Idea for a Plug-In / AdvanceMAME suggestions

[u-man]

Hello again folks,

I dont know where to put this thread, so mods and admins please move it to the right place, if you think it dont belongs here.

Yesterday i started to read the docs of advanceMAME and find out a nice feature...

Speed Control

AdvanceMAME permits a special speed control of the game play.

You can play the game in a faster way, change arbitrarily the frame rate, skip the game startup process at the maximum speed, or skip the game animations pressing a key.

Press `asterisk_pad' to enable the `turbo' mode. Press `minus_pad' to mark the time of the real game start. The next time the game is started, it will execute very fast until this time.

More details are in the description of the `sync_fps', `sync_speed', `sync_turbospeed' and `sync_startuptime' options.

The video and audio synchronization uses an advanced algorithm, which ensure always the best performance.

The program continuously measures the time required to compute a frame and continuously adapt the number of frame to skip and to draw.

If it detects that you have system too slow to play the game at full speed, it automatically disables any frame skipping.

If the underline Operand System allows that, AdvanceMAME release the CPU when it isn't used after computing each frame reducing the CPU occupation.

the text in bold is the interesting part and the feature i would like to see in GameEx. from my point of understanding, you can fastup the game startup process significantly and save it individually for every MAME game. there are a lot MAME games with a long startup time and testing screens.

my question is, could we have a plugin that do nearly the same, unfortunately only AdvanceMAME has such a nice feature, i have no clue why this is not implemented in all the MAME derivates.

As i have a Arcade-CRT-monitor, i would like to test the advanceMAME thing, but i would need to rollback my MAME-Roms and to use the real cool features, i need to start this in DOS-Mode , but maybe i didnt understand this correctly. Currently i am sticked with CabMAME and i will test the GroovyMAME next (sad, i have only a nvidia-card).

I want to achieve "arcade perfect resolutions" and i am in search for the best solution for my case. so any tips here, would help me a lot.

thx in advance, u-man

[nullPointer]

Sounds like a cool idea u-man. I'll be curious what others have to say about it, but to my mind it's blurring the line between the role of the emulator and the role of the frontend. To me it sounds like something better accomplished with a custom build of MAME much like AdvanceMAME.

In order to pull this off with an external plugin or application there would need to be a high level of interoperability between the external component and the emulator. What I mean is that the plugin would need to store information about each ROM, and know what ROM was being loaded at any given time. That part would be fairly arbitrary. Where it would get very difficult is that the plug-in would need to make the emulator "do something". This part would require two factors. The plug-in would need to 'know' enough about the inner workings of the emulator to properly "invoke the thing" and the emulator would need to expose the functionality to allow an external application to make it "do the thing".

I guess to me it seems like an unnecessary additional layer. Utilizing a custom build of MAME would eliminate many of the complications above. I'm going out on a limb, but I would guess the differences between the various drivers in MAME means that what works to accelerate the start-up of one game may not work to accelerate that of another (I could be wrong about this). So if one were to go the route of a custom MAME build we wind up back where we started with AdvanceMAME, at which point it begs the question as to why one would duplicate their effort in the first place.

Purely my 2p, and I'll be curious to hear what others have to say.

... And this has been another memo brought to you from the desk of Capt. Nojoy McBuzzkill

[u-man]

nullPointer glad and sad in the same time to hear from you ,

i guess you are right in many points, but as i can remember the most important thing, the speed-control is allready in MAME, it only misses the stuff to individually save the time-records for each game. AdvanceMAME saves this in an internal database.

In order to pull this off with an external plugin or application there would need to be a high level of interoperability between the external component and the emulator. What I mean is that the plugin would need to store information about each ROM, and know what ROM was being loaded at any given time. That part would be fairly arbitrary. Where it would get very difficult is that the plug-in would need to make the emulator "do something". This part would require two factors. The plug-in would need to 'know' enough about the inner workings of the emulator to properly "invoke the thing" and the emulator would need to expose the functionality to allow an external application to make it "do the thing".

naive as i am, i thought this would work with a slightly different "do this and that while emu is running", kinda the stuff "send keys"+"wait xxxx secs". the whole acceleration would not be such a big problem, as i am not aware of any problems a game would have, as long as you do it only for the starting process.

it would be a cool feature anyway..... custom build, yes but how?

here is the link for the interested people outthere: http://advancemame.sourceforge.net/doc-advmame.html#5.10

[Draco1962]

I believe that this would be well outside of the scope for GameEx as null pointed out and would be dependent upon implementation/management via one of the unofficial MAME builds.

[u-man]

Ok, maybe you all are right and this is a little to much for GameEx as a Frontend. Maybe you didnt know this, but you CAN speedup Games in the official MAME version. Press tab in a game and select the user interface menue. there will you find "fast forward", as long as you press this key, the game is speeded up. so its not only for a unofficial MAME build, a Plugin would work for all MAME-Versions outthere.

but i agree, that this idea is maybe too much for a frontend.

man, i wish i had some programmer-skills..... damn it.

[Adultery]

The fast forward key isn't really what you're looking for here, it's a different function not related to frame skipping if I read your initial post right. It would really be more like a rewind key present in some emulators but opposite.

Programming skills or not, what you're asking would require a low level input hook for starters. I would have to agree with the others here, it's kind of a pipe dream, sorry.

[u-man]

The fast forward key isn't really what you're looking for here, it's a different function not related to frame skipping if I read your initial post right. It would really be more like a rewind key present in some emulators but opposite.

i know that my english is bad, but i didnt mean frame skipping. i want a fast startup of a game. you know, the games which start with a test field and check up processes, this i want to skip with the fast forward function. in AdvanceMAME you can record this step for every game individually. so the next time you start the game, this test-stuff will be just fast forwarded, so that you can play right away.

Anyway, i cant do this and it seems this is the wrong place to ask for that. thread can be closed.

sorry for wasting your time.

[nullPointer]

Anyway, i cant do this and it seems this is the wrong place to ask for that. thread can be closed.

sorry for wasting your time.

Whoa ... whoa ... woah

Just because we're nay-saying doesn't mean it's necessarily a waste of time there friend. The way I figure it we're just some dudes hanging out talking about our hobby. Just like any group of sports fans who get together, one guy is going to think the Anytown Mud Ducks are absolutely brilliant while another guy will think they're crap. With car guys you'll have one dude who (correctly) thinks the 1969 Chevelle SS with the 454 big block was the greatest muscle car of all time whereas some other dude will say it's the 69 Pontiac GTO Judge. Who's right? Who's wrong? It doesn't matter. Not the point. Hell despite some popular trends (in the U.S.) I always thought putting fruit in beer was a terrible idea until I tried a radler one exceedingly hot day this summer and it knocked my socks off. Who knew!? What I'm saying is that just because we bring up possible limitations of a plugin like this doesn't mean it's a waste of time to mention it, nor does it mean that this is the wrong place to talk about it.

Stay cool man, and FWIW I've always found your English to be exceptional; a million times better than my German (which is non-existent), despite the fact that I was born in Wiesbaden!

[Adultery]

I would like to echo my friend Null's post up there. He pretty much nailed it better than I could have.

I know the feeling... I was doubtful until I had my first sip of Summer Shandy at a crawdad boil poolside on a hot July 4th weekend. Good times.

I wasn't trying to be a dick. I'm sorry. Fast forward is more or less a frame skip thing, where rewind is more like playing the frames in reverse from a buffer.

[Tempest]

As i have a Arcade-CRT-monitor, i would like to test the advanceMAME thing, but i would need to rollback my MAME-Roms and to use the real cool features, i need to start this in DOS-Mode , but maybe i didnt understand this correctly. Currently i am sticked with CabMAME and i will test the GroovyMAME next (sad, i have only a nvidia-card).

I want to achieve "arcade perfect resolutions" and i am in search for the best solution for my case. so any tips here, would help me a lot.

thx in advance, u-man

I don't understand this comment. Isn't dos mode just the command line? or is it something different?

[nullPointer]

I don't understand this comment. Isn't dos mode just the command line? or is it something different?

I think you're spot on there Tempest, by which I think he's saying that there isn't a UI for AdvanceMAME. OTOH I was under the impression that both CabMAME and GroovyMAME were in the same boat.

@u-man Tempest is right that I don't think you need to worry about running AdvanceMAME from DOS Mode or the command line. GameEx is already doing that for you. So you may need to alter the command that GameEx runs, but beyond that you should be OK. Are you able to plug the AdvanceMAME executable into ClrMamePro to scan your ROMs? Just for kicks you ought to try running a scan against your current ROMs to see how compatible they would be with AdvanceMAME. You might be surprised at the number of games that would probably run just fine through AdvanceMAME. It's a thought anyway.

[u-man]

hello again,

thanks for all the nice replies, but i did not felt offended. it was rather a thing of... mmmh, these guys know what they are talking and it sounds plausible to me .

my next idea was, what if we would have that "internal database" of AdvanceMAME. imagine a fully configured database, where for every game the speeded up startup-test-check-etc. is configured. could not we use that somehow???

and the easiest way would be to ask for that database in the AdvanceMAME forums, thats what i meant with, maybe this topic dont belongs to here.

I never used advanceMAME for the following two reasons:

1.) 03-01-2013 Released AdvanceMAME v1.2. Still based on MAME 0.106 but with the new graphics effect XBR and various bugfixes.

that means i would need to rollback my roms to 0.106 and you need a Rollbackset for this, if you want all games from 0.106...you will off course loose all the games from 0.106 and up... dunno what that means in numbers

but thats what i did today rolled back my set. once done, i will try a sneek peek on advanceMAME.

2.) this is from the docs of advanceMAME:

Troubleshooting

The svgawin drivers (you need them, if you want to use the good features) are inherently unsafe because they should coexist with the normal Windows drivers.

The most common problem is that the Windows driver sets the video card in a state that the SVGAWIN driver cannot understand or restore.

The only possible solution is to try to reduce the video hardware acceleration at the minimum in DisplayProperties/Settings/Advanced/Troubleshooting.

If you want a stable solution you must use the Linux or DOS version of AdvanceMAME and AdvanceMENU.

Alternatively you can try to use two different video boards, one for Windows and the other for the game display. Check the `device_svgawin_skipboard' option to control which video board to use.

and with DOS version, i thought they mean DOS as a OS and not a command line. maybe i am wrong, cause i never tried advanceMAME before .

beside of these 2 "problems", i would say that advanceMAME must be a real cool version for a Arcade-CRT, maybe the best.... cause it can generate the correct resolution on the fly. with CabMAME and Soft15khz you have "only" a view resolutions available. it depends on how much resolutions your graphic drivers can handle. i think it was 40 for NVIDIAS and 120 for ATIs or something like this, BUT AdvanceMAME can generate every resolution on the fly. this is great for a CRT .

these means to play Moon Patrol with real 57Hz and stuff like this .

GroovyMAME has nearly the same features, but with a NVIDIA card, you need a lot of tweaking to get it work... thats what i read, didnt try also

basically i try to find out, which of these 3 MAME versions is the best possible solution for a Arcade-CRT.

[Draco1962]

I would recommend submitting your suggestions for the functionality enhancements to the respective authors of the MAME variants and see where it goes. It is possible that others may likewise find these suggestions worth of implementation if at all possible!

[nullPointer]

I never used advanceMAME for the following two reasons:

1.) 03-01-2013 Released AdvanceMAME v1.2. Still based on MAME 0.106 but with the new graphics effect XBR and various bugfixes.

that means i would need to rollback my roms to 0.106 and you need a Rollbackset for this, if you want all games from 0.106...you will off course loose all the games from 0.106 and up... dunno what that means in numbers

but thats what i did today rolled back my set. once done, i will try a sneek peek on advanceMAME.

2.) this is from the docs of advanceMAME:

Troubleshooting

The svgawin drivers (you need them, if you want to use the good features) are inherently unsafe because they should coexist with the normal Windows drivers.

The most common problem is that the Windows driver sets the video card in a state that the SVGAWIN driver cannot understand or restore.

The only possible solution is to try to reduce the video hardware acceleration at the minimum in DisplayProperties/Settings/Advanced/Troubleshooting.

If you want a stable solution you must use the Linux or DOS version of AdvanceMAME and AdvanceMENU.

Alternatively you can try to use two different video boards, one for Windows and the other for the game display. Check the `device_svgawin_skipboard' option to control which video board to use.

and with DOS version, i thought they mean DOS as a OS and not a command line. maybe i am wrong, cause i never tried advanceMAME before .

Oof ... yeah speaking on a personal level I'd probably steer clear of this one as well. The features sound cool and everything, but an emulator that is going to cause conflicts with my video drivers? Ugh ... no thanks.

And after reading the documentation you provided it does indeed sound like they are referring to DOS as an operating system, which seems a bit odd to me since ... come on are we living in 1986? ... but whatevs. Maybe it would run under DOSBox? (which just begs to be described as an emulator inside your emulator so you can emulate while you're emulating ... but I'm not going to go there ... except I just did ... dangit).

[u-man]

I would recommend submitting your suggestions for the functionality enhancements to the respective authors of the MAME variants and see where it goes. It is possible that others may likewise find these suggestions worth of implementation if at all possible!

Yup, that is what i want to find out and maybe then, it could be a nice thing to have for a future Plugin.

Oof ... yeah speaking on a personal level I'd probably steer clear of this one as well. The features sound cool and everything, but an emulator that is going to cause conflicts with my video drivers? Ugh ... no thanks.

And after reading the documentation you provided it does indeed sound like they are referring to DOS as an operating system, which seems a bit odd to me since ... come on are we living in 1986? ... but whatevs. Maybe it would run under DOSBox? (which just begs to be described as an emulator inside your emulator so you can emulate while you're emulating ... but I'm not going to go there ... except I just did ... dangit).

That are my thoughts too, but i will try out and see how far this is true for windows, as my post is from the Troubleshooting Section and maybe there are no problems at all.... i will see what happens . weekend is around the corner, so there is time to testify.

Generally i can say, if you want to use a CRT it is best to have a ATI card, as you have nearly no tweaking procedures to do. Unfortunately, i just have a NVIDIA and maybe will spent some bucks for a used ATI-Card .