Emulation

Axatax_ wrote:

would also like to see this added to the Nekoware collection. It's a great piece of software. So please don't give up on it.

I haven't given up -- but I *really* want to get the Mplayer 1.1.1 out the door. I've promised this for like eight months. S*it -- I'd love to do a new XMAME/MESS package, and I'd also like to get an Ardour port out (and I actually have some semi-working code for the later, as well as Jack, if you don't care about VST plugins).

Sh*it -- maybe we sould make some kind of Nekoware crowd funding thing... I dunno. I'd quit my job in a heartbeat to hack away on IRIX stuff. How cool would an IRIX port of Snes9X be with gamepad support? Samus doing TAS runs on your Octane? << -- I think that would qualify as death and ascension to heaven. Just MHO.

I would also like to see that modern Mplayer port finished. I wonder how well an Octane would handle MP4 video?. I would also be willing to donate some money to see updated software. Imagine the possibilities.

I would also like to see that modern Mplayer port finished. I wonder how well an Octane would handle MP4 video?. I would also be willing to donate some money to see updated software. Imagine the possibilities.

The MPlayer is comming, but I won't give any time lines anymore as I've done this twice and other life issues get in the way. Suffice it to say, I'm still alive and working on this and there will be improvements with MP4, and MPlayer across-the-board.

The Mplayer 1.1.1 in my FTP has good _compatibility_ with MP4 but the performance isn't quite there yet. The performance is coming -- just don't expect 1080p x264 on even the best Octane.

Axatax_ wrote:

I would also like to see that modern Mplayer port finished. I wonder how well an Octane would handle MP4 video?. I would also be willing to donate some money to see updated software. Imagine the possibilities.

The MPlayer is comming, but I won't give any time lines anymore as I've done this twice and other life issues get in the way. Suffice it to say, I'm still alive and working on this and there will be improvements with MP4, and MPlayer across-the-board.

The Mplayer 1.1.1 in my FTP has good _compatibility_ with MP4 but the performance isn't quite there yet. The performance is coming -- just don't expect 1080p x264 on even the best Octane.

Now that I have my Octane up and running the way I like it, I can say that MP4 video works as long as it is configured a certain way. I don't watch my videos full screen either, always in a window, but performance improvements for MGRAS are certainly welcome, even if they're only small.

When I run ./mame I get a rld: Fatal Error: Cannot Successfully map soname 'libstdc++.so.7' under any of the filenames /usr/nekoware/lib/libstdc++.so.7:etc..

Funny thing is.. I do not have a libstdc++.so.x file anywhere on my system from nekoware (even betas). I have all of nekoware and nekoware-beta extracted in dirs and searched for libstdc++ in all the *.idb files (lists contents of tardists).. and nothing shows up for libstdc++.so. Plenty of .a's (static libs).

Am I missing something? It is late at night for me trying to mess with mame .. maybe I just need some sleep and it will work in the morning.

-Kevin

You are missing a libstdc++ from tcgware's gcc build, see viewtopic.php?f=15&t=16727919#p7377642 in the first page of the thread.

It looks like this needs proper repackaging into nekoware. I'll look into it and see if i can get a decent build with MIPSPro and fix the endianness
I might want to try 0.168 but even on my linux systems a build takes hours and the resulting binary is more than 100 MB

EDIT: oh, it is already over 125 MB itself

Thanks for all your work on this!
Yeah, staying up late made me not read the thread too well

necron2600 wrote: Thanks for all your work on this!

Nonono, Axatax_ did all the hard work I was merely around to help you.

Mame is a bit of a pet-project after i initially discovered it in 1999. We had Xmame and Xmess back then. I helped building the nekoware port.

How well does it work? Eager to try it out, but can't just yet.

It does seem to play very well on an Octane 300mhz, and visually look better than other compiles/versions I have used.. but it does not play many games (at least ones I tried). It does play pacman though.. and in a 1920x1200 resolution desktop it looks good and is fast. Just need it to play more games.

run as ./sdlmame -w -video opengl it will find roms under the /roms/ in your current dir.




However, all the other xmame binaries i have found through nekochan may play more games.. but the sound seems to go 1/2 speed.. so speach and music are sloooweed and deeper sounding. gameplay is not to bad with those. I tried messing with the sound freq/rates but no luck. I havent tried it on a faster machine yet.

-Kevin

OK, here's the deal (and my opinion) on MAME/MESS stuff --

The port is not difficult. It's pretty straight-forward, and I think I did it over the course of two days (it's really just dealing with GCC-isms and the macros used by the newer versions of this compiler). The issue is, building the damn thing takes about two days on my 2x600 Octane. That's the fastest SGI I have. Somebody with an awesome Origin could probably crunch through this in a few hours.

Now, here's the opinion part --

You may not *want* the latest MAME/MESS. I don't fully understand their development cycle, or how they hash the ROMs, but all of this seems to be in a state of constant flux (ie. - running a random ROM set will usually result in fail. Somewhere along the line, they changed either the expected ROM format or the hash values of the ROMs.)

Now, I have a great version of 0.88, working on my Octane. This is an "older" version of this software. It's newer than anything on Neko besides the 0.149, but it works better, doesn't suffer from the Neogeo/SEGA arcade endianess issues, and works perfectly with any ROMs I've thrown at it. I have the OpenGL renderer working like the 0.149 port, and the MESS port works, too (ie. you can play NES games on your SGI). It doesn't leave me wanting for a newer version, for now -- it runs like it's supposed to.

The 0.88 version is somewhat important, but I don't want to disrespect Neko's ToS for this forum. You can read between the lines on this.

If this is of interest, I can package this up for Nekoware. Just let me know -- and please do so in a day or so. I'm not always near my SGI's now.

WTH. I'm packing it up now and sending it to /incomming.

Enjoy, and send feedback. I think you'll like this version better than the 0,149. Compatibility with ROMs in the wild are much better with this version.

OK,

It's actually 0.94, not 0.88...

It's in /incomming now. If you guys like it, I'll do a proper Nekoware tardist.

But you have to let me know.!!! Please communicate!!!

Just make sure you're using ROMs for the 88-94 series of MAME.

I'm pretty sure you'll be tickled pink by this version.

Can we access /incoming ...? I thought this had to be moved by one of the moderators into the /beta directory?

I can only find ftp://ftp.nekochan.net/pub/downloads/co ... 49.tar.bz2

Thanks...

Only Neko can move stuff from /incoming to /beta and /incoming is not browseable, but if you specify what name it can be found in that folder, we can retrieve it.

PS: I agree with MAME and MESS increasingly becoming a movable target. They have integrated MESS into MAME since 0162, which massively bloats compile time. and i only checked certain old roms like Galaga for compatibility with the latest mame 0168.
You can build subtargets with MAME. You only need to make a driver list and a .lua script for specifying all necessary drivers in your subtarget: cpus, audio, video, machines and buses, and that's a bit of an art. I did manage to succeed in isolating all necessary files, but only after building it for at least a dozen times.

There is a lot of development stuff going on right now, especially in the SGI section. MooglyGuy (aka Ryan) is now trying to put in skeleton drivers for old SGI hardware, together with the PROM dumps.
MAME 0169 now has the Indigo R3000 as skeleton driver!

Looking forward to giving this a try at some point! I always enjoy playing a few retro bits on my SGIs.

Will report back with feedback once I can download and try it out.

I moved it to axatax's contrib directory. Remember, if you just need feedback on something you can attach binaries directly to forum posts and skip the whole FTP thing.

oh sweet! I've been stuck working on other projects and have really meant to get back to this - I will fire up my Tezro hopefully today and do some testing

Great work Axatax! Thanks for this!

I will be playing with this alot more in the coming days - btw what is the correct versioning for these files? they all seem to say 0.78.1 but then xmame.xgl also says GLmame 0.94?

either way xmame.xgl works great so far! everything i tried so far has run full speed with sound: neogeo, CPS1, CPS2
it seems to even work great with the gxmame frontend I compiled! viewtopic.php?f=15&t=16729470#p7377856

I had to disable effects thought



I haven't messed with xmess yet, I really will need to learn how to use it, but I smell a virgin run of Zelda Outlands on NES happening soon...

so far the GXMame frontend has been working great, but I still can't seem to figure out which version of xmame this is - seems it likes to report .78!

For my monitor, I set the options in GXmame to gamma .70, brightness to 1.0, really helped the colors. effects has to be set to 0, seems there is a bug.

This xmame.xgl has been playing everything i threw at it full speed, I've been using a completed mame 1.03 set I found online. so I'd say it would make a great addition to neko tardist! So far the only thing I have found that I have not been able to get to work are vector games

If anyone else gave the GXmame frontend a spin and found it useful perhaps I can look into making a tardist of it also

BTW fullscreen mode works great too!