daphne‘s up and running under mamewah. for those not in the know, daphne emulates the old laserdisc arcade games. we just have space ace and dragon’s lair right now, but i fully expect that other such gems will make an appearance later on.

the trick is in setting up the daphne.nms and daphne.ini files correctly in mamewah. more details later as i have type to post them.

embrace your inner pizza,

-tony.

hi-scores are working, thanks to mame32FX’s save states. MAME now automatically saves the machine state when exiting a game, so that when you launch it again, it picks up right where it left off. obviously, this keeps persistent high scores, and lets you make it all the way through a game if you want to, in multiple sessions. that is, if no one else plays it while you’re gone.

the potential downside is that if someone else leaves a game in the middle, you might have to wait and die in order to start over. i think that this is outweighed by the fact that you don’t have to wait for the machine to boot and check its roms and do video tests and all that.

party for your right to fight,

-tony.

we’ve switched emulators. we were originally originally using plain ol’ vanilla MAME, but i like the occasional autofire button, so a flavored build was in order. for the past couple weeks we’ve been using mame32 plus, which is a nice little emu that features some nice things including autofire. here’s where the problems start. our romset is .105, the version of mame we were usin’ is .105, but the mame plus we had was *gasp* .105u5! i wouldn’t have worried, except that some games like gauntlet weren’t running. so i tried and tried (and still i can’t find / a lollipop that’s halfway refined…) to find an older version of mame plus that was .105. no such love. i could only get .106, and while i know i’m going to have to update the romset eventually, i have no desire to do so right now. so.

say hello to mame32FX, featuring autofire and high-score saving, among other things. we hope you enjoy it… we know we do!

less filling, tastes great,

-tony..

well, maybe Pacifico instead.

so i went to the electronics shop around the corner, only to find out that they don’t make the 6-pin kind of molex connector that i need anymore. *sigh*. so i bought some crimping pins and connector blocks anyway, and jury-rigged a new video cable together. it took most of the lunch hour; i was tired and i wasted a block because i put the damn pins in the wrong direction. duh. but i got it together, and it works GREAT. the monitor still isn’t the best monitor in the world, but by god it works.

i invited people by to check it out, and there was pretty much a constant stream of people from about 4:30 until 8 when i left the office. almost every person who came by flipped through the list of games, and inevitably found The Game. the one game that had captured their imaginations when they were kids. the game that they had plugged the most quarters into. the one that they kept coming back to. a grin would creep up on their face as they read the title, and as the game started, they would inevitably say “oh, man, i remember this game. i put so many quarters into this…” and the waves of nostalgia emanating from the cabinet was just awesome.

okay, more later. g’night.

i forget if i’ve mentioned this or not, but thanks to jason, we have a soundblaster Live! card and an extra 60gb hdd. this means that the roms and all can live on the 60gb drive and not be affected by the OS on the 20gb boot drive, especially if we need to reinstall or something. awesome! it’s better than seperation of church and state!

PC is running awesomely. may have to rescale the layout to less than 1024×768, though. i forget if our arcade monitor can do that high of a res.

so in one post, i’m talking about gentoo vs. SuSE, and in the next one, i’m revealing how the machine is working fine with MAMEwah and XPSP2. perhaps i should explain a leetle, no?

so i didn’t get too far in the gentoo build. i realized how inane it was to build every little thing that i might need from source. i know that there’s a performance gain, but the benefit didn’t outweigh the cost for me. so i switched to ubuntu, which seemed to be generally the same thing but a much more stupid-friendly build. again, i got stuck. not for lack of trying, but at work we use SuSE, and i’ve had my head wrapped around the way novell does linux for so long that it was a real pain to try and think about things the ubuntu way. conf files are in different directories, even runlevels work differently. again, not worth it. i’m not slagging the build of either flavor; i just didn’t want to invest the time to learn a new paradigm.

so i tooled around a little bit more with advMAME, and discovered that a lot of my initial problems in SuSE with svgalib and advmame were that i hadn’t had everything installed that i needed. there was a lot of kernel rebuilding and package-installing. it was very intense, and it’s already faded from my brain, much like the few glorious days after finals are over when everything leaks right out of your ears. suffice to say that i got it all running, but then advmenu would randomly hang when advmame was done running a game, and i couldn’t get the damn frontend to come back without canceling the process and launching advmenu again. not really great for an ‘embedded’ solution inside a cabinet. so after much more tinkering and hemming and hawing, i let loose a great cry of anguish, and installed XP instead. you know something? mamewah runs great. i’m sad that i couldn’t get linux to be the toy i wanted it to be, but i’m much more happy in the end, knowing that my end solution works.

pc is up and running mamewah 1.161 just fine. need to set up keyboard combos inside MAME so that we can manipulate everything from the control panel. kurt brought in buttons, tape, and wiring so we can start drilling the new control panel. next monday or tuesday we should be able to bring the cabinet into the office and start working on it there.

i guess i have to buckle down and actually start designing the control panel!

setting up mamewah was tricky but manageable. i think i would have had an easier time of it if the documentation had been more complete. i’m pretty sure it wasn’t my fault, either. i’m used to reading man pages and all that crap, but these docs were not good. they were okay for general stuff, but after you get past the generics and into the details, they pretty much fell apart and i wound up looking online for a LOT of the stuff that i wound up using.

so here’s what’s happening recently:

not much.

ha! i kid. seriously, though. we’re still moving ahead, but slowly. right now i’m trying to get the right build for the box. i want a good combination of minimal overhead vs. ease of maintenance, and this is proving to be hard to set up. :) there’s an advanceCD build that boots straight off of a cd (very minimal overhead), but it would need to have to be altered by hand to look at the hard drive, etc. (and we’d have to do it again every time we decided to use a new release), which == high-maintenance.

i think we may have a possible compromise in gentoo between overhead and maintenance, but i won’t say more until i have it up and running. i spent a good chunk of time last night setting it up only to realize that i’d set up the stupid partitions wrong, and i have to do it over. :) oh well.

just so you guys know, the project isn’t dead by any stretch of the imagination.

i gave up on svgalib under SuSE. i know it’s probably an extreme decision to switch flavors of linux merely for a build problem, but i was also having bloat issues, since we’ve only got a 20gb HDD to work with at the moment. i wasn’t able to get a minimal install to my liking without expending considerable effort to wade through pages of dependencies in YaST, so i decided to see what gentoo has to offer (i’ve noticed lots of people saying that gentoo is what they’ve used for their cabinets).

so, we’ll see what happens. i’m doing my first emerge –sync right now.
in other news, not much is happening. we’re still moving forward, though. it’s just quiet. maybe… too quiet. ;)

i know, i know. i could use AdvanceCD, but i want a little more than that, and i don’t like the potentially over-complicated upgrade path for what is essentially a static disc image. i’d have to rewire the config files every time a new disc came out, and i think it would just be ugly. plus, if i left R&H, not many people would be able to maintain the machine, which could be Bad.

yet, i’m trying to install svgalib on this box. just for advmame. i must have some kind of latent masochism or something of which i wasn’t previously aware. sigh.