Mameox128 - Working Romset Project Options

[ressurectionx]

That's truly unfortunate BP.

I was just discussing this with my brother today after seeing how things went down in the other forum. (I room with him, so we both kind of take turns half-heartedly paying attention to each other's rambling and bitching about what happens in the forums we're involved in from time to time). I told him that I hoped that you wouldn't stop providing for the scene after all that went down, but I had my doubts that you would even post again when I woke up and read all that had happened today before I went to work. Not only did the moderators there decide that my actions were not banworthy after you assured me that I would be banned, but other developers came out (some of them pretty harsh towards you) and said that your degrading behavior towards another person who is enthusiastically trying to join the scene was out of line. On top of that you were belittled for not releasing your source on a regular basis when your project is based on an open source MAME in the first place.

Though I did appreciate my support from some of the bigger players earlier today, it was not my wish or intention that you abandon the scene or that you take a beating in there today like I always take from your supporters when I'm there.

I feel this is a very hollow victory for me and that I have lost far more than I could have gained. It's a shame if you really do leave the scene, and a lot of people will be very disappointed if you aren't a part of it anymore.

I wish we could have worked together.

Take care of yourself,
~Rx

[RMM]

All things come to an end I wish to train for my mountain biking race now. So its time to just do stuff for myself and help friends along the way, and to leave the pubic debate with you guys. Best of luck I have listened to all of this stuff, it all points to where I must direct my future.
Take care BS or BP

Very sorry to hear that. I was looking forward to Arcades 2.0. I hope you decide to release it before you take a break from the scene. Also dont let disagreements with others ruin your involvement in the Xbox community. Many people do appreciate your efforts.

[ressurectionx]

BP's back on the job. He's posting about it in the other forum and it sounds like things are rolling right along. He's even asking people for suggestions on GUI and other stuff again. I'm not going to be getting involved with it anymore at this point as I'm really starting to pick up some traction on my front with the indispensable help from ekszbox (and hopefully a few others once they get their rigs set up). I'm sure that together we can implement these changes ourselves in the future, so do expect a release at some point. Still a lot that needs to be ironed out so it won't be for quite a while I'd imagine. Make sure to grab BP's new emu when he releases it though cause it sounds like it's going to be great.

To smothermunchie and others, I'm sorry I didn't get to your last posts with all that trash talk going back and forth. I'd like to take this a more professional direction now and I hope I didn't offend ya'all with my behavior back there. I would love to hear from you all again, and I noticed that this thread pretty much died besides my posts after that nonsense went on.

When we get to the point that signifigant changes can be made in the code (basically when I get some skillz), I'll start asking if you guys have any suggestions of what you'd like. I'm currently in the process of removing a ton of useless code from the source (all of the clone, non-working games, mahjong games, Play Choice 10 games, Decocass games, etc.) This will make the overall .xbe much smaller than originally. I'm actually suprised that nobody's done it before. Maybe it will have no impact on MAME preformance, but it will at least make it take about half as long to make a new build than it does now... My hopes are that it actually frees up some memory and maybe a few more games that couldn't be played before can be played now. Even more ideally, maybe even the Mortal Kombat, Narc and NBA Jam games might play better. That's just a dream at this point though, because for all I know none of the game driver code is put in the memory until the game is played. I have no clue how that works and this codechange might do nothing more than clean a lot of the crap out and make faster builds.

I wish BP luck with his future work.

Regards,
~Rx

[ekszbox]

for all I know none of the game driver code is put in the memory until the game is played.

Did you check if the unused drivers (mahajong/clones etc.) run in arcades?
If they do, then obviously that means the unused driver code gets linked into the xbe, which means that removing those source files will reduce overhead.

If you have a function, which is linked into the executable, but does not get called/used, it still takes up overhead.

When a program runs, a copy of it is placed into memory (RAM), so if an xbe is 40MB, you will need 40MB of free RAM.

There is of course one way one can massively reduce the executable size: using DLL's.
In this case, one could put each driver into it's own DLL, and dynamically load it.
XBMC uses that trick for the codecs I believe.

KM

[ressurectionx]

That's great to hear ekszbox. I was hoping it worked that way, but wasn't sure. For as many years as people have been coding on the XBox for MAME, I couldn't believe that this actually effected performance if it hadn't been done yet. I've removed almost 1.5MB of code so far (in about a day and a half with a 12 hour work shift in between). Plenty more where that came from. Some of it will be pretty complex to remove without effecting necessary stuff, but a lot of it is real easy to purge.

I don't know about dll's but if that might be better, I'd like to learn before I spend 2 days on what I'm working on. Or maybe when I'm done with this, we can take what's left (the good stuff) and make a dll setup?

Later,
~Rx

EDITED TO ADD: From re-reading your post I think you might think I'm only talking about removing entire ".c" or ".h" files. I am doing that for things like Mahjong and Decocass and Play Choice 10, but I am also removing code inside of files. For example, tons of code will be removed from the pacman driver file. Why have code for a billion versions of a game when you might include 1 or 2 max. You know I want to keep anything worthwhile in the emu, so I'm only purging things that really aren't necessary. Tons of C++ redundant code will be removed.

I'd also like to know more about your last post about making the build smaller. I'd like to try whatever it was you were talking about before removing too much more code. Would hate to have to do that with a full build and have to re-do all this work so far.

This post has been edited by ressurectionx: Mar 30 2008, 05:14 PM

[Vectorman0]

I just read the first page of this thread, and I think a fully compatible ROM set, free of duplicates identical to the originals would be a really great thing to have. I would certainly get a lot of use out of it.

[ressurectionx]

Hey Vectorman0,

I'm working on my own build now. It will take a while, but I'm removing all rom code for bad games, mahjong games, clones, etc.

Keep ya updated.

[Smothermunchie]

Hey... so back to my old question I posted several days ago.

Resx, could you please provide directions on how to remap the controls for Super Off Road?

I've got some free time to burn tonight and would really like to waste a good hour on this game.

Thanks.

[ressurectionx]

Hey Smuthermunchie.

Do you have a debug rig setup? I'm actually altering key configurations by editing the source. I could mess with Super Off Road and give you the driver and you can compile the build with the fix.

If not, it will probably be a while before I complete my build. I will get that game working 100% though.

[competes2win]

Hey man, I know you don't have much time on you're hands but I was thinking you should purge the FBA-xxx 1.28 roms of duplicates if they are un-necessary... I think it's really frustrating scrolling through about 5 different streetfighter II's. etc. But you would know better than I if there are any differences or reasons for all of the clones. As far as I know they all work flawless however. Plus there are very few games in that emulator. Anyhow, I was just thinking...

[Smothermunchie]

Hey Smuthermunchie.

Do you have a debug rig setup? I'm actually altering key configurations by editing the source. I could mess with Super Off Road and give you the driver and you can compile the build with the fix.

If not, it will probably be a while before I complete my build. I will get that game working 100% though.

You're speaking gibberish to me son.

All I have is the main build, or whatever you call it, that Britney provided us with as a torrent file.

It looks like I'm able to change the controller settings, but without any documentation, along side with not knowing what the heck I'm doing, I'm a little tentative on changing any of his control features.

Besides that, I'm not all too sure exactly what would be the best settings for this game anyway using a standard Xbox controller.

Well, I've got some free time tonight. Hope you can post back within the next hour or so.

If not, take your time. It will be awhile before I get another break again.

[ressurectionx]

Competes2Win - That sounds like a good idea. It might be easier just purging the roms necessary from your dataset to get that job done. I think they still work on that emulator and if I made any code changes, they'd be worthless when they released a new build. It shouldn't be too difficult to just remove the unnecessary roms and make a dataset for people to run through romcenter. The only downside is that the emu GUI will tell you that you're missing a lot of games at the bottom where it tells you that you have 291/291 roms for a system. If that doesn't bother you though, this would be the quickest way to eliminate all the junk.

Worth looking into. If somebody doesn't get around to it before I do, I might mess with it one day if I want to change it up a bit.




Smothermunchie - Hey man.... yeah. I'm messing around with actual source code. The UI would probably be alot easier to mess around with if I knew how to do it and could tell you. There are limitations though using the UI to change settings, for reasons that would take a long time to explain and since I'm really just feeling it out I'd be uncomfortable stating definitave facts about it when I couldn't be sure. Basically though, the options for the UI are limited by the source code. Even if you could get the controls where you want them, you wouldn't be able to control how "touchy" they are. That's the problem with a lot of the analog games. They weren't given any TLC and toned down a bit to play the game better.

I'll take care of that myself, but like I said, it will be a while. If I can't figure out how BP makes the GUI interract with the source correctly, there will be things missing from the options as well when I make a build. I plan on figureing that out, but it may take a while. Sorry I can't get that to ya overnight.

I'll figure it out sometime though, and this will be the place I let you know.

Take it easy,
~Rx

[Smothermunchie]

Hey again Res!

So yeah, I've been getting my Super Off Road fix on my little Nokia N800 handheld lately.

Here's the thread on it:
Internet Tablet

I go by the name Addison over there.

But anyway, Britney just gave me a private message and shared the new configurations that he incorporated!

This has to be the most amazing birthday present for me! I couldn't be more thrilled!

I definitely know how I'll be wasting my night! All that's left that I need for tonight is a keg of beer and a snorkel!

Well, good luck with your unrelenting obsession and seeing this project all the way through.

You've got grit, and I respect that!

It's doubtful that I'll upgrade to his new Coin Ops version.

It would be awesome to see it in action, but with only having a standard hard drive, I'm not expecting that it would fit all too nicely.

Can anyone confirm if that fat chunk of a download can sit inside a regular Xbox harddrive if it was completely gutted with nothing else on it besides this?

Thanks!

[competes2win]

A standard xbox hdd is 8 gigs with one seagate model being 10 gigs, the coinops is roughly 4.5 gigs... so it should fit. It's worth the upgrade I'd say. I like it a lot. Nice full screen screenshots, and just like arcades it has a great sorting system, but even better with added categories. Plus apparently there are around 300 extra games. It's nice, and it should fit on your standard hdd, depending on how big your partition is that would be used I suppose.

-one thing I don't understand is why BP has to go and change the title of the emulator all the time lately... lol not that it really matters, but for some reason I would prefer that "mame" be incorporated in the name somehow since after all, "Coinops" IS mame. my opinion, and doesn't matter one bit.

This post has been edited by competes2win: Apr 6 2008, 06:28 AM

[Smothermunchie]

I was able to test out Britney's new configuration, and even though it took quite some time to get use to his new methods, I must say, it's extremely brilliant!

I mean he really nailed the controls down!

Anyway, is there a viewable list somewhere that shows the new games that were added in Coin Ops?

Platinum 2 Arcades is perfect for me, but for some reason, I'm super curious about his latest release.

Thanks!