MAME 0.242
mamedev.org
mamedev.org
I don't know all the details, but the results speak for themselves. I wholeheartedly believe this should be the present and future standard of LaserDisc preservation.
Unfortunately the laser disc games didn’t really withstand the test if time between defects in the media and the general failure rates of the consumer quality electronics inside them. Emulation seems to be the only way to enjoy them now. I’ve not seen a working cabinet in many years.
Wikipedia:
> Although similar in appearance to compact discs or DVDs, early LaserDiscs used analog video stored in the composite domain (having a video bandwidth and resolution approximately equivalent to the 1-inch (25 mm) Type C videotape format) with analog FM stereo sound and PCM digital audio. Later discs used D-2 instead of Type C videotape for mastering. The LaserDisc at its most fundamental level was still recorded as a series of pits and lands much like CDs, DVDs, and even Blu-ray Discs are today. In true digital media the pits, or their edges, directly represent 1s and 0s of a binary digital information stream. On a LaserDisc, the information is encoded as analog frequency modulation and is contained in the lengths and spacing of the pits.
Any clue it’s possible to read vinyl records this way or are the grooves/material too ill suited for lasers to easily read? Reading deformities of grooves seems like it would require orders of magnitude more precision than the length and spacing of pits, but I know nothing about the physics and hardware here.
Vinyl wear by using a needle is overstated anyway [2].
Last time I looked into this, I heard it was good if you had a REALLY good record cleaner. It’s extremely sensitive to dust in the groove.
Audio is somewhat more complicated; the original standards had that as analog too, but digital options were introduced (I'd like to say early 1980s, but not entirely sure).
All for the sake of re-living one's teenage years :D
[1]: https://lakka.tv/
Retroarch is a frontend for libretro, which provides a set of APIs that emulators can use for I/O. If you can produce a library from an emulator that conforms to the APIs, then you've got what Retroarch calls a "core".
Thus retroarch acts as a kind of target for emulators, that lets them all use a common frontend, including for things like button mapping (each emulator maps to a set of "fake" Retroarch inputs, which Retroarch then maps to your actual controller) or video output/filter settings.
This is a different approach from other meta-emulators that typically invoke full, independent emulators as if running them from the command line, and try to manage them externally.
And yes, there are multiple mame cores for Retroarch:
https://github.com/search?q=libretro%20mame&type=Everything
[EDIT] Also, I've run Lakka on hardware as weak as a Raspberry Pi 2. You can't use fancy video filters (say, to make games look the way they did on a CRT TV or monitor) but it'll run a whole bunch of Mame games, plus all 8-bit console games and most from the 16-bit era at acceptable frame rates and latency. It also worked well enough to be comfortably playable for a surprising number of Playstation (PSX/PS1, the first one, that is) games and for exactly one of the N64 games I tried on it (Super Mario 64—all other N64 games were a lag-fest, if they ran at all, but that one was smooth and snappy). Any mini PC from the last 10 years is probably more powerful than an RPi2, so should do even better. RPi4 takes that "most" on the 16 bit era and makes it "all" and makes a bunch more N64 and Playstation games playable. Probably many Playstation 2 games as well, but I've not tried it.
Is this really necessary? Why not map input devices directly to core inputs? Makes configuration needlessly complex in my experience.
Now you only have one place to go remap buttons, rather than N.
(That would be my guess, anyway.)
It's less complex than a wrapper program having to know a bunch of different config formats and conventions.
Again, cores run as shared libraries inside Retroarch. These "fake inputs" aren't, like, actual OS-level simulated devices. It's more like a core listens for events of type (name made up) "ra_analog_0" and treats anything coming in as left-stick x-axis positive-direction input, and by convention so do most or all other cores that emulate a system with a left analog stick (or perhaps with just one), unless they have a good reason not to, so default Retroarch-provided automatic input device mapping can make most common gamepads do something sensible with most cores, as soon as you connect them. Then if you prefer to swap left and right sticks, you do it one place and it works everywhere. Or if you prefer to swap left and right on just one game, you do that. The core never has to know about any of it.
The drawback to RetroArch is that the UI is non-intuitive and it's a bitch to configure.
I just want to download an OS image, write it to a USB stick, put my ROMs on the stick, put the stick in my mini PC, and boot it up and play.
I run it on some old quad core amd HP thin PC. Plays all non-3d games perfect.
Also look into a Mister. Not a mame cab but tons of arcade games and consoles. That’s my “ass in seat” gaming rig.
You run an updater script which pulls in all the stuff.
That will update it and download the mame Roms from archive.org. You will need a de-10 nano, sdram card, and a usb otg hub. I also have a Wi-Fi and a Bluetooth dongle. Works amazing. New PSX core is 90% there. Saturn is coming too, but no ETA
This is not necessarily a feature; actually I consider it an anti-feature, as one is forced to chase the romset versions (either download the full set, which nowadays is tens of GBs, or the diff, which I've never tried).
If one actually plays games, and they play correctly, there's no value in upgrading the emulator and ROMs to new versions.
I think this is not exact, as, if memory serves me well, I had breakages with existing romsets when upgrading MAME.
While a romset itself may not change, another one may take the place of the default set, and the previous gets renamed, so it requires manual intervention.
I used to play with MAME games - not hundreds, but I think a few tens, and the hassle of upgrading was never worth, with I think only one case where upgrade was required.
So, YMMV. My suggestion for casual users is that if one has a given set of favourite ROMs, and they work, there's no reason to upgrade.
"On December 24th, 1996, Nicola Salmoria began working on his single hardware emulators (for example Multi-Pac), which he merged into one program during January 1997. He named the accomplishment by the name of Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, or MAME for short (pronounced as the word 'maim' in English, other languages may differ). ..."