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 Post subject: MACH3 MAME WIP - Message to Chip and Matt
PostPosted: Thu Feb 06, 2003 7:18 am 
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Dear Chip and Matt,

Here are some screenshots of a MACH3 MAME Testdriver. Over at MAME, there is a debate about just what codecs should be used to document and emulate the video and audio. Thios persons testdriver is currently using MPEG.

See http://www.boldtower.com/mach3.html for details.

Stephen


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 Post subject: DAPHNE to MAME
PostPosted: Thu Feb 06, 2003 10:39 am 
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Personally I think all of the DAPHNE team should help the MAME dev team and see if we can't finish all the Laser Disc games.

Some classic arcade games are just waiting to be completed and emulated. With SMF working on Firefox, I just hope we can see this being played in the next 12 months if not before.

Any chance of this happening guys? I know DAPHNE is a pet project but perhaps adding your expertise of LD games to the MAMEDEV's we might nail the lot of them?

Thanks


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 Post subject: Re: MACH3 MAME WIP - Message to Chip and Matt
PostPosted: Thu Feb 06, 2003 9:08 pm 
DAPHNE Creator
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StephenH wrote:
Here are some screenshots of a MACH3 MAME Testdriver. Over at MAME, there is a debate about just what codecs should be used to document and emulate the video and audio. Thios persons testdriver is currently using MPEG.

See http://www.boldtower.com/mach3.html for details.


Hi Stephen,

Could you clarify the key points you wanted to bring to our attention regarding this?


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 Post subject: Re: DAPHNE to MAME
PostPosted: Thu Feb 06, 2003 9:09 pm 
DAPHNE Creator
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Ad_Enuff wrote:
Personally I think all of the DAPHNE team should help the MAME dev team and see if we can't finish all the Laser Disc games.


Are you on the MAME dev team then?


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 Post subject: I just thought you might be interested
PostPosted: Fri Feb 07, 2003 6:03 am 
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I just thought you might be interested because there was some talk of MACH3 here by others. Also, you were interested when I mentioned about the Dragons Lair MAME Driver a while ago, so I thought along the same lines for this.

I also thought that this implementation may have some interest to devs because of the audio track sync system that MACH3 and US vs them use for target data. People were wondering if this could survive compression, or how this is encoded.


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 Post subject: MACH3, MAME, etc...
PostPosted: Fri Feb 07, 2003 6:05 pm 
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I suppose there is a certain amount of 'pride' that makes us want to keep Daphne as a separate project, but the real problem is the incompatible licenses of the code bases (GPL vs. strict non-commercial.) We can share techniques, but not the code itself, which increases the amount of work to move things from one platform to the other. MAME may go GPL in the future, though, which would help matters.

Also, much of the 'magic' of Daphne lies in the high-performance MPEG2 playback and searching, but the MAME devs have said they do not want an MPEG-based solution in MAME due to patent concerns. (The fear is that the MPEG consortium that owns the patents will some day start demanding license fees, just like Fraunhoffer has now done with MP3.)

Until the MAME devs can find a patent-free, high-performance, cross-platform video codec, lasergames won't make it into the official builds. If they (or we) can obtain such a codec, I'm not opposed to working on game drivers for MAME. Since we've already worked out a lot of details about the game hardware and LD player emulation, I'd like to see our names in the MAME dev credits list... :D

Oh, and re: the target data for MACH3, MAME's solution is to pre-decode the audio data track to a binary .dat file, and use that directly during emulation, rather than decoding it in realtime. Perhaps this isn't as 'pure' as using the raw audio stream, but MACH3 was the only game that used such a system, so a generic approach isn't really that useful anyway.


The main thing that's keeping us from adding MACH3 (and DL2!) to Daphne is the lack of an integrated 8086 CPU core. There is at least one GPL'd core out there, but so far no one has done the work to hook it into Daphne. Any volunteers? :o


Oh, and thanks to all for your continued interest and support of the Daphne project. There's been a lot of buzz about the unofficial MACH3 driver for MAME... I hope people don't forget Daphne's accomplishments too quickly.... :(


-Warren.


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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sat Feb 08, 2003 9:03 am 
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Warren,

I have to say, it is only a certain percentage of the emulation scene that actually remember Laser Disc arcade machines. Which is why DAPHNE doesn’t get the interest and backing of other people it deserves.

I for one, as a 32 year old arcade fan, remember when these machines originally were about in my local arcade or on holiday.

From what I can tell, people are more interested in NEOGEO, CPS2, SEGA System 32, NAMCO System 22 and perhaps now El Semi's SEGA Model 2 emulator.

Anyone playing DAPHNE will suddenly realise that it’s all rather linear gameplay and will get bored rather quickly. After all we are talking 20 year old or so games (Dragon's Lair 1983??). Plus you will need all the FMV which after seeing how many people are interested downloading AREA 51, Killer Instinct or even Maximum Force for MAME goes to show how many people suddenly lose interest when the amount of downloading required suddenly is enormous (Maximum Force 2 is 1 Gig even zipped up!).

Of course, I want to play these Laser Disc games, and the faster it happens all the better, which is why I suggested working with the MAME team.

Yes it’s your pet project and course I understand you wish it to remain so, but in the long term, which project will get finished first? Look at RAINE? Which emulator had a fully working version of Rainbow Islands? MAME or RAINE? ....MAME of course! Which makes RAINE a rather pointless emulator full stop!

Don’t cut off your nose to spite your face, perhaps MAME is the way forward for the whole of DAPHNE's developers and perhaps in doing may open up all your hard work to a mass audience. Something of which most people haven’t even heard of you yet alone played Dragon's lair!


Last edited by Ad_Enuff on Sat Feb 08, 2003 11:20 am, edited 1 time in total.

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 Post subject: What about the Theora Codec
PostPosted: Sat Feb 08, 2003 10:54 am 
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http://www.theora.org is a Video Codec that is open source. Yes, someone does have a patent on it, but it is licensed to Xiph.org, for commercial and non-commercial use, indefinetly.


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 Post subject: Theora...
PostPosted: Sun Feb 09, 2003 5:02 pm 
DAPHNE Team
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I've been keeping an eye on Theora, and the VP3 codec from On2, on which Theora is based. I think some of the MAMEdevs may be eyeing it as well. It's in pretty early stages right now, but it's definitely something to watch.

It remains to be seen if it will have sufficient playback/search speed for laserdisc emulation, but I would think that at least the games with minimal searching (DL/SA/Cliff/etc.) would be usable.

The "irrevocable license to freely use" the patents is an interesting concept. It doesn't give me a warm, fuzzy feeling about using it (they could still make some kind of claim in the future, whether it's valid or not.) However, if Xiph.org is adopting it, that's a pretty strong point in its favor.

Things are getting interesting again! :D

-Warren.


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 Post subject: Some Info
PostPosted: Fri Feb 14, 2003 5:23 am 
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Warren,

According to the Dragon's Lair Project site, it also mentions that US vs Them uses the same Audio Track Decoder codes from the LD.

I wonder if this data is be stored in a similar way, that early computers used for their "tape recorder storage". I know early Texas Instruments, Apple, Commodore, and others allowed the user to store data using a standard tape recorder.

Unlike a Tape, I wondered if this system was troublesome because if an LD "Skipped", it would miss data, and it seems like laser based media are more vunerable to skipping when dirt or other info is found on the disks.


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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Mon Feb 17, 2003 12:51 pm 
DAPHNE Team
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Quote:
According to the Dragon's Lair Project site, it also mentions that US vs Them uses the same Audio Track Decoder codes from the LD.


Hmm, this is not correct. I once borrowed and played an Us Vs. Them disc, and found that the right audio channel is blank. (It *does* use the frame #s encoded in the vertical blank, but all the PR-8210 games use this.)

I'll have to ask Jeff to change that.


Quote:
I wonder if this data is be stored in a similar way, that early computers used for their "tape recorder storage".


Yes, on MACH3 it sounds very similar to the FSK (frequency-shift keying) tone used for cassette storage on old computers. I'd be curious to see what code the MAME team used to decode this into binary data. (I once wrote something similar to read my old Sinclair ZX81 tapes...) Here's an interesting, general purpose decoder: http://www.threedee.com/jcm/audio/


Thanks,
-Warren.


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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Fri Apr 18, 2003 5:11 am 
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Ad_Enuff wrote:
Warren,

Anyone playing DAPHNE will suddenly realise that it’s all rather linear gameplay and will get bored rather quickly. After all we are talking 20 year old or so games (Dragon's Lair 1983??). Plus you will need all the FMV which after seeing how many people are interested downloading AREA 51, Killer Instinct or even Maximum Force for MAME goes to show how many people suddenly lose interest when the amount of downloading required suddenly is enormous (Maximum Force 2 is 1 Gig even zipped up!).




I'm not sure where you are getting your info, but killer instinct and the other harddrive games have been EXTREMELY popular since their inclusion in mame. Why? Because of the fmv. People love things with cool graphics, even if the gameplay sometimes sucks. Afterall isn't that what the modern video game industry is based upon. :wink:


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