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Haze WIP

Ice, 08:38, 24-11-2006

http://haze.mameworld.info/2006/11/23/so-whats-going-on/

Haze сообщает:

November 23rd, 2006 - So.. What’s Going On?

No updates here in quite a while. Why? Time would probably be the biggest reason. Work for Uni this year has been very demanding to say the least, requiring many new skills and languages to be mastered, some of which I’m finding quite difficult. This leaves very little time for MAME.

I recently attended the GameCity event in Nottingham as it was being promoted by the University as an interesting as well as potentially beneficial event for us students.

Amongst other things as part of the event there were many classic arcade games spread out over the city, giving people in Nottingham the chance to play the likes of Afterburner and Frogger for real. Sadly Afterburner was only the upright cabinet, but it was still good to see the real things in action again.

There was a classic gaming theme to some of the other events that week too, including a showing of the ‘High Score’ movie which follows the story of Bill Carlton (who attended the event) attempting to break the world record score of 80 million on Missile Command. Without saying too much about it to avoid any spoilers it does leave some interesting questions about the game code and bonus awards around the 255 level mark which might be interesting for somebody to investigate in MAME. A world record attempt of 80 million really does make the sub 1 million scores on MARP look rather pathetic though. MAME did get a brief mention at the event in a question from a member of the audience, but Bill preferred to make his record breaking attempts on real hardware, where they would actually count.

Other than that, there isn’t much to say. I’m sure the whole ‘4gb CHDs for CPS?!’ debate will rage on for a few weeks to come, but as far as I’m concerned it’s a step forward. The best measure for accurate emulation is that any given input reproduces the same given output as the real hardware, the actual implementation of that is secondary to the results. The previous XOR system would ONLY give the correct output for one specific input at each address (the game ROMs), not ANY specific input, therefore it was a highly inaccurate and rather gross hack. The new implementation will always give the correct results. While it’s true that the original hardware didn’t have 4gb of storage nor did it have a truckload of compiled C code running the game on a virtual processor either. Both are implementation details.