MAWLER: A MAWS Recreation

[nullPointer]

The loss of MAWS and the search for a suitable replacement has come up a few times in the GameEx forums, so I thought I'd take this opportunity to share a project I've been following with great interest. Ids over on the BYOAC forums has developed a standalone desktop version of MAWS that has progressed to a point of being a very valuable tool to keep in your emulation arsenal. In some ways being a standalone app grants MAWLER advantages that were impossible even for the original version of MAWS (first and foremost being that MAWLER is not vulnerable to security flaws over the web! )

I've rewritten MAWS, which you can find at http://www.ids.ca/mame/maws2.zip It is a stand-alone app, written in Java, so it should run just about anywhere. See the readme file in the zip for how to configure. Currently it loads all data files on start up - so it will be very slow to start and consume a lot of memory. This may result in it not running in constrained environments (e.g. very old computer, raspberry-pi, etc). As a very rough estimate, assume you'll need about 750MB-1GB free RAM.

The coding was done largely without looking at the original MAWS code, so differences may exist. I've attempted to recreate the GUI, based on images from the wayback machine, with some tweaks to make better use of screen real-estate. The current feature set is largely due to BYOAC member feedback, with artwork from 8bitmonk, et al.

This project is still under active development, so it can only get better from here! Don't be afraid to let him know if MAWLER turns out to be something useful to you!

Project Thread

[DazzleHP]

That's awesome man thanks for the heads-up! You know, i learned to live without MAWS - i just accepted over time that it was gone. Now that i see this i wonder why it isn't just exploded all over the interwebs! I thought it was lost forever. You wouldn't believe how many times MAWS reunited me with faded memories. Damn.

[hansolo77]

I been doing emulation and MAME for a while now. I remember seeing stuff about MAWS but to be completely honest, I don't know what it is. MAWS was dying or dead when I first started my stuff, so I never really cared much to find out what it was. I never had any use for it.

[nullPointer]

Basically MAWS acted as a searchable aggregate data source for MAME roms. So it cross-referenced nplayers.ini, catver.ini, controls.ini, mame.exe -listxml, etc. It was also a source of artwork, as well as a pretty robust ratings system. So while it wasn't necessarily an essential tool, it could sure come in handy when you absolutely had to have the list of all side-scrolling beat-em-ups, supporting 8-way joysticks, and 4 players! Like I said, not exactly indispensable tool, but it could certainly be a fascinating way to kill some time.

AFAIK It wasn't actually a lack of community interest that brought MAWS down, it was the fact that it apparently had a deeply embedded security flaw which had gone previously undiscovered until a group of malicious hackers brought the site down on the back of that exploit. Apparently the MAWS admin elected to take it completely offline rather than start over from scratch. There have been other tools that have done similar things, but nothing to my knowledge that filled the exact same niche as MAWS. At any rate I'm certainly glad that a talented developer has decided to pick up the torch.

[DazzleHP]

That's exactly it null!

So Han, say you played an arcade game when you were a kid, for me that was 20+ years ago so my memory is pretty much useless. I have no idea what that game was but i want to play it so bad! I know i have it, coz i have a full mame set but the likeliness of finding said game (within 28k plus roms) with no idea of what it was called is, well dire! That's where MAWS came in. You could go on and enter criteria - such as: one player; 2 buttons; beat em up etc and it would give you results (including screenshots) based on what you entered There was nothing like it and i'm so glad someone felt passionate enough to take it on!