Notices

I have just updated the sdlmame-wiki with my findings up to now.

I will add to it later on.

Must get sleep.......

Sorry for the lack of updates to sdlmame. Besides being in lab almost every waking hour i have gotten sucked into playing uqm in the little time i have for fun.

Dev bloggish stuff:
Part of the problem is deciding where to direct my efforts on this project. With my main test ROM, Ghosts 'n Goblins, the drawing routine was taking up a good fraction of the CPU cycles. I profiled gauntlet today and it keeps the emulator a lot busier, making the drawing a smaller fraction of the load (it autoskips about 50% of the frames, but is surprisingly good, considering).

That's out of total usage of about 66% for the sdlmame binary, with pulseaudio hogging up its usual 10-12% and the kernel and such using the remaining 1/5 of cycles.

So, it's not so obvious with that that GL ES is worth the time. GL ES is something i have poked at a bit but it is still not all that well supported in SDL in Maemo from what i gather. I also apparently managed to annoy the main SDLMAME dev with my newbishness as i worked on getting the initial maemo build ready, and he seems to ignore my posts now, so i'm not sure if he has started on GL ES himself. I can't blame him as i was floundering around with pretty basic stuff that was new to me. Anyway, it's not very easy to coordinate arm porting efforts with no communication and frankly not much of a motivation to start on any serious changes to the code that i probably don't have time for right now, anyway.

There are lots of UI things to be fixed and a new upstream version with a lot of fixes to save states, which is a key feature for a mobile phone emulator, so there are more immediate tasks that can be done, but i wanted to ask for input on priorities. I appreciate the efforts of testers to report their experiences with different ROMs. My question to you now is what would your top request be for improvements? I'll try to handle the easy and most desired fixes first.

Don't worry, even if you can't spend a lot of time we all appreciate your work very much.

To my understanding, the most important bits to be fixed are all relative to UI and keyboard. These are my most wanted features/fixes:

1 - All keys working and selectable to any function, no matter the language layout.
1.1 - If point 1 is not possible: Keyboard automatically changed to US English at the beginning and then switch back.

2 - Possibility to redefine hardware keys (i.e. I'd like to use volume keys for volume control and not save states).

3 - The UI is very small when starting SDLMAME, would be great to show it maximised at the beginning.

4 - Accelerometer for analog control in selected games (i.e. car driving games).

5 - Touchscreen for analog control in selected games. (i.e. Arkanoid in portrait mode)

I don't really care for non working/slow games. Once the port is stable and usable enough to be in extras, I'd think in possible changes to improve the speed.

Great work anyway!

1. UI update you have mentioned.

2. Screen rotate options for games better suited for portrait orientation (a lot of shooters, Dig Dug, etc are examples.

3. Sound off option so some of the slower games will work.

Those three things seem like a nice bridge to me

1. Yep larger and readable ui in all roms including startup.

and

2. i dont know how possible it is but the games listing is a pain can it be possible to make the listings a complete a-z of the roms available.then implement the letter or word list shortening tool.

The latter is not that important and i would gladly except better performance and speed than a better rom search system.

With me being a gp2x wiz owner i know these things dont turn-a-round that fast (although the n900 is a lot more popular than the wiz) and because of my little (or no) knowledge of development i will wait until you have made any improvements to this project.

Even for me to give time to test roms it is time consuming, so for you (Flandry) and others working on this project i take my hat off to you dedicating any time to this project is a bonus, you are doing a great job and please continue improving this emulator.

Latter two points sound like programming work, probably beyond the scope of this, unless someone else gets on board. I'd rather have most things working as it does on desktop, then we can have touch (cheat) control for things like Police Trainer (with the stylus). And touchscreen control for putting down pipes in Pipe Dreams.

Thanks guys, some good reminders there. AFAIK the hardware buttons (as well as the keys, at least the QWERTY keys) are redefinable already via the GUI, but i haven't tried it much. I was kinda hoping for more discussion of preferred key layouts so I could pick defaults most likely to be useful.

Does everyone really want the volume rocker to be just that?

Disabling sound doesn't actually accelerate MAME itself at all because often the sound processor also handled other critical things (like coin drop), so it is always emulated. It would be nice if it could at least make pulseaudio chill out...

Here's a probable feature list for next release:

• Updated to current upstream version (0.136u* or possibly 0.137)
• Nokia keyboard localization bug workaround (probably just via a script wrapper for now for simplicity)
• Additional cleanup of config file and other file installation and defaults as discussed earlier in thread
• Something with the GUI. I don't know how involved this will be and it might be rendered (pun intended) needless if/when GL comes along for scaling instead of a YUV overlay.
• Possibly accelerometer control input
• Possibly rotation for portrait games

Some of this would have to be done on a per-ROM basis. Once i've fiddled around with it i might give you homework to tweak your own favorite ROMs' config settings and send it to me, but first things first...

Added more rom tests to the wiki. With a few tweaks here and there the amount of games playable will be high because the roms which are not quite running correctly are not far from being playable.

I added a few mame bios roms to the emulator and i got a few extra roms to run. quite surprisingly to me the mega-tech roms worked and as it stands (correct me if i'm wrong) at the moment this is the only way you can see megadrive games on the n900. limited choice and small screen but its good to see Arnold Palmers golf running (just).

Is there a possibiliy of getting the ability to "turn off sound" in SDLMAME?

I know that lots of games would run faster if sound didn't need to be emulated as well.

On the whole, I am really impressed and pleased with the numer of games that are running acceptably. Thanks again, Flandry!

Moved your post from the emulators thread to here. I discussed this in my previous post in this thread, as a matter of fact.

Since i'm posting, here's a status update: no progress on sdlmame yet. As my N900 has become more integrated into my routine, i've bumped into some things maemo that needed my attention more than games. Thanks to the forum i've resolved a couple problems without too much trouble, and have resolved one of the shortcoming with a stop-gap measure through some python hacking. I'll put up that bit of work once i can figure out the appropriate place.

I see from another thread that there's a need for a bit of information in the extended description of the sdlmame package describing where to put roms. Noted...