much a given that they'll do it again when the current revision gets too close to 1.
- sylware 3y agoI remember the good old times when I could compile mame with a simple C compiler...
- TheMogMiner 3y agoHuh, it doesn't compile with GCC anymore? That's weird, as someone contributing for the past 20 years, I could swear I just compiled it yesterday with GCC.
- sylware 3y agosimple C compiler, not gcc and its languages. Did you try to compile mame with cproc/qbe, simple-cc/qbe or even tcc?
- dean2432 3y agoonly 74 years left before MAME 1.0 releases with the current versioning
- chungy 3y agoWho says 0.999 won't be followed by 0.1000?
- beebeepka 3y agoIs there a modern name fronted for Linux? Even after all these years I still get back to my territory outdated version of mame32++ wine. It's not a perfect setup but the alternatives, that I am aware of, suck even more.
- jandrese 3y agoIt comes with a mostly text but technically graphical ROM selector. It's not the most pretty, but it is quite functional. Given the size of the project it is almost inevitable that the interface feels like a database front end.
- beebeepka 3y agoIt's only been an year since I've tried it. There have been massive improvements over the years but I still prefer dealing with the above setup. They do have autofire, saves, art, snapshots, etc. but I got tired of having to configure my joypad cfg after every restart. Maybe time to give it another try
- cpill 3y agocould someone explain to me why the ROM set changes with every release? it makes me think the developer is an idiot.
- TheMogMiner 3y agoSure: They don't, and the people who imply that they do are the idiots. A full set of ROMsets consists of tens of thousands of archives, each containing a set of files where one file holds the contents of one programmable device: a ROM chip, a GAL/PAL, a microcontroller with internal firmware, and others. 99.9% of these individual sets do not change from version to version. When a given set does change, it's because a previously incorrectly-dumped chip's data has been replaced by a newer - correct - dump, or a chip that was never dumped previously has now been dumped, or (rarely) the set was renamed. What you're probably doing is finding full-set torrents per version, posted by some independent group, and assuming that that somehow means that every one of tens of thousands of individual sets within that larger set has changed. So, hopefully this clarifies which individual is an idiot here.
- HelloNurse 3y agoJust to state the obvious, in addition to correcting old rom sets every MAME release also adds new rom sets for newly supported games (either variations of known games like hacks, prototypes, foreign versions, special editions or completely new work). Typically, there are enough changes to actually disrupt a very large portion of the segments of any full set torrent.
- netol 3y ago> As requested by users, you can finally use delta CHD files for clone systems and software items. This allows for major disk space savings in some cases when you have multiple versions of a system or software item. FWIW, this is commit https://github.com/mamedev/mame/commit/d1172bf710f2a7b1777ed7687f5ba65748d90ee9 https://github.com/mamedev/mame/commit/d1172bf710f2a7b1777ed...