Hello everybody. I'm currently working on MAMEox128 v1.28 working romlist, and man is it taking a long time to test these games and properly document my findings. I had a few questions I thought I'd throw out there to other members that might make my testing easier. Any help that you guys could give would be great.

1. Does anyone know how to get games like Guerrilla War and Heavy Barrel to work right? You should be able to make your guy change direction and fire, but I can only move around and fire straight forward. I thought maybe the other analog stick would work to change direction, but it doesn't.

2. Does anyone know how to use the "pedal" for games like "Hydra"? You can't start that particular game unless you use the pedal after inserting a coin, and none of the buttons seem to do that. (Hydra works too slow to be enjoyable anyhow, but I'm sure that's not the only game that has this problem).

3. Does anybody know, or could they point me in the direction to a FAQ on how to create your own datfiles for Romcenter so when I'm done I could make it available along with my findings and then you all can purge the non-working and duplicate roms from your sets?

4. I saw that somebody released code for MAMEox128 v1.28 and it looks as though a few people might be interested in advancing the work on this. Now I'm under the impression that for most of the upgrades to this emulator it would require a massive amout of work because of code changes after MAME .084. With this in mind, if somebody were to come out with an updated version, what is the chances that my findings for working games not be valid with a new emulator? I'm thinking nil, but perhaps somebody will update the emulator and get other games working. Would these updates just be improvements to the GUI and ease of use?

Um.... I think that's all I have now. I'll bring back more questions as they pop into my head. Currently, I've gone through and tested 1,304 roms for MAME. Can't say how long it will be before I finish, but I will use this thread for questions and updates on my progress.

Thanks guys and gals.

I'm having another problem. If I press "back" and "black" the game will pause, however if I press "white" and "black" together the UI options screen won't come up. Has this ever happened to anyone before? Any suggestions?

I know that this used to work, but it doesn't anymore.

Some games, such as Joust say "Factory Settings Restored" after the romcheck. I can't find any way to get past this. Has anybody ever been able to do this?

Some games like "Kram" start off with a language selection screen. Does anybody know how to select the language so you can continue on?

I'm not clear on what you are trying to do. MAMEox128 is based on MAME .84 therefore the romset you need would be the .84 romset. If you dont have the .84 romset all you would have to do would be to use a CLRMAMEPRO dat file such as the one found here: MAME .84 to rebuild your romset and that should give you most of the games for MAME .84/MAMEox128

I think he wants to get the massive rom set in a similar fashion to how the games appear in mame arcades. No trying to figure this and that, just click the game and it goes and thats it.

Man... sometimes I think I speak in riddles or something.

I know this is built on v.84. I have had a complete set of v.84 for about 6 months now, but it's crap playing it. If you guys haven't noticed, only about 1/2 of the games actually work for MAME without errors on load, freezing your XBox or not responding correctly to the controls on load. There are also a ton of dupes wasting space on your hard drive. So far I've gone through over 1,500 of the games and tested them out personally.

I am going to remove all of the NON-WORKING roms and the DUPES that we don't need. Then I want to create a new datfile in Romcenter so other people can purge all the bullshit.

Comprende?



That being said, if you would care to answer any of my questions posted previously, it would be appreciated.

Nobody is interested in this at all?

Maybe I'll just keep my findings to myself.

the geurilla war question-i dont think you can turn round,if you have tried ikari warriors you will find the same problem,unless maybe you go to the ingame menu by pressing back and white.then you can change around some of the controls but i think if you do that then it will change controls for all the games(but i could be wrong,maybe worth trying.)
the mameox128plus1.28 question-i think you have got mixed up with fbaxxxpro1.28.the fba sourcecode was released a while back but mameox1.28 sourcecode hasnt been released.
i can tell you this though as i stumbled upon it by accident,bendermike who developed bendermameox,tried to update mameox past .84 and tried his hand at .92(something like that) but he was having problems with it.not an easy job i dont think,well anyway he released the sourceode for the mameox he was biulding for this new mame.
ui options question-its BACK and WHITE not black and white together.
joust question-to get past the factory settings screen which by the way all williams arcade games have(80s ones anyway) you either leave it for a couple of minutes,or just play around pressing the different buttons.
a quick question have you been looking at the suppoerted games.text,as there are some games on there that arent .84 roms but still work.example raiden fighters2(2000).

Hello. Thank you for the replay xyteam.

1. Yes. I noticed the problem with Ikari Warriors as well. I have about 5 games I've noticed this problem with, including "Forgotten Worlds" which somebody else mentioned in a seperate post here last week. I'll have to see if I can come up with a fix, but I still can't enter the UI menu to try.

2. Yes. I got that mixed up. The FBA source is released, not the MAME source.

3. That's what I heard about upgrading MAME. It was attempted at least once and there were some major problems with it. I heard they wouldn't be able to add a whole lot of games anyhow because of the XBox's limitations and they just gave up.

4. I've tried every two button combination I can with BACK, START, BLACK and WHITE and for some reason the UI options doesn't work anymore for me. I can get the game to pause by pressing BLACK AND BACK and I can exit back out to the romlist by pressing START AND BACK, but the UI options just doesn't work.

5. Bummer about the Joust and other Williams games.

6. No. I had not looked at that. I thought the only games supported for MAMEox were in MAME v.84 I will have to check that out and add those extra games to my list.

Thanks for your help. If you have any idea why the UI Options aren't working anymore for me, I'm all ears.

I just hit the reset button (to reset the ROM, not the xbox!) and the scrambled line stuff will typically go away after just a couple seconds. Robotron and joust are 2 of my favorite games of all time.

For my setup, I took the .dat file linked to in this thread and down-converted my 110 collection down to 84, then had clrmamepro build a set of non-merged set of roms. (that is, each zipfile was its own game and contained all the roms needed to play that game). I then pushed all of those ROMs onto my xbox and went through and deleted out a lot of the clones, mahjong, and games that were too big to fit in memory or ran way too slow. Since the ROMs themselves weren't merged, it was easy to delete a single game without nuking any others.

I deleted just enough ROMs to get the whole collection to fit inside 1 folder (4096 file per folder limit).

Then I moved the whole collection back onto my PC and had clrmame pro then merge all the remaining roms to save space. Throw in the screenshot collection from XER and you've got a pretty sweet setup. While I play mainly the classics (I'm old, plus I also have a dedicated MAME machine, so I don't really need it on my xbox) I haven't really had a problem with games not working.

I'd be happy to have clrmamepro spit out a .dat file that you could use if that would speed up your work.

Hi Hargle,

Great man. Thanks for the fix on the Williams arcades. I'll make a note of that in the list for all of them. Unfortunately, I can't test your fix because for some reason MAME isn't allowing me to reset either. Hmmmmmm....... I can pause and exit back out to MAME, but I cant reset the rom or access the UI settings. This is getting really frustrating, because I know I used to be able to do both of those things and I don't believe I've changed anything.... at least I can't figure out what's changed anyways.

Joust and Robotron are two of the best games made, although I mainly played them on the Atari 7800 when my dad bought them for my brothers and I on Christmas. I loved Christmas... my old man would buy like 10 games for whatever system we had at the time.

For my setup so far, I scoured the interenets for months and came up with a perfect and complete set of MAME .84. After all that hard work, I was more than a little disappointed to see just how many roms didn't work and the obscene number of Mahjong games which drive me up a wall.

It looks like you've gone through the trouble that I have already and I really appreciate your offer for your datfile, but I'm kinda OCD about it and want a perfect set, that's perfectly documented. I've never been much of a team player..... If you know how to create a datfile for either Romcenter or Clrmamepro though, that'd be awesome. I probably won't be done with this for about a month or two but I want to be able to offer (what I consider to be) a perfect MAME datfile and the excell spreadsheet documenting the reasons why games don't work. I've gotten through about 1,700 or so roms now, so I might as well "stay the course".

That's a good idea about making all the roms full sets first. I was considering doing that because I want to change a lot of the default roms to "US" roms instead of "World" roms if for no other reason than because I'm quite partial to the Anti-Drug campaign by William Sessions. LOL.... I laugh everytime I see that. I thought doing it the way you suggested would probably be the easiest way to accomplish that.

I'm getting pretty old too. Double Dragon is the best arcade ever.

Thanks for the reply!

OK, gottcha


Since Hargle has offered to create a .dat and you want to continue to work on you own, might I suggest once you finish your work and create your .dat compare it to the one created by Hargle to see the differences between the two then go back and maybe test those games you differ on to see why there is a discrepancy. This should give a pretty good definitive list of working games.

actually you were not specific at all until you made the post that is quoted above. However since all the basics are now covered, I wish you the best of luck on your project and look forward to any/all progress you make with it.

I think that's a great idea actually RMM. What do you think Hargle? I suppose I could use that datfile now. I'll just have to learn how to use clrmame pro if you don't have a Romcenter version available.

-----

Heh... yeah Robot3. I guess I wasn't very clear above. I've mentioned my intentions on another thread or two and I didn't really lay it out good above. Sorry for the confusion, and thanks for the words of support.

------


DAMN UI OPTIONS!!! LOL..... Still can't get them to work. What the hell?

I think this is a great idea, the .84 dat contains shed loads of stuff that you simply can't play, it'd be great to get a much smaller working list up and running.

As for using clrmamepro, romcenter can use the dats from it no problems.

Thanks for the tip man. I didn't know that.

I'm just finally finishing the basics of the spreadsheet.... the names, the zipfiles and the clones. It's taken a long time because the way the txt file was set up it was impossible to export it to excel nicely (at least I didn't know how to). When I'm finished with that, I can get back to actually testing the games. I've gotten around 1,700 done now. Tons of bad roms so far, but a lot more good ones though. It will be interesting to see how much of the 11 GB of files will actually be used when you've got just the roms that work without clones.

I'll keep this thread updated with my progress.

Not a problem mate, glad to point it out

Yeah, please do post your progress, I for one will definitely be interested in using it.

I always wanted to see something like this--count me as also being interested in your progress!

Sure thing guys. I work weird hours and travel somtimes on my weekends. I might be going out of town this weekend actually, so I probably won't get too much done in the next week or so. I usually like to sit down when I can devote large blocks of time to testing the MAME and PSX games. It's crazy how 10 hours can just fly by like that.

Trust me... I will get this completed. But just like the PSX compatibility, it's one of those things I'm dying to get done so I can get on with my life, but it's always going to gnaw at me if I don't finish it. If I had to put a date on when I'll be done with this, My guess would be by mid-April..... but I don't want to commit myself to anything. Ideally, I would like to have a complete compatibility list of MAME and PSX by May so I can start obsessing on working my fat ass out for summer instead of obessing over this.

Who knows? Now that I've got the bulk of the spreadsheets for both projects done, testing should be a lot quicker.

To think.... I was actually typing out every title and version by hand before I went to work on the supported games text file. Doing it that way was no treat either, but I did in about 6 hours with that what would have taken 30 hours to type out by hand.

It's an ever evolving process, and if you really look at the spreadsheet when it's done, it won't be too difficult to notice the changes from one point to another when I developed a new way of getting this done. I'm sure I'll never go back and make everything uniform, because that would just waste countless hours fixing something that isn't broke. Trust me... for anyone who would actually take the time to read a spreadsheet on MAME compatibility instead of just taking my word for it and using my datfile, it will still make perfect sense.

Hello everyone. Getting off work this morning and then I'll have a few days to devote to this. I hope to get 2,000 games under my belt in that time, but that's probably being way too optimistic. We'll see how it goes, and I'll update my progress.

I still haven't figured out why my MAME won't go to the UI options screen or reset, but I can pause and exit to the romlist. Really weird and frustrating. If I can't figure out what I need to delete off my box when I upload a new version, I'm just going to put the roms on my second XBox and do it that way. I will not begin testing games again until I've solved this problem.


THINGS WE KNOW:

MAMEoX will likely not be getting a compatibility upgrade which would make this list obsolete any time soon, if ever.


Things I haven't personally tested, but have been stated as fact:

1. Some games, such as Joust say "Factory Settings Restored" after the romcheck. If you reset the rom (not the emu) then it will load up fine.

2. Romcenter can use clrmamepro datfiles without any problems. (I'm going to research online how to make datfiles)


QUESTIONS I STILL HAVE:

1. Does anyone know how to get games such as Guerrilla War, Ikari Warriors and Heavy Barrel to work right? You should be able to make your guy change the direction he's fireing. I can move in all directions but only fire straight forward. The other analog stick doesn't get the job done. It has been mentioned that this could possibly be changed in the UI Options menu, but that the changes might universally impact all games, which is not an acceptable fix. If this is the case, I will mark these games as unplayable. (A cumbersome workaround in this case could be to group all games which would require this universal change together and have a seperate instance of MAME only for running them. I won't be doing that, but it is an option if you just can't live without those games)

2. Does anyone know how to use the "pedal" for games like Hydra? You can't start that particular game unless you use the pedal after inserting a coin, and none of the buttons seem to do that. (Hydra works too slow to be enjoyable anyhow, but I know that it is not the only game that has this problem).

3. Some games such as Kram start off with a language selection screen after the romcheck. Does anybody know how to select the language so you can continue on? It seems to me like it's just stuck there and there's nothing you can do about it.

4. Is it even worth doing this project? I've just started reading about Mamedox Arcades and what I've heard sound really impressive. The list of games on there is somwhere around 800 games, so it does play quite a bit of the games and I do see that Gurilla War and Ikari Warriors are on there. From what I've seen BritneySPAIRS (sorry if I got that name wrong) say on here and in another forum, he loathes bugs and will not add games that don't work, so I can only imagine that these games run perfectly without the flaws of MAMEox128 plus.

What are the merit's of doing this project still? I'm quite vested in it already, so I really don't want to abandon it, but I feel like I'm re-inventing the wheel now and not even doing as good a job.

I saw that robot said in the other thread that he plays both emus and has them side by side on his XBox. Why would you do this? What functionality and benefits do MAMEox128 Plus have over Mamedox Arcades? I've read a bit about Mamedox Arcades and I've seen the extensive list of supported games and the claims that everything on the list works without any bugs and I'm kinda sold on it now.

Somebody please tell me that I haven't wasted the better part of my last 3 weekends doing this work.

Well From what I gather Mamearcades, which is what I use, is more of a "best of" emulator. So even though it plays all the games it plays perfectly it doesan't necessary include all of the perfectly working mame games if that makes any sense. It includes probably all of the 'classics' and the authors favorites.

but also important to know, I believe that you can now add any mame rom and are not restricted to using the roms specified by the emulator. So in this case Mame arcades would act just like any other mame emulator.

Posted in this thread: http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?showtopic=634022

robot3 said:



Then BritneysPAIRS said:



Then you said:



No offence to BritneysPAIRS or all the great work he's done, but I can only understand about half of what he types on either here or the other forum I was looking at. His posts are extremely confusing to me. I get from this though that his emulator does not support the feature to add roms. Is there something that you know that I don't competes2win, now that you've been using this emulator for a while?

What is the "FULL" version of Arcades? I thought this was the full version of Arcades? Is his emulator a port of an entirely different PC version of MAME than MAMEox PLUS?




I mean, honestly, there is absolutely no reason for me to be doing what I am doing right now if his emulator has all the same features, plus the ability to add your own roms if there is one you like that he didn't put on there. Plus with the video features and what not, his emulator sounds amazing. I'm a little disheartened with this now and will probably go back to testing all of the PSX games for a while instead of MAME like I was going to this weekend until I figure out if this is worth it at all to continue.




EDITED TO ADD: Well, I do feel a little better now. He says that he's open to hearing about roms that actually do work and adding them to his interface, and he has said a few other things that make me think that the games he already has tested were done the same way I have been testing them in MAMEox. Perhaps I should just avoid testing the games he already supports (remove them from the spreadsheet it took me about 12 hours to create) and just test ones that he doesn't currently support.

In the end, if he's willing to add the roms or put the functionality to add your own roms, he's already done most of the testing work for me and has improved the emulator in ways that I probably never would have been able too (and looks like more updates are coming). Maybe it's time for me to sign up for the other forum and speak to the man directly.

ok ressurection ill try and answer some of your questions.
acouple of weeks before the full arcades patch was released(mamedox emulator and 100added roms),brineyspairs released a beta patch which didnt have the rom adding function,just wanted some feedback.the full version which as you know has been released and is posted in this forum,has the added romscan function so you can now add your own roms.
mamedox arcades is basically mamedox1.1,reskinned with a roms oackage and some new features(genre selection,favourites.....),anyway mamedox is based on mameox.843b as is mameox128plus,the difference with mameox128plus is options mostly(add your own flyers,mame history.....)there is possibly a slightly better game compatibility but not much i think as for example-i tested the mortal kombat games on both emus,with sound disabled obviously and they run perfectly on both emus.
i know mameox128plus runs raiden fighters2(2000) and mamedox dosent.
mamedox arcades has been made for ease of use for people who dont want a load of different options and i think its just basically aimed for people who dont want any hastles,and its bug free as well.

Thanks for that breakdown on that zyteam. I get it completely.

I did a little sleeping on it and after reading your post I know what to do next. This is actually great. I would like to continue my testing on Mameox128 Plus, and I believe that I can still use my spreadsheet to track all of this. Here's what I'm going to do.


1. Any game on my spreadsheet that BritneysPAIRS has already tested in MAMEdox Arcades I will give a Black background with Green letters. Any one that is an unnecessary clone of one of the games he has working, I'm going to make a black background with blue letters.

2. The games I've tested that work that are not yet on Mamedox Arcades, I have already made Green on a White background. Clones of these games I have made Blue on a White background.

3. Games are not a part of Mamedox Arcades and do not work on Mameox128 Plus will be Red on a White background. There will be an explanation in all non-working games as to what the problem is (MEMORY ALLOC ERROR, NOT ENOUGH MEMORY, wrong romset errors, freezes xbox on load, blank screen on load, Ikari Warriors type controller problems, too slow to be enjoyable, sound is too annoying to be enjoyable, etc.)

4. All Japanese or other foreign roms that fit one of the following categories will be Purple text on White background. These categories include, but are not limited to: All Mahjong games, Games which rely heavily on text, or simply any unenjoyable foreign game which wasn't already discarded for being a clone of a working English rom.

5. Any girly games which are either in English (are there any in English?) or not very text reliant so they're still playable even if you can't read the language will be seperated for anyone who wants to add them. My list of working games will be kid friendly, but somebody might want these on their box too. I will make them Black letters on a Red background. If they don't work, they'll just be grouped with all the unworking roms. Anyone that is unplayable because of huge amounts of text or Mahjong games will be put in the working foreign category and be made Purple on White background.

6. Any game I will not bother testing and will simply remove will be Orange text on White background. These include games such as the Cassette system games and the Play Choice 10 games. There is no reason to play any of these. Cassette games take over 2 minutes to load and seem ancient and Play Choice 10 games are just NES games.

I may choose to make more categories as my testing progresses.

In Office 2007 I can also group games by color, making them really easy to post here in a forum when I'm done too.

Perhaps it would help BritneySPAIRS with his work too when it's done. I know that he likes testing things out himself, but he could use this as an aid if he wanted to when considering which new games to put on his XBox.

NEW NOTE: I believe that BritneysPAIRS got some roms working that didn't work before, but their clones did. I'm not sure exactly which ones he fixed or how he did it, so if I've already tested them and the main rom didn't work, but the clone did, I'm just going to leave the notes that I put on there for MAMEox128 Plus. It doesn't really matter because as far as those games are concerned, anyone who has this set got the roms from a pack that already had all of the fixes in it. Like I had said in the post above though, all of his working games and the clones to them will have a black background, so you know they work no matter what my notes said.

However, if a game that was fixed in MAMEdox Arcades is marked as non working in MAMEox128 Plus on my list and all of the clones don't work either, I will mark the main game as Green in the list and say it was fixed in MAMEdox.... such as Ikari Warriors and 720 Degrees.

I also really don't know how he fixed some of the roms. I was going to make all US roms the main set, then world, then Foreign if they aren't available. Since I don't know how he did it, if he has a game I have yet to have tested, I will just mark the main rom Green and the others Blue. Again, it won't matter because any of the games he has on his emu have already been tested as working either way and people who have the emu have his set.

This is great, merging both lists like this. I've finally merged my spreadsheet with the working roms from MAMEdox. I've probably got another 2000 games done now just from doing the merge. All things I've read about this emulator make me believe that if it's on the list that it has been tested and it works.

A few interesting things I'd like to mention.

1. There are around 4 or 5 duplicate games where the parent rom and clone rom are both included. I'm not talking about ones like the street fighter roms, but roms that have both the US and Japanese rom for no apparent reason. Overall though, very good work de-duping.

2. Personally, I would like to have the US rom before the European or World roms. I like getting the "Say No To Drugs" messages from the FBI. Reminds me of the arcades when I was a kid. US roms were prefered some of the time, but not most of the time. There were even instances where the Asian rom or Japanese rom was included over the US rom. There are probably about 50 or so roms that I would change in this category.

3. There are quite a few games which I like that work in MAMEox128 Plus that are not on his list. I don't have any idea at this point how many without doing a complete test of the remaining roms and adding everything up.

I will continue working on this spreadsheet and then lay out in detail any suggestions I have. I know somebody was asking which roms we'd like to see in a new version of MAMEdox Arcades and I know I'm a little late now, but I think I can come up with a list of good games that work in MAMEox128 that aren't in MAMEdox once I finish the testing. Probably only have about 2,000 more roms to go through now.

Thanks for your help everyone, especially BritneysPAIRS!

haha you're crazy man going through all this... but keep up the good work.

I remember doing something similar a couple of years back, though maybe not to the same extent. I downgraded a full romset to .84 and then using a couple of apps, removed Mahjong/Adult/Light Gun etc etc from the set. I also got rid of almost all pre-84/85 roms as I never played them. I then removed all CPS1/2 and NeoGeo as well as I ran those from FBAxxx. All this on the PC before I even attempted to move them to Xbox.

After testing about 70% of the remaining roms I was satisified. I think ultimately the whole set only came to like 2 gigs or so, mostly because I had taken out the big NG and CPS roms.

The one problem I have had with people making sets (including myself) is how they define 'Working'. Even in 'Arcades', games are included which patently do NOT run 100%. I mostly play shooters (shmups) like DoDonPachi, R-Type etc and I especially notice those types of games which do not run as they should. eg Dragon Blaze. Also games were included with no sound eg. Batsugun, V-Five etc. I know this is a compromise some people are willing to make to play certain games eg. MK3, but for me it is a bridge too far.

Anyway, enough waffle. Good luck with the project ressurectionx!

Yes.... this is a problem that I've been considering as well. Any games which have lagging problems or no sound/ messed up sound I have made notes of. I think unless I REALLY enjoyed playing it as a kid I will be removing these from the list as well. Any one that I would like to keep I will see if there is a way somebody can write some code to get it to work on MAMEdox Arcades. I know it can be done (probably not all the time), because there were about 15 to 20 or so roms that I'd already tested on MAMEox128 Plus that I had marked as not working from anything to controller issues, sound issues or even OUT OF MEMORY errors that are included in the list on MAMEdox Arcades. And from reading BritneysPAIRS posts, I believe that he wouldn't put any roms on his emulator that didn't play perfectly. I can't confirm this myself at this point because I haven't personally tested his emulator at all as I don't have it yet. (No Mortal Kombat games on the list of working MAMEdox Arcades though, for example)

A real big thing for me would be to make the US roms the main roms in here, like I said above. Between that issue, some Japanese roms being used over US roms, some 2 player roms being used over 3 or 4 player roms and some other similar issues, there are actually 128 different roms that I would use in my ideal romset that are different than the ones that BritneysPAIRS used.

I'm pretty excited about this now and I believe that I can put together a good list of games which should be added to or changed for MAMEdox Arcades, if BritneysPAIRS would be gracious enough to take a look at it.

Keeping my fingers crossed.....



Yeah, I know man. I don't know why I do it, but once I start something like this I gotta see it through. Back to the PSX compatability list when I'm done with this too. Thanks for the good word.

MAME 0.84 xbox dat file

that's a link to the dat file I just created off my set o' trimmed up and merged roms. Hopefully I've created the .dat file properly for people to use-I haven't done this type of stuff before.

sorry that I disappeared from this project for a bit, and hope this might help cut out some of the drivel.

I might be mistaken but I believe Britney Pairs is hacking many of the ROMS to try and get speed increases or to help those ROMS play better in some way. If thats the case then most of these ROMS would not work in Mameox128 so it would serve no purpose to try and use a ROM list from Mame Arcades because they wouldnt be compatible with Mameox128. Its almost like the old NEORage situation where you had to use specially hacked ROMS to work with that specific emulator while most of the standard MAME ROMS wouldnt work.

Yes RMM. This is true. I know from experience now that there are at least 20 or 30 roms that I had listed as unworking in MAMEdox128 that BritneysPAIRS got working for MAMEdox Arcades, And I had only tested about 1,700 games myself, if you include all of the clones for the games I tested. These include bad controller configurations, blank screen on load, crashes xbox on load and MEMORY ALLOCATION errors, among other problems that he fixed. Pretty cool that he got extra games to work if you ask me. I believe I read somewhere that he said that he's done somewhere around 300 fixes so far.

I think it's a pretty safe bet though that if the game does work without any problems in MAMEox128 Plus that it should work in MAMEdox Arcades with little to no tinkering though. That's the list I'm making now. I have already noticed roms that work in MAMEox128 that I do like that haven't been added to MAMEdox Arcades. I have all of BritneysPAIRS roms and every clone for them separated from the rest of the roms on the full list and I will test the rest in MAMEox128 Plus to see which ones will work before I suggest a list of enjoyable working games to BritneysPAIRS for his next update.

I will also let him know about the 4 or 5 duplicate roms that I found on his emulator and also suggest that he use other roms instead of the ones he is using in certain instances. (I am aware that certain roms like the Street Fighter clones were intentionally left in because of the "Turbo" or whatnot, but there are around five roms that I see no reason that two versions were included. I believe this to be due to the fact that they are named two completely different things and are so far apart on the list from each other that mistakes happen. My spreadsheet, now that it is complete doesn't allow for that. It's pretty cool when you look at it and I'm looking forward to sharing it with everyone when I'm done.)

It would have been useful if BritneysPAIRS had given a list of the bugfixes or at least a list of the games which he fixed/optimized for your own comparison. Here is a response I got from him over at 1emu in relation to the bugfixes

Thanks for that info G19.

That's kinda what I figured. He did say that he wouldn't put any games on that don't work and games like Ikari Warriors that I couldn't get to work right with MAMEox128 were included in the working list for MAMEdox Arcades. I have also noticed some that I listed as not working because of no sound or slow play that he had working too, so this confirms my findings anyhow.

At this point I'm just going to assume that any game he has working on his emu is 100% without any evidence otherwise. I've never seen a single complaint myself about it. So I will not be testing any more of them than I already have, since I assume once I finally get my hands on his emu that it will be my emu of choice over MAMEox128. Looks like I have about a week until that thing finishes and I can FTP it.... sigh.

I finally figured out my problem about getting the UI options to work on my MAMEox128. Actually, I didn't figure out why, but I've deleted everything and FTP'd a new version over and it works fine. So back to testing it is for me. I've got a lot less to do now that I can eliminate the 800 or so roms already in Arcades and all of their clones. I'll update everyone on my progress.

---------------

Oh... one more question. I'm kinda dumb at the programming end of things. He's not actually hacking the game roms themselves right? Other than mixing the roms differently than MAME would have usually called for. I assume any programming or altering has been done on the emulator end and that he's not actually physically changing any of the roms.

This would be great to know, because if he feels it not worth his time to get the alternate roms for the 128 games that I would prefer an alternate romset for I may be able to do them myself without losing any of the work he did to get the roms working.

For example, if he were to have used the (World) rom for Ikari Warriors or Guerilla War and I wanted to change it to the (US), this would be impossible for me to do if he changed the rom somehow to get the guys to fire right. I'm hoping that whatever he did was on the emulation level and if I need to make these rom changes myself that it will simply be a matter of swapping the roms inside the zipfiles and everything will work automatically with his keymapping work intact. (I know that he did use the (US) rom for both of those games actually, I was just using that as an example.)

I hope that question is clear to everyone.

Well he posts over here sometimes so maybe he can respond. I dont know the answer but I thought he was hacking/modifying both the roms and the emulator. I was also thinking that since he was modifying the emulator that would cause many of the games that work on Mameox128 not to work on his modified emulator. Like I said Im not exactly sure so take what I say with a grain of salt because I might be completely wrong.

Hey RMM,

I have seen some of his posts in here before, so I know that he must stop by every once in a while or when somebody here grabs his attention for a minute. I will go to the other place and talk to him myself about all this when I'm done. I don't want to go to him with a half an idea though. It's amazing what you can do with the sort functions in MSO 2007 and I will be able to make small lists of the roms and their info and notes really easy with it when I'm done. Any of my suggestions would be really mapped out and easy to follow.

I believe with the roms he was just moving the roms inside the zipfiles a different way than the .84 MAME datfile would have them set up. That I can do. If he's putting in any code or anything, I won't be able to do anything about that.

I think you're right that many of the roms I'm testing that work on MAMEox128 Plus might not work in MAMEdox Arcades, unless he adds them. What I believe is that in 99% of the cases, if it works flawlessly in MAMEox128, it will work flawlessly in MAMEdox Arcades if BritneysPairs chooses to add them. Either way, I have a list of roms that work flawlessly in MAMEox128 Plus that are not included in MAMEdox Arcades.

BritneysPairs is what I believe to be the superior emulator, and I haven't yet played it yet. If it is everything I've heard it was, most importantly every game on it works flawlessly, then all of the layout and sort options makes his the superior emulator by far. It's actually everything that I had originally intended when I took up this project, but better.

I was hoping that he would add a lot of the really oldschool classic games that I remember back in the early 80s and he could add a category specifically for them so old guys like me could play them, but they wouldn't be cluttering up the lists for everybody else that would never play them. I don't think that would be very code intensive and most of those games are so small that you wouldn't even notice them in an update.

That's just one of my suggestions. I've come up with some ideas along the way and I'm taking notes as I go. We'll see how everything works out when I get the list done.

Hello again everyone,

I've started from the beginning again after merging both lists. I wanted to be more clear in what the problems were if the game didn't work, or the type of game that it was if it did work so BritneysPAIRS might add the games. It's pretty slow going, but this time around from the beginning, I have already figured out a lot of the bad roms out of the first 2000 or so roms and because of the roms that are already on MAMEdox Arcades, so it's much quicker than my first time around.

My weekend is over, but it's been very productive as far as this list has been concerned. MAMEdox Arcades working list knocked out nearly 2,200 roms total if you include all of the clones that do not have to be tested too. I myself have now tested and catalogued all of the other games from A to Gemini Wing now. That's 1470 out of 5162 roms down, plus all of the MAMEdox roms that have already been tested from Gemini Wing to Z, so I would guess about another 1,700 on top of that bringing us to a guesstimated total of around 3,150 roms being tested out of 5,162, or about 60%. Once I get to the roms that I haven't tested at all before again, it will be a little slower, but now that the spreadsheet is done and all of this work has been put into it I don't imagine it will take very long. It may be premature to say now with everything that could happen until then, but I believe I will be done with the testing by the end of February.

Awesome work man, its greatly appreciated!
no more "missing roms" even though i have the 0.84 romset.

I hope that when you post the new dat file you'll also post a little walkthru with pics and all,
i always get lost when using those romcenter or clrmamepro programs, there are just too many options.

Dude, you are awesome. Thank you for undertaking this huge project.

Hey VampX. Not a problem man. This is taking a lot longer than I would have liked (the whole XBox thing for me), but I finally feel like I'm getting to that end of the tunnel. Once I get this and the PSX compatibility project done, I don't have much left but to see if the Karaoke function in XBMC is any good and get a nice collection there too. While most of my work on the other consoles I found later could have been done en masse instead of painstakingly done by hand, I'm just glad that is all over. Most roms for the other systems work just fine and I have gotten rid of any that don't and named them the way that I want to see them. Not much help I can give to somebody else in those regards though, short of giving them a download which is illegal here, and it's not something they couldn't find themselves online anyways.

I hate to disappoint anybody, but I will not be doing a Commodore 64 compatibility list

The spreadsheets I'm making for PSX and MAME though have a ton of work put into them and I'm happy to share it with whoever wants it. I might not be able to code anything or get these games running, but I like doing my part where I can. Hopefully BritneysPAIRS considers my suggestions for adding games and using different romsets for some of the ones he's already done. I don't have much faith in my abilitiy to see to it that that part of the project gets done if he declines.


Hey underworlderZer0. You're welcome man.

Keep you guys updated.

Been working on this a bit here and there the last few days and I just got past 2,600 roms on the list. Figured I'd let you know that it's about halfway done.

are you leaving out all tha mahjong rubbish?

LOL.... of course I am.... I can promise not one single Mahjong game will be on my list. (Well, possibly ONE if there was ever one made in English that actually worked.)

That sure helped me skip a big chunk of the letter 'M'.

Any game that I can tell by the name or the screenshot is Mahjong I automatically make it Orange in color on my list and put a '?' in the "Working" column. Just like I do with the Play Choice 10 and other home console arcades and all of the "Cassette" roms.

On a side note... have you tried MSO 2007 for Excel yet? It's crazy all the things I can do now with the sorting. I can't wait to get this done and put the different categories out on a thread. It will probably take a few more weeks after I'm done testing before I can have good working datfiles though.

Oh... and I'm at about 3,200 games now. Just finished the letter Q (Skipping the Quiz games too)

UPDATE: I skipped over the letters S and T for the time being and finished the alphabet. With only the letters S and T left that leaves roughly 1,300 roms left to check, minus all the clones and the roms included in MAMEdox Arcades.

NEW QUESTIONS:

1. Do you think BritneysPAIRS will consider adding roms still? I'm reading through the thread on the other site and sometimes I think he'd be open to working on this some more and other times I get the feeling like he's moving on.

2. Most of the games that I am going to suggest adding are a few classic games from the 70's and mostly early to mid-eighties that have been neglected. I realize a lot of you guys are younger than me and might not want anything but the most popular games from that time like the Pac-Mans and the Galagas but I do believe there is room for these other roms if put under a seperate category or two such as "Classics" or "Retro Games". My assumption here is that any of these retro games that work without any problems on MAMEox128 Plus wouldn't have any problems on MAMEdox Arcades and should just require a quick add and test on BS's part (or his people). There are a limited few that could use a controller mapping update, and I have added those suggestions on my list when I've come across them too. Any games that have no sound I have listed as such and if they are not just complete ripoffs of other games and are worth adding, I've marked as well and will ask if there is a way to get them working with sound like he has done for other games before.

So here's my second question: I've seen him ask when others suggest games if it works on MAMEox128, if it works on HK$'s build, or if it works on Platinum in different posts. I'm not going to test these games twice, as this is taking forever and I'm not in the mood at the moment to manually add all of these games to Arcades for testing after having tested them all on MAME0x128. Do you think he will add the more primitive games that I've tested as working flawlessly on MAMEox128?

Thanks again....


BTW... I'm under 1,000 games that still need testing. That's a little over 4/5ths of the way there.

well for your first question-he will still add roms,ive been trying out some,just transferring roms from mameox 128 to arcades with unleash file explorer.he did say to me in one his posts as long as its playable and a good suggestion then he would look at it.
2nd question-the reason he asked if it worked on hk$ biuld is because,some people werent using mamedox at the time when the roms were getting suggested.i dont know about the really older games you spoke about but i dont see why not,out of all the 100 added roms that were added to arcades,most of them were my suggestions,all i did was go to a site called system 16 and went through all the different arcade hardware and games that were compatible with the hardware and i just tried them on mameox 128 plus.if they were playable then especially with the type of game it was 2d,3d then you knew it would work on mamedox.the games i chose wasnt nesseciraly games that i would play myself but games that other people would enjoy playing so i stuck with games from about 1988-2000.
at the end of the day he has the final say of what goes in but you can only try.

ps a game you have to try on mame dox arcades or mameox,its called dyna gears a brilliant 2d side scroller romp with a bit of humour thrown in.

Well I've seen you over there on the other site then if it's you that's made all of those suggestions.

I signed up there but I haven't posted yet. Actually, I'm unable to use my home email at work and I forgot to verify my membership when I got home after work so here I am. I can't log in until I verify the membership. When I do, my name will be the same over there as it is here.

The reason I asked about the HK$ stuff is because from what I've gathered on the internet, MAMEox128 Plus is an HK$ emulator as well. Is this incorrect?

A lot of the games that I'd suggest may not be the most popular, particularly with the younger crowd, but I don't see any reason to limit this great emulator and what it can offer everybody because of one person's preferences. I think it's a great idea to purge all dupes and games that just won't work, or have no sound, or are pure shit (such as the quiz games that you can't even answer right because you have no clue which button on the gamepad corrosponds to which letter answer). But to offer such a great emulator and then limit it because of personal preferences is a shame. This single emulator should be the only MAME emulator on our XBoxes and the only major arcade emulator that accompanies FBA-XXX Pro. I consider my XBox a museum of video games and although because of the limit of a .84 MAME core we can't have every old game that the XBox should handle, I really do believe that we should put every game that works on this emulator so we have one central location for all of them.

You'd be suprised how many of those older games you've never heard of before were really fun, and quite addictive like Pac-Man was. I'm actually kind of shocked that he didn't add "Eyes" or "Mappy" (Actually, I can't remember if he did have Mappy, but I'm pretty sure that he didn't and that struck me as odd, because that's almost as classic as Pac-Man and definately at least as memorable as Crystal Castles).

Here's how I propose we do it.... I think that a seperate category for the lesser known retro games is the way to go. If it's really a hang-up for him to have games he deems unworthy of playing because of their age cluttering the list when you're viewing the FULL list of games, maybe a solution would be to totally seperate the retro games somehow so they don't even show up on the full list and they're only viewable when you select the "Retro" category. My knowledge of programming is pretty basic, and I don't know about programming for the XBox at all, but I would think that something like that could be accomplished pretty easily.

So here would be my reasons why adding those games shoudln't be much of a problem or put anybody out:

1. Make a seperate category for Retro games where they are only viewable if you're looking at that category. Make it so these games don't ever show up with all the other games in the "Full" list. (Although I would suggest a few games like the aforementioned "Eyes" and "Mappy" make it to the main list.

2. These games would take up almost no space on your hard drive so they would require very little time for people to download and add when the next version comes out.

3. Adding these games that I've tested as working on MAMEox128 Plus to MAMEdox Arcades should be almost no work at all. There are a few that could stand to be remapped, and I will list those games together in their own category when I present them, but other than that it should just be a matter of BritneysPAIRS checking to his satisfaction that the rom works and then adding it to the emulator.


Again... I will be bringing this to him sometime this month when I get everything together in a presentable fashion. I don't want to bother him right now with a half-assed idea though. Although I wouldn't be opposed if somebody were to give him wind that somebody were putting a list like this together.




And I'll have to give that Dyna Gears a try. I'm sure that I skipped it if it was available on MAMEdox Arcades because I haven't bothered testing any of the games he has on there after I got a hold of his compatibility list.

yes mameox128plus is an hk$ emulator,its his own biuld of mameox.
mamedox is britneyspairs version,but hk$ and ebsay all helped with mamedox,but britneyspairs is the only one now who is doing anything with mame.pity really some more updates would be great but the new core after .84 is supposed to be very difficult to work for xbox,some have tried.