Hi folks

My basement is going to be renovated for the next 2 months or so. I was wondering if anyone here in Ottawa with considerable MAME knowledge would be willing to house Sparky's Ultra Mame for that time period. It does come with some work though. As you may or may not remember from Marty's original post, the Ipac had fried on it. I now received the replacement card so it needs to be reconnected with 52 seperate connections, hence the reason the foster parent needs to have experience.

Anyway, PM me to let me know if this sounds like something you'd like to do and we'll take it from there.

Thanks

Alex

Update:
I'm the lucky guy that gets to babysit the UltraMAME while cheg pimps out his basement This huge beast is now sitting right in the middle of my living room, which is fine since we haven't figured out what we're doing with the living room yet, and has sat empty for a year.

Sparky, and Hippochrome were kind enough to take time out of their busy day on Sunday to drop by and help move the umame into my house. Thanks guys!

Sparky was also nice enough to help put it together and give me a tour of the insides. The ipac was busted, so a replacement was included, but not yet hooked up. Sparky explained what needed to be done, and said it was a 10 hour job. Well, maybe he meant 10 hours if done right, but I got it done in only a few hours! It's a bit messy, but hey, I got gaming to do. W00t! It was much easier than the frakkin' T2 jigsaw puzzle poster hippochrome got me, that's for sure.

I've also done some tweaking to the software, to get it all up to date. I've updated the firmware on the 2 ultrastick 360s, the ultramap software, vpinmame (the included one had expired and refused to start!), and video card drivers. I tried updating mamewah, but the menu is all messed up. Anyone ever updated mamewah? What am I required to do? Also, is there a way to have it automatically save the state of a game when exiting, and then reload the state when loading that game? Otherwise, all the high scores are lost! Yuck!

I also enabled vertical sync in the video drivers, this got rid of the ugly tearing in side scrolling games.

Question for Sparky: Can I screw the ipac directly into the console? Or do I need something in between? Would a piece of cardboard suffice?

Quoted from jonny_eh

Update:
Question for Sparky: Can I screw the ipac directly into the console? Or do I need something in between? Would a piece of cardboard suffice?

I recommend going to a local hardware store and getting some plastic washers. Best to have an air gap between the cab and the board.

... and I don't deserve the full credit for building it BTW... it was a team effort. I mostly did the control panel. Spacecadet worked hard on it as well...

Once the holidays come and gone, I can help with some of the software configuration if you guys need help, just too busy right now.

Mame and savestate: that actually ticks off a lot of people, it's annoying to load a game up and boom, you're in the middle of a level or mid punch.  Best thing is to compile your own mame and add the old hi-score saving support (imho of course). What version of mame is on there? I can try and help out with that in preparation.

Don't know anything about Mamewah. EVeryone I speak too say Mala is easier to configure. I never tried it myself, plus I have a preference for HyperSpin. Though it doesn't have a theme for every game yet, as of last week it's no longer necessary as the dev added the ability to add text to the wheel (see youtube for an example of why I think HS is awesome).

Thanks for the help guys.

I'll definitely check out Mala and HyperSpin, I'm not a fan of Mamewah, but it gets the job done. The best case for mame would be when starting a game, it should ask if it should restore the save state. My media centre does that for me when I watch a video, it will ask if it should continue from where I left off last time.

Seriously, why don't arcade games save their scores? Pinball has been doing it for decades! I guess if they did save the scores, we wouldn't have that hilarious Frogger episode of Seinfeld.

Your suggestion on save state wouldn't save hiscores though.

That's the nice thing, with hiscore support put back in, I think a huge percentage of games have it thus why these personal builds are popular. The only reason why they took HiScore support out is because it's not "true" to the hardware.  Sure, so is save state but that's left in .

But having auto-save states would basically mean the machine is never turned off, so the scores are never erased. Seems pretty damn useful to me. Plus, a lot of these games take a long time to boot, with all their useless hardware tests (useless in emulation), this too would be skipped with save states.

I see what you're saying, I just don't think it makes up for starting the game and appearing in the middle of one. IMHO, the small delay in seeing the bootup screen is part of the illision in shownig this is playing the same game as people were playing in the arcade.

FYI, even if you press reset (F3) to quit out of the game when you start up, that can reset the high score in some games!!!  Anyway, the option is there for some to support saving state. I don't know which games, but there's an option to turn it on/off in MameUI (formerly Mame32/Gui).

Currently I can save and load states using the attached keyboard, but I have to push shift+F7, then '1' to save. F7, then 1 will then load the save. Maybe I should map it to one of the ipac's "Shift mode" buttons. i.e. 1START+1SW1, then press 1START to save, and then 1START+1SW2 then 1START to load.

When I was just using mame 0.118, it was all automatic, I'd quit the game and get back in and didn't have to do any saving at all.

Double check the MAme version number you have and google on it, it might just be an option in the mame.ini that needs to be on.

Yeah, here you go, read this:  http://mamedev.org/devwiki/index.php/FAQ:Features

Quoted from The Loafer

When I was just using mame 0.118, it was all automatic, I'd quit the game and get back in and didn't have to do any saving at all.

Double check the MAme version number you have and google on it, it might just be an option in the mame.ini that needs to be on.

Yeah, here you go, read this:  http://mamedev.org/devwiki/index.php/FAQ:Features

Awesome, thanks! I'll definitely add the -autosave parameter to mamewah's ini.