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 Post subject: MAME emulation of Dragon's Lair is progressing
PostPosted: Fri Dec 01, 2006 11:49 pm 
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From the 'WhatsNew' for MAME 0.110u4:

Quote:
Rewrote the Dragon's Lair driver from the schematics. Added new
module machine/laserdsc.c which has laserdisc emulation for the
PR-7280 and LD-V1000 laserdisc players. Full emulation of the
laserdisc is pending support for CHD audio/video and high quality
rips, but you can operate the game and see the frame numbers that
would be displayed. Added built-in layout to display the scores,
lives, and credit information. [Aaron Giles]


Daphne may have a competitor soon! :wink:


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PostPosted: Sat Dec 02, 2006 5:57 pm 
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Quote:
Daphne may have a competitor soon!


Yes...and no... ;)


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 Post subject: Re: MAME emulation of Dragon's Lair is progressing
PostPosted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 8:42 am 
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Krusty wrote:

Daphne may have a competitor soon! :wink:



Yeah, MAME has taken THIS long to get DL working (so to speak) and we've had Daphne for YEARS

For me, I'll stick with Daphne as I use it more than MAME 8)


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PostPosted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 10:24 am 
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I totally agree. Even if MAME gets Dragon's Lair fully working, I'll stick with Daphne. I garantee it won't be as good as Daphne. So many great and very tallented people have worked very hard on Daphne to deliver a great emulator that we all love!


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PostPosted: Wed Dec 13, 2006 11:13 am 
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Envisaged0ne wrote:
I totally agree. Even if MAME gets Dragon's Lair fully working, I'll stick with Daphne. I garantee it won't be as good as Daphne. So many great and very tallented people have worked very hard on Daphne to deliver a great emulator that we all love!


As much as I love daphne, and I do, these games need to be in mame.

Mame has a way of taking things that are cumbersome to setup and making them simple. Plus once a game is in mame, the rom/hd image instantly becomes easier to find. Not to mention the fact that it becomes standardized. No more of this "which video rip should I use?" stuff, mame will have one standardized image that all the rommanagers can check and verify.

Getting the laserdisc games in mame means an easier setup, which means that less (ahem) technically inclined laserdisc fans will get to play the games again.

Not that I've particularly had any problems personally, but with the whole framefile/mpeg/rom combo, combined with the fact that actually getting ahold of the needed stuff for some of the less popular titles is like going on a snipe hunt, I can understand why many people download daphne, can't get it to work and then forget about it.

Not that the recent changes to the loader haven't helped a lot mind you. The beta stuff addresses these problems, but eliminating the need for framefiles and such would simplify things a lot.

And for the record every single stand-alone emulator mame has "assimilated" ended up having more accurate emulation in mame. Mind you that often means slower emulation though, so non-purists hate it. That isn't to say this will be the case for the laserdisc games though in either respect, I'm just saying...

I guess what I am saying is making a statement like "I guarantee it'll be better on daphne" is rather silly considering history has shown that mame emulates things more accurately compared to other emulators.

Btw this was posted in the wrong forum as the news pretains to more than just dragon's lair, check out the thread I started in misc schlop.


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PostPosted: Wed Dec 13, 2006 12:42 pm 
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Well you do have a right to your opinion. I'll stick with mine. And I don't think MAME has always been better than other emulators. For instance, an emulator came out that could play After Burner 1 & 2 amongst other games. When MAME finally supported After Burner, there were a lot of graphical glitches and it took MAME a VERY long time to fix them. Same with the Street Fither games that run on CPS2. And the 3D Street Fighter games (like SF EX2, etc). MK2 & 3 had a lot of sound problems and graphical glitches (mostly in displaying the characters shadows on the ground. Those, again, took FOREVER to fix them). MAME, in my opinion, doesn't do the best job at emulation. It usually takes it a lot longer to get things right than other emulators. Yes, it might be easier for the average user to use, but I really don't care. I prefer quality over ease of use. And I honestly think once MAME does release DL, it will be the same story. Something, probably in graphics or sound, will be messed up, and it will take them forever to get it fixed. Daphne does the job perfectly, so I'll stick with it :D


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PostPosted: Thu Dec 14, 2006 12:18 am 
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Envisaged0ne wrote:
Well you do have a right to your opinion. I'll stick with mine. And I don't think MAME has always been better than other emulators. For instance, an emulator came out that could play After Burner 1 & 2 amongst other games. When MAME finally supported After Burner, there were a lot of graphical glitches and it took MAME a VERY long time to fix them. Same with the Street Fither games that run on CPS2. And the 3D Street Fighter games (like SF EX2, etc). MK2 & 3 had a lot of sound problems and graphical glitches (mostly in displaying the characters shadows on the ground. Those, again, took FOREVER to fix them). MAME, in my opinion, doesn't do the best job at emulation. It usually takes it a lot longer to get things right than other emulators. Yes, it might be easier for the average user to use, but I really don't care. I prefer quality over ease of use. And I honestly think once MAME does release DL, it will be the same story. Something, probably in graphics or sound, will be messed up, and it will take them forever to get it fixed. Daphne does the job perfectly, so I'll stick with it :D


Well that just shows that you don't understand how those other emulators had those games "running better." The first emulator you mentioned is final burn, which used hacks to remove the glitches in afterburner. The second, zinc, uses a hardware accelerated 3d renderer to render the graphics and used to use a huge hack to fix the sound. The only way to prefectly emulate a 3d game is to use a software renderer, as none of those 3d arcade systems are exactly direct-x based. So in other words both emulators made them playable, at the cost of not emulating the games in a terribly accurate way.

I should also point out that in both cases, the authors or said emulators were writing the mame drivers at the exact same time. They kept their emulators alive because mame doesn't allow hacks and the only way to get the games playable when the emulation is incomplete is to use hacks.

The best example of this that I can think of is the ultra64 emulator. Sure, it got ki and ki2 playing a lot faster than mame but the timing was so off with the ai that any ki fan immediately noticed the difference. To this day though, people still swear up and down it's "better" because it came out first and because it uses so little resources that they can run it on their crappy 10 year old pc. Again, the author of ultra64 helped to start a driver for mame, somone finished it, and that was that.

Cps2 emulation for mame has always been perfect, save some raster effects which weren't emulated by any other emulator either. Yes the mk games have some sound issues but considering mame is the ONLY emulator that emulates them I don't see your point on those. The sound issue arose when it was discovered that the midway drivers had the sound emulation all hacked up and it was removed.

This isn't an opinion, it's a fact. 99.999999% of the time mame emulates games more accurately, and it can be proven simply by looking at the source code and comparing it to actual hardware.

Now you can prefer one emulator over another, but just because you like one better, it runs better on your system better, or the game is in a more playable state on that emulator doesn't magically make it's emulation more accurate. Do not confuse being able to play a game with being able to prefectly emulate a game, they are not one in the same.

I'm not trying to be mean, but you are spreading falsehoods, falsehoods that all too commonly become "fact" in this community if they are repeated enough.


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PostPosted: Thu Dec 14, 2006 8:36 am 
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Before this becomes to far off topic (yeah, to late), I'll give you that MAME might emulate the games more accurately. But does the overall user care? If they can get a game to play flawlessly and fast with one emulator, and not on MAME, where do you think they'll go? As I said before, I'll take quality over MAME. If After Burner runs better on one emulator, then I'll use that one. Even if it's a "hacked" way of doing it. Bottom line, it's all about having fun and playing old games you liked as a kid. So, logically, you go to the system that can let you do it, and do it well. And, my poing about MK's is that MAME has a history of releasing games with a lot of glitches. No sound support or graphical bugs. That, personally, irritates me because I believe they shouldn't release it until it works flawlessly. OTHER emulators have done that, excuses aside of being hacked or not. I tend to trust what another emulator will do over MAME because they have a tendency of releasing games with a lot of glitches. I'm not trying to bash you. As I said, you have a right to your opinion. I will stick with mine. No one has to be right here. And, I personally still believe that Daphne will be more popular than MAME when/if they ever support DL. But we'll see when that day happens.


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PostPosted: Thu Dec 14, 2006 10:38 am 
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No the average user doesn't care. That is because the average user is a ROMZ kiddie that only wants to play games for free.

I can download a shareware pacman game that at first glance looks and runs exactly like pacman. I don't want that though, I want to play THE pacman game from the arcades. That is exactly what these other emulators are giving you as they are hacked and therfore the gameplay is effected.

So you aren't playing the games you played as a kid if you are running some of these hack jobs. It uses the rom data, but they aren't the same. And you say that "logically you go to the system that can let you do it and do it well". That is my point exactly! These third party emulators may "do it" but they by no means "do it well" as they aren't emulated properly.

Again the mk thing has no relevance. The game was prefectly playable without sound issues before, but it was discovered that a hack was used for the audio and it was taken out, thus now when you start up mk2 you have to adjust the sound as it's too low. People would have rioted in the streets if the mame devs had taken the midway games out over such a small issue.

And do you know why some games appear glitchier in mame? It's real simple when a minor glitch is found in mame the devs go "well we must have read the schematics wrong or there is a chip we don't know about... lets get ahold of the pcb again and try to track it down." Needless to say that can take a while. On the other hand many of these third party emulators go "well I have no clue where that glitch is coming from, but i can alter my code/rendering engine/ect to make it go away". This is a horrible way to do things as every time you rig up a patch the gameplay/graphics skew further and further from the original programming, compound that over several dozen glitches and you get a game that plays nothing like the original, it merely looks similar.


Regardless your posts about mame pogressing too slow is unwarranted. If you'd follow aaron giles's blog, the reason laserdisc games were never tackled is because the core needed to support some sort of video format and nobody would touch it, so the driver never even started. Well he's doing that, there should be some sort of playable beta by next year. The pcbs themselves are simple compared to most mame drivers and will be done in no time, barring any encryption issues. To show just how much faster mame development goes, not one week after he announced that he would be working on this, he recieved a skeleton driver for the alg games. This is something that the daphne team (no offense) wouldn't even start because they were hung up on not being able to find an amiga 500 emulator with a open gpl.

Mark my words, we'll see the games unemulated by daphne in mame by march.

So you better stop throwing stones, because like it or not "the big guy" gets results and if you want to run emulated versions of the alg games, mame could be your only choice. And for the record, although again, I have to state that I like daphne very much and use it often, mame is 100 times more popular than daphne already.... most people have never heard of daphne, or have heard of it but have never tried it. I have no doubt that people who use daphne already will hold on to it for a while, as will I, but there are only like 50 of us.

I'm not bashing daphne, I'm just trying to wake you up a little bit. Mame supports over 5000 unique games, it is THE arcade emulator. Once a game gets emulated in mame the entire community benefits because now it's in the popular eye and more people will be looking for info on the game, which will make emulation more accurate, even on the original emulator as mame devs usually share any info they find with original authors (Matt is talking to Aaron Giles as we speak).

A emulation fan bashing mame is like the pope bashing jesus.... you can do it, but you are only shooting yourself in the foot. :D


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PostPosted: Thu Dec 14, 2006 6:07 pm 
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HowardC wrote:
This is something that the daphne team (no offense) wouldn't even start because they were hung up on not being able to find an amiga 500 emulator with a open gpl.


This isn't true. The main reason I never did any work on ALG games was because the amount of enjoyment I would get from emulating the games didn't justify the amount of work that it would take to emulate them. (ie it wasn't worth it).

Quote:
And for the record, although again, I have to state that I like daphne very much and use it often, mame is 100 times more popular than daphne already.... most people have never heard of daphne, or have heard of it but have never tried it. I have no doubt that people who use daphne already will hold on to it for a while, as will I, but there are only like 50 of us.


I know you were emotional when you wrote this, but I still want to let you know that this hurts me to read this. I feel like you're telling me that all my hard work is irrelevant and appreciated by only a very small number of people. Even if that may be true, it still hurts to hear it and I'd prefer not to.


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PostPosted: Thu Dec 14, 2006 7:15 pm 
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I for one am quite offened at the comments you made HowardC. I realize you are excited about this stuff but no sense saying it like that. I would never write stuff to either team like that as i appreciate both emus. Its up to you and other people to use whatever emu you want. I for one dont see it happening in MAME anytime soon but if it does koll. I will still thank both teams without any harsh words.


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PostPosted: Thu Dec 14, 2006 8:48 pm 
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HowardC wrote:
To show just how much faster mame development goes, not one week after he announced that he would be working on this, he recieved a skeleton driver for the alg games. This is something that the daphne team (no offense) wouldn't even start because they were hung up on not being able to find an amiga 500 emulator with a open gpl.


I'm not sure where you came up with this, but UAE has been using the same license as Daphne for as long as it's been around, and it's emulation of the Amiga system is better by far than MESS last time I checked (which I admit was a long time ago). If it had been a priority it wouldn't have taken much time to put into Daphne either.

I don't see your how your argument works. In Daphne no one wanted to tackle ALG, so it never got done. In MAME no one wanted to tackle external video files, so it never got done. It seems that development time has more to do with motivation than anything else.


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PostPosted: Thu Dec 14, 2006 11:52 pm 
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Matt Ownby wrote:
HowardC wrote:
This is something that the daphne team (no offense) wouldn't even start because they were hung up on not being able to find an amiga 500 emulator with a open gpl.


This isn't true. The main reason I never did any work on ALG games was because the amount of enjoyment I would get from emulating the games didn't justify the amount of work that it would take to emulate them. (ie it wasn't worth it).

Quote:
And for the record, although again, I have to state that I like daphne very much and use it often, mame is 100 times more popular than daphne already.... most people have never heard of daphne, or have heard of it but have never tried it. I have no doubt that people who use daphne already will hold on to it for a while, as will I, but there are only like 50 of us.


I know you were emotional when you wrote this, but I still want to let you know that this hurts me to read this. I feel like you're telling me that all my hard work is irrelevant and appreciated by only a very small number of people. Even if that may be true, it still hurts to hear it and I'd prefer not to.



I've made a few posts over the years about alg emulation and although you also said that you weren't that intersted (why is beyond me as the dl style games aren't very interactive and the alg games are) you also would ramble on about not being able to find open source code for the amiga 500.


I'm sorry if that hurt your feelings, but it was meant as a compliment to daphne's users, not an insult to you. Most people just "don't get" laserdisc games and aren't going to bother with ld emulation until it's completely "automagic" (in other words it's in mame and they can order a pre-burned dvd off of some romz service).

With that being said, I can say with some certainty that pretty much everyone that is a fan of laserdisc games is using daphne now, it's just that there aren't that many laserdisc fans and the sheer number of games mame emulates is always going to make it the most popular emulator out there. I appreciate everything that you've done, if that means anything to you.

I don't know how you guys interpreted this as daphne bashing when I haven't said anything negative about how well daphne emulates laserdisc games, rather I've defended how well mame does things when every joe blow that's chimed in on this thread except for me has said "no I won't try it because it's mame." That's the most frightning statement an emulation fan can make considering literally hundreds of talented individuals have contributed to the mame project, many of which added the code from their own stand-alone emulators.


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PostPosted: Fri Dec 15, 2006 12:04 am 
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Mark Broadhead wrote:

I don't see your how your argument works. In Daphne no one wanted to tackle ALG, so it never got done. In MAME no one wanted to tackle external video files, so it never got done. It seems that development time has more to do with motivation than anything else.


It works in that when you guys decide to tackle a new problem, there are like three of you, so understandably, it can take you forever to get results. Also you often have to start form scratch, as daphne only supports a few games and there might not be any common code to draw from already in daphne.

When something is started in mame, it has a huge code base to draw from (I believe amiga 500 was already in mess as were the processors needed to build a dl driver) and dozens of active programmers ready to pitch in if they can. Plus because mame is the emulator with the highest profile, when something is added to it, it makes big news in the emulation community, so people with that random bit of unknown information are more likely to come out of the woodwork, which is what happened in this case.

Remember I didn't say aaron giles gets things done faster than matt ownby, I said mame gets things done faster than daphne. ;)


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PostPosted: Fri Dec 15, 2006 4:06 am 
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HowardC wrote:
I've made a few posts over the years about alg emulation and although you also said that you weren't that intersted (why is beyond me as the dl style games aren't very interactive and the alg games are) you also would ramble on about not being able to find open source code for the amiga 500.


It's not that I wouldn't love to use any source code that's out there (I would).

The main issue is that the mpeg2 decoder I am using is licensed under the GPL so in order to use it, everything else in Daphne must be GPL'd too.

So I can either use non-GPL'd code, and lose the ability for Daphne to have a VLDP (it would be back to real laserdisc players only) or else stick to GPL'd code and have VLDP. The choice is pretty clear to me :)


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PostPosted: Fri Dec 15, 2006 5:18 am 
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sounds like someone's a mame fanboy.


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PostPosted: Fri Dec 15, 2006 7:00 am 
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chip wrote:
sounds like someone's a mame fanboy.



Not at all, I'm a fan of whatever works the best. Just by concidence mame almost always works the best given the alternatives. About the only exception I can give to that is zinc, but technically mame still emulates it more accurately due to the software rendering and the fault is in my slow computer and not mame.


Btw you guys should play with the test drivers for the alg games in .111 I wasn't expecting them to work, but to my suprise they are already functional! Of course there isn't any video, but the boot-up sprites were there, I popped in a quarter and to my suprise I heard the coin up sound, the hud appeared, and the framenumber jumped to the first scene. Of course I'm sure the emulation isn't complete at this point, but my guess is they will be in a fairly playable state as soon as aaron finishes the video format.


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PostPosted: Fri Dec 15, 2006 7:09 pm 
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HowardC wrote:
Btw you guys should play with the test drivers for the alg games in .111 I wasn't expecting them to work, but to my suprise they are already functional! Of course there isn't any video, but the boot-up sprites were there, I popped in a quarter and to my suprise I heard the coin up sound, the hud appeared, and the framenumber jumped to the first scene.


This can only be a good thing. I too was very impressed by how fast he got these games working. Here's a snippet of an email exchange we had regarding how he was able to get these running so quickly:

Quote:
Me:
> How did you get ALG working so fast? People have been
> bugging me to add ALG support for ages and I've always
> assumed it would be too much effort to do, but you seem to
> have whipped it up pretty dang fast.

Aaron:
We already had some Amiga-based arcade games in MAME, and I had done a
lot of work about a year ago in cleaning up the Amiga-based code, so I
was pretty familiar. Apart from that, it's just a genlock, which
replaces background color 0 with the incoming video stream. Plus, the
initial work was done by someone else who had all the ROMs and
decryption information, so I just took his work, cleaned it up, and
added it. The hard part was working out the inputs and the gun
interface.


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PostPosted: Fri Dec 15, 2006 10:10 pm 
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I figured as such.

See this is what kinda makes me mad, but I accept it.

I'm sure this mystery person never mentioned to you that they had figured out the decryption info, which probably would have been the biggest stumbling block if you were to attempt adding support.


It's like I was talking about before, for whatever reason people are more willing to contribute to mame than anything else.

Anyway, maybe after the mame dirvers are finished you can take a look at the code and think about adding them into daphne. You couldn't use it line by line, but you could use it to figure out the decryption method.

The only thing that worries me about the mame drivers is Aaron's choice for the video format. It seems a little impractical to make a completely lossless copy of a laserdisc when mame is about preserving the original arcade experience and these games were all displayed on a glorified ntsc television with composite quality.

That's why I'd rather see them in daphne at this point, but hopefully Aaron will either change his mind or release his compression utility so people can re-compress the images to a more sensible size.


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PostPosted: Mon Dec 18, 2006 1:41 am 
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HowardC wrote:
It's like I was talking about before, for whatever reason people are more willing to contribute to mame than anything else.

Anyway, maybe after the mame dirvers are finished you can take a look at the code and think about adding them into daphne. You couldn't use it line by line, but you could use it to figure out the decryption method.

The only thing that worries me about the mame drivers is Aaron's choice for the video format. It seems a little impractical to make a completely lossless copy of a laserdisc when mame is about preserving the original arcade experience and these games were all displayed on a glorified ntsc television with composite quality.

That's why I'd rather see them in daphne at this point, but hopefully Aaron will either change his mind or release his compression utility so people can re-compress the images to a more sensible size.


Three reasons why people are more likely to contribute to Mame/Use Mame than other emulators.

1. It's simply easier to have everything in one location, rather than having X number of emulators for Y games.

2. Many projects go belly up after some period of time. Stella, Project 64, and so many others with potential. Mame's been in active development for many years, and no indication that will change. You can also grab Mame's source, work on whatever you like, get it together in your own time, and submit it for approval.

3. Arcade accuracy. It's pretty much as close to the real thing as you can get.

Which leads into my next topic.

LD games are rather unique when considered against Mame's purpose. Mame's purpose is to document and archive Arcade Games, presumably as close to the real thing as possible. While it's true that the original displays were pretty low quality compared to today, the discs themselves were much higher quality. So what do you do? Preserve it at the quality it was viewed, or preserve it in the quality it was actually capable of? The chose the quality it was capable of, likely they'll have the ability to use filters to achieve the quality it was originally viewed at, like their other filters.

As far as filesize goes, it's likely being done this way for a secondary reason as well. Mame's purpose is not just to play games, yet the addition of LD games is going to attract alot of people who make demands and treat it like a toy. The filesizes can inhibit that, alot of the poke-rom types will be turned off by multi-gigabyte files. Just like Daphne's originally "Huge" filesizes kept away the rom-kiddies long enough for sensible heads at Digital Leisure to sort of give it their blessing.

Don't get me wrong on any of this. I *like* Daphne, I've used it for many years now, since right when DVD->Daph first came out. I've nothing but the highest respect for the people who've put it together.

But Mame's purpose is to document and archive all of the arcade games possible, and it was inevetible that this day would come. It's a shame the two should conflict, but it was bound to happen one day.


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PostPosted: Mon Dec 18, 2006 5:27 am 
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What conflict? Who cares how many emulators run laserdisk games. I'm sure Daphne will have some advantages and I'm sure Mame will too. Who gives a shit, Matt and the team have put countless hours getting Daphne to this point. I just don't understand the "conflict" in emulators. I'm sure some Mame developers use Daphne and I'm sure Matt and the gang use Mame. I love 'em both. How can people try to pit one emulator against another since EVERYONE is working for free. Keep up the good work and I'm sure I'll be using them both for a very looong time. and to quote Mr Do

Relax it's all about the games


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PostPosted: Mon Dec 18, 2006 6:58 am 
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I agree, mame and daphne aren't conflicting at all, mame and daphne users on the other hand, that seems to be another story (which is why I was defending poor old mame).

On the other hand the choice of language wasn't necessary to get your point across. :wink:


Regarding the filesizes in mame, the problem is files this large are going to scare off developers as well, which might slow progress in emulation once aaron gets bored with it and he leaves the emulation of "other" laserdisc games (such as time traveler) to other people. 35 gigs is a sizeable investment of space, even with todays 300 gig harddrives.

And I still argue that the original video output quality is all that matters. Allowing users to display the output at a higher quality than the original machines did falls into the playability factor, not the preservation factor and mame is all about preservation and documentation. Read my post on aaron's blog..... mame is not a film preservation project, it's a game preservation project and the footage that is actually available in full archival quality (35 mm film prior to being transferred to laserdisc) are already stored in a film vault somewhere with digital leisure keeping an eye on them. Most of the other games weren't even filmed/transferred at the quality he is suggesting to store them in.


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PostPosted: Mon Dec 18, 2006 8:07 am 
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HowardC wrote:
I agree, mame and daphne aren't conflicting at all, mame and daphne users on the other hand, that seems to be another story (which is why I was defending poor old mame).


Yes, and this trend (fighting between the users) will continue, I predict. It's kind of interesting to watch if one can detach oneself emotionally.

Quote:
Regarding the filesizes in mame, the problem is files this large are going to scare off developers as well, which might slow progress in emulation once aaron gets bored with it and he leaves the emulation of "other" laserdisc games (such as time traveler) to other people. 35 gigs is a sizeable investment of space, even with todays 300 gig harddrives.


I think the file sizes are here to stay, partly because of the fact that they are inconvenient for users to have on their hard drives. I also think that it's going to be lossless-only with no support for lossy or re-encoding at all, again in order to keep the file sizes big.


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PostPosted: Mon Dec 18, 2006 3:50 pm 
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Well, I'm planted firmly on the fence here. MAME is now (in my opinion) an ideal emulator for coders and purists, there's a big code library to use and exploit, and there's a version for practically every platform you can think of.

However, it isn't the best emulator for users, single game products invariably are optimised for the specific cases, and will run faster, and with more features in many cases.

I think there's a place for both - as a huge ALG fan, I'll probably be trying MAME's engine to play the game. However, I would much rather see the UAE code used to add it to Daphne, as the VLDP is a much more gamer-friendly solution, if not as pixel accurate.


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PostPosted: Mon Dec 18, 2006 6:30 pm 
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Matt Ownby wrote:
HowardC wrote:
And for the record, although again, I have to state that I like daphne very much and use it often, mame is 100 times more popular than daphne already.... most people have never heard of daphne, or have heard of it but have never tried it. I have no doubt that people who use daphne already will hold on to it for a while, as will I, but there are only like 50 of us.


I know you were emotional when you wrote this, but I still want to let you know that this hurts me to read this. I feel like you're telling me that all my hard work is irrelevant and appreciated by only a very small number of people. Even if that may be true, it still hurts to hear it and I'd prefer not to.


I'm not trying to dig up the past here by commenting on this, but I'd like to say the following....

I just found out about Daphne a few days ago. I still have yet to use it (waiting for the DVD's from DL to come in the mail), but all I can say is this-- I am amazed by the brilliant minds behind this project. For YEARS I've been wanting to play the original version of DL-- just like I saw played in the arcade when I was little. This emu you guys worked on together is like a god-sent for me. I thought I'd never be able to play the *real* version again and relive those fond memories. It means a lot to me as a fan of Bluth's work that you all invested so much time and work into this project. It's validating and lets me know that my-- as well as many other's-- memories *are* important and that the game really is so much fun to the point it still lives on 20+ years later.

Yes, I do use MAME. MAME is cool, no doubt. Very buggy, but at times it pulls through and some of the games work. But to compare MAME to Daphne is like comparing apples and oranges. MAME may be coming out with their own DL roms and such, but I highly doubt it'll ever compare to Daphne's version. There is too much passion and love for these games which has been invested as evidently shown by your craftsmenship. I'm not implying the people who work on MAME do not have the same passion, but after playing countless games on there, they're not... well... *precise.* I'm not trying to put MAME down and I could be wrong, but I foresee any laserdisc game like DL emulated on MAME being like the Old Navy version. It will appear okay... it will have a few defects, but will mainly be for the person who just wants the game to just have it and then forget about it/toss it off of their hard drive in a few months. But the Daphne emulator appears to be the Banana Repulic version-- extremely well constructed, worth the time (money), and aimed towards those individuals who are willing to invest in the best/highest quality. In other words, Daphne is the designer emu, MAME-- albeit a fantastic emu-- is more for "everyone" who just wants to have something to "knock around in."

Did my clothes analogy make ANY sense??? LOL!

Anyway, in short: thanks for making this. Your efforts, surely, are not wasted nor not appreciated. And just because you don't have hundreds of people on the message board thanking you or telling you how great it is, dosen't mean it's not true. Keep up the great work-- you and your creation are VERY much appreciated.


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PostPosted: Sat Jan 27, 2007 6:31 am 
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Bottom line is everyone will continue to use Daphne because no one wants to download 15 gigs of data just to play Dragons Lair.


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PostPosted: Sun Feb 18, 2007 3:08 am 
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Matt Ownby wrote:
I know you were emotional when you wrote this, but I still want to let you know that this hurts me to read this. I feel like you're telling me that all my hard work is irrelevant and appreciated by only a very small number of people. Even if that may be true, it still hurts to hear it and I'd prefer not to.


I for one truly appreciate all the work done for this awesome emulator. I am a huge fan of the laserdisc games and love having the ability to play them again. I am also a huge fan of MAME for the same reasons. It is great to play all the games I have pumped thousands of quaters in when I was younger. At the same time, I highly doubt I will ever download the massive files needed for MAME laserdisc games. Why should I waste hundreds of gigs of HD space when I could run the same games using 10 gigs? Also most CHD games run like shit. They are slow, choppy and unplayable. Daphne runs these games perfectly and it is very easy to use. I will be running Daphne for many years to come, and look forward to the progress it makes in the future. So to all the developers, thank you and keep up the great work!!!


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 Post subject: HowardCs promise to us
PostPosted: Wed Mar 14, 2007 4:45 pm 
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Im still seeing March go by so fast and yet Howards promise that MAME would have lasergames running is not here. I guess he mustve lied to me and that makes me sad.. :(


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PostPosted: Thu Mar 15, 2007 1:01 am 
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I think it's kinda silly to talk about mame running laser games at this point in time. It would be dog slow with choppy video and sound even on the fastest computers. Even the docs at Mame.net say some games simply cannot be run accurately without a 10 or 20 GHZ processor. So maybe in a few more years folks.


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PostPosted: Wed Apr 04, 2007 5:45 am 
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ztomiccomputers wrote:
Even the docs at Mame.net say some games simply cannot be run accurately without a 10 or 20 GHZ processor.

Some games, yeah - like those that involve sophisticated 3D (Tekken 3) or fairly modern processing power (Street Fighter 3.)

I have a hard time believing that the laserdisc games fit that description. They usually involve two things: a full-screen video renderer, and a small amount of computing power to run the game. Computational power should not be an obstacle for either function.

As noted above, the main thing holding back the laserdisc emulation was the absence of a truly open-source video codec. People wanted the MAME team to use DivX or XviD or whatever - but they couldn't be sure that they wouldn't run into licensing issues. I don't blame them for being skittish. Now that that obstacle is apparently gone, it's not surprising that they're knocking together drivers fairly quickly.

Matt, I have a great deal of respect for you and your work - it's an extraordinary product for a one-man work.

The MAME team also commands tremendous respect for their phenomenal successes. In my mind, it is the shining example of what a large, marginally centralized team of dedicated, uber-skilled people can do. As a movement, it impresses me even more than Linux; frankly, I think the challenge is greater.

So my position is: We celebrate both projects, and we carry forward our hopes for the future of both of 'em.

- David Stein


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