Emulation

Hello all,

For all of you Retrogamers, i finally have compiled Xmame 0.65.1 arcade machine emulator and Stella 1.3 Atari 2600 Emulator.

It appears that a bug crept in xmame 0.62.1 preventing it from compiling on SGI machines. That's why you see only xmame 0.61.1 on freeware...
I fixed that and Xmame is running happily. The fix is posted on the Xmame mailinglist, so future builds should be ok.

Stella is a different beast. It only emulates the good ol' Atari VCS 2600, but does so almost perfectly, even Pitfall II. Be sure to get the SDL library from freeware, otherwise sound is not available.

Check out the screenshot with Stella and Xmame in action:

http://www.nekochan.net/wiki/gallery/album21/irixemu

I will give the tardist to Nekonoko in the near future, but i have to do lots of shit before i get around to it...

Very cool! Thanks!

Do you have any idea what type of system I would need to properly run the Neo Geo games? What about CPS2 games are they supported yet?

Are there any NES emulators for IRIX? What about controller support?

Emulation is one of the few reasons I still keep a PC around.

[Do you have any idea what type of system I would need to properly run the Neo Geo games? What about CPS2 games are they supported yet?

I tested XMame with some NeoGeo roms like PuzzleBobble2 and even with the fastest optimisation (i had to compile this on an Origin 200) i only got about 8-9 frames/s on my R5K180MHz O2. So i infer you should have at least an R10K and 192 MB for the NeoGeo stuff.

There may be a way to accelerate this BTW, i only compiled XMame with the MITSHM extensions, but looks like you can build it with OpenGL as well. I'll try that next week and i should have the results at the end of the week. Don't forget that mame is a very general Emulator. For selected consoles/systems, like NeoGeo, SNES, CPS2, there are other emulators, that are smaller, but faster. Look at http://www.retrogames.com/ for an overview.

For the CPS2 games, i found something on:
http://www.geoshock.com/downloads/emulators/cps2.phtml
Looks like this is going to work. ROM's are probably unfindable

Are there any NES emulators for IRIX?

No compiled ones as yet, but it shouldn't be hard to port fwNES to IRIX. See also:
http://www.lofi-gaming.org.uk/emulation/nes.shtml
It seems that the NES is the console with the largest number of emulators...

What about controller support?

Hah! Well, get yourself a Fuel, that has USB on it and hook up your microsoft Sidewinder
I don't know. Guess this is very system specific, but there was something at:
http://howtoemulation.emuhq.com/controllers.shtml
which looks like some abandoned page about controllers on PC, damn.

Hmmm, ok. My Girlie is not yet back from shopping yet, so lemme see what i can dig up using google:

NES: http://www.junkmachine.com/nintendo/members/7.shtml
SNES: http://www.dreamcliff.com/personal/daniel/jump/
SMS: Standard DB9 game controllers
MegaDrive: pinouts at: http://www.phm.lu/Documentation/Connect ... roller.asp
N64/PS2: http://www.stndev.btinternet.co.uk/usbpads.htm Damn, usb

A nice hobby project for someone who has a year to spare, to hook all these beasts up to an O2/Octane/Indigo2...

dexter1 wrote: For the CPS2 games, i found something on:
http://www.geoshock.com/downloads/emulators/cps2.phtml
Looks like this is going to work. ROM's are probably unfindable

I've got lots of CPS2 ROMS, I just lack an emulator for IRIX, as well as a fast machine.

Chalk up another reason to get an R12K O2

Hah! Well, get yourself a Fuel, that has USB on it and hook up your microsoft Sidewinder

I have a bunch of the original sidewinder controllers, they use a DB15 serial type connector and they daisy chain, unlike the USB sidewinders. I'm guessing one would need to build a converter and then hire a device driver programer.

I'll eventually get this worked out but the PC stays for the moment.

Thanks

How's the project coming along? I'd like to give MAME a try, possibly along with the OpenGL output. If nothing else, do you have the patches sorted out so I can attempt a build locally?

Hello Neko,

Sorry for not replying earlier. My life at this moment is extremly hectic, with all the construction going on at my house, and work being an absolute bitch to me.

The latest version of XMame 0.66.2 compiles cleanly on SGI's with MIPSPro compilers, thanks to the project team honoring my patch requests. Only for the OpenGL port i had to add an extra GL header, but the GLport is severely unstable and cuts performance in half, compared to the X11 version.

By all means, try to compile it yourself, but beware: only X11 works, with MITSHM but without XV !
I will finalize an optimised build of XMame as soon as i get aroud to do it, wich will be in a couple of weeks. Oh and if you're at it , build GXMame as well. It's a great frontend to XMame.

Great, I'll try and get everything sorted out and packaged up Thanks!

nekonoko wrote: Great, I'll try and get everything sorted out and packaged up Thanks!

Cool, thanks guys.

xmame-0.66.2 mips4 compiled with MIPSpro 7.3:

http://www.nekochan.net/wiki/downloads/xmame-0.66.2.tardist

The package was built using dexter1's suggestions. I tried it on a couple of ROMs and it seemed to work

I'll post the news on the site tomorrow (later today actually as it's now 1AM) but forum readers can have fun now

I take it that the xmame tardist doesn't just run "out of the box"

When I run it, I get the following output:

ian@oxygen:~/tmp> xmame.x11
warning: no mixer plugins available
info: trying to parse: /usr/local/share/xmame/xmamerc
info: trying to parse: /usr/people/ian/.xmame/xmamerc
info: trying to parse: /usr/local/share/xmame/xmame-x11rc
info: trying to parse: /usr/people/ian/.xmame/xmame-x11rc
info: trying to parse: /usr/local/share/xmame/rc/pacmanrc
info: trying to parse: /usr/people/ian/.xmame/rc/pacmanrc
Mouse/Trakball selected.
loading rom 0: pacman.6e
loading rom 1: pacman.6f
loading rom 2: pacman.6h
loading rom 3: pacman.6j
loading rom 4: pacman.5e
loading rom 5: pacman.5f
loading rom 6: 82s123.7f
loading rom 7: 82s126.4a
loading rom 8: 82s126.1m
loading rom 9: 82s126.3m
done
pacman.6e NOT FOUND
pacman.6f NOT FOUND
pacman.6h NOT FOUND
pacman.6j NOT FOUND
pacman.5e NOT FOUND
pacman.5f NOT FOUND
82s123.7f NOT FOUND
82s126.4a NOT FOUND
82s126.1m NOT FOUND
82s126.3m NOT FOUND
ERROR: required files are missing, the game cannot be run.

I know that I should RTFM, but could someone post up some quick steps to getting a game playing?

Well, the first thing you need, is to get a copy of a game's ROM images
(How, don't ask, if you don't own the arcade board and copy the roms yourself it's technically illegal)

Second, you need to tell XMame what game to play (as you can tell by the filenames there, if you don't give it one, it tries to load up pacman)...

you'll likely need to pass some arguments to xmame as well
telling it where to find the roms and what-not

You'll probably want to visit this archive: http://www.mame.dk/

Note that legally you need to own the arcade games you download from the site.

Er, there's a message on the front page saying they've had to take the ROMS down

Just have to see if my old ROM collection still works.

It says that, but I am still able to download ROMs from it (just tried one now successfully).

Hello

Mame.dk only offer download to registered account

log in

Even though most of the ROM sites have been closed for free download, please do check out

http://www.mameworld.net/

Which gives info and links to some sites who offer a few ROMS for download.

Note however, that obtaining a full 0.66 ROM set that way is extremely difficult, because some roms are incredibly huge or hard to find or have been altered.

For people with older ROM sets check out this site:

http://www.sys2064.com/fixfiles.htm

It does not offer full ROM's for download, but only the changes from previous ROMsets to newer Mame releases.

Enjoy

Speaking fo ROMs...

I have a stash of NES roms that number in the 4 digits. I think it's in the neighborhood of 4,000 or so. I also have about 30 or 40 GBA roms, too. They are in an archive, but I'll dig them up some time soon if anyone is interested. There are alot of hacks of the same games, but the bulk of them are mainly the actual game or different beta versions of the games in all sorts of languages.

Be warned, the NES collection is about 1.2 GB uncompressed!

I'm not really a rom collector, a friend just dropped off some stuff and those were in it.

Ok I'm new to Irix packages, but I installed Xmame with the software manager but I can't find it. I did
find / -name xmame*
and all it found was the original file.

I tried reinstalling it and it only seemed to light the first bar on the bottom, so maybe it didn't actually work.

-update nevermind.
Forgot to check the box to install it.

Is there a joystick / gamepad device compatible with the o2 that can be used with xmame?

all the romz are on the newsgroups.

alt.binarys.emulators.mame

warning, they total 10.7gigs not including the 'chd's !!!
(me is a mame contributer and romdumper!)