AGEMAME HQ

Thanks to the tireless efforts of startaq on the MAMEWorld forums, we now have a 14/16 segment LED unit. Not very useful at that, but by simple addition of a few extra elements, it makes a handy VFD. Although for that to happen, we need to strip out the old bitmap hack, which means changing the layouts and while that’s happening, we might as well split the driver up to emulate the actual controllers…

So, if you wonder why the u3 patch has a distinct lack of improvements to AGEMAME drivers, that’s why.
(There will have to be a new layout file for bfmdrwho eventually to cope with these changes, I’m working on it, but I haven’t figured out the overlays yet).

It works with both.

There’s a little sound improvement in this release, but there’s still a lot of work to do with supporting all the various sound combinations.

Because of the new source distribution, there will be times where changes to the MAME core do not directly affect AGEMAME’s drivers. As a result, although the patch I release will have 117u1 written inside it, it will also include my u2 updates, as the driver form is identical.

However, it has come to my attention that age.ini will not be parsed by u2 AGEMAME, due to changes to INI handling in 0.117u2 mainline MAME - so to continue using that, you will have to rename it to mame.ini, as the instructions have been reporting for some time, as a matter of fact.

Anyway, I can’t give you any info on the new release AGEMAME-wise as of yet, except to say that I’m trying to correct little details with the current emulation that could lead to drastically improved sound support in Barcrest games.

SAGEMAME is dead, just use regular SDLMAME, and then extract AGEMAME over the top.

AGEMAME32 will return if things work out, but the new GUI (0.117u1 onwards) will be more than enough for some.

The source is now only packaged as the one overlay ZIP, so you need the 0.117 source from SDLMAME or MAMEDEV

All the info you need is on the sidebar, I haven’t done any of the new stuff yet with my latest information, or indeed worked out how to deal with the source patches.

I’ve finally picked up this package of info that was made available to me, and it’s big, and I mean *BIG* big. It’s basically a load of binders full of technical data, part lists and that sort of thing, labelled Barcrest, Maygay, BFM etc. I’m not sure of their full contents as yet (I’ve only looked through them for half and hour or so), suffice it to say that we may be talking about material that could be very useful to the emulation cause in the right hands.

Naturally, as soon as I decipher the man’s handwriting, I’ll start using the info and see how far it goes.

I’ve read the details behind u1, and I’m glad we have a primitive interface now, however AGEMAME’s new form will be based around 0.117, just for my own sanity. The thing is, if what I’ve heard is true, this package waiting for me at work is a huge collection of technical observations from an AWP engineer I know, and I’d rather get a release out of the way before looking into all that.

I’m currently deserting my post, enjoying myself and laughing at those struggling with the scrag end of the weather. This doesn’t mean I’m out of the loop though, I’m interested to see that the parent project has finally eaten its own tail and emulated an arcade board that uses it as a guide.

I myself am looking forward to sorting through the huge package of stuff that is reportedly making it’s way to my office, where presumably my coworkers will be baffled by it.

While trying to emulate the MPU4 and M1 platforms, you start to wonder why certain games seem to have significantly poorer sound than others. Suddenly it dawned on me that these supposedly generic hardware units were in fact different in many key areas.

In the case of MPU4, one of the modifications was to remove the original audio chip from the main board (an AY8913), and instead have the sound generation placed on the ROM card. It looks like there were two cards in use, one with a Yamaha synthesiser chip, and one with an OKI MSM6376 ADPCM player, which were then used.

However, I’m yet to find out just what replaced the AY chip on the main board, and many games produced after the modification continue to write something to it, hence the garbage audio in Connect 4.

So basically, we have another minibeast to contend with - as the video hardware and Connect 4 are written for two different revisions.

At this point in time, I’m currently doing the conversion work to the new system, and as such there’s no way to get a patch released for this version.

When we make a fresh start at 0.117, I’ll restart patch delivery then.

In preparation for the change in source distribution, I’ve started work on the modifications to the download plugin (originally designed by Philipp Baer).

The plugin’s been used behind the scenes for a while now, as a menu I use to select uploads, but it’s natural output has always been replaced with the download tables. It makes sense now to reactivate that output, which is a rather neat ‘box’ design. In the future, this smaller version will allow me to consolidate a large number of the download pages into one, far more flexible one, with the old versions consigned to the Previous versions page.

To that end, I suggest that you don’t bookmark the downloads pages directly, as they will be reworked heavily to a new design, that will render most of them obsolete.