Xbox emulation...

[Marc]

My apologies if someone already posted this, but I found this in a search and thought it was cooler than the other dise of the pillow. I hope that they distribute this. Follow the link to see a work of pure genius. Like I said, if you've already seen it, my bad...

http://www.otakunozoku.com/xbox/index.html

[Knight]

So some loony let me loose on an XBox development kit a month or two ago and I had some spare time on my hands this last weekend so it was only natural that I do something "creative". M.A.M.E. is the result, and it was a lot easier to port to another platform the second time around, than it was this time last year .

The XBox version runs at a rock solid 60 FPS on all the old 80's ROMs I've tested it with, and also the NEOGEO ROMs too, and this is only with a debug build. There are a few lines in some of the drivers of the M.A.M.E. source code that give the MS VC++ 7.0 compiler the screaming ghoulies so I have not been able to test a fully optimised compile yet.

I've got to tweak a few bugs in my rendering code that copies the arcade game bitmap that M.A.M.E. creates each video frame to the XBox bitmap and that will remove some of the blown out colours you can see in the screen shots and also the fact that NEOGEO games only fill two third's of the screen.

I also need to come up with a decent menu system & interface for the emulator, right now, if you want to change games you have to restart the XBox, edit a config file that contains the game name you want to play, and then reload M.A.M.E.

So I've found the computer I want to put in the M.A.M.E. cabinet I am still trying to find time to construct, it's going to be an XBox, it's got a built-in hard drive, Ethernet connection, and supports analogue & digital controlllers, and only costs a few hundred American dollars, plus it already supports a standard TV signal so I can wire up any decent TV instead of an expensive Wells Gardner monitor.

The screenshots below were taken with a Kodak Digital DC240 camera in very poor lighting conditions in a hurry.

As an aside I have come to the empirical conclusion that I am an utterly awful photgrapher. I'm going to have a more artistically inclined colleague take some far better pictures later on and use those instead. I'm also hoping to get an .AVI of the emulator actually running a few games at some point in the near future.

Otaku, June 6th, 2001.


Just a small update. I've managed to remove just about all of the bugs in the rendering code, it's even a little faster than it was before. I've fixed all the blown out colour & gamma problems, the sizing issues, and apart from about a dozen games that have inccorect colours, everything runs just perfectly. MetalSlug X looks superb now that it has the correct colour palette. The bugs in Microsoft's latest 7.0 C++ compiler I managed to work around by just tuning the optimisation parameters for those particular source files. Sound now works, a little glitchy on one or two drivers, but nothing that is really annoying. I've implemented code to handle the analogue sticks so now games like Crazy Climber and Karate Champ can be played as they were meant to be. And I've also implemented code to handle the four joypads, so that you can play four player Gauntlet too.

I've now put a simple menu system in that scans the hard drive at start up for available M.A.M.E. ROMs and displays them in a list that lets you rapidly scroll through to select the game you want. Also figured out a reset emulator bug that was annoying me that would prevent you returning to the menu system. Turns out the bug was in beta 14 of the M.A.M.E. source code that has since been fixed in the beta 16 release, so my M.A.M.E. source is up to date, and a few latent bugs got fixed automagically. The emulator runs on both the silver Alpha hardware and the "final" debug stations just fine, in case you were wondering.

Now if only Microsoft would let me legally distribute this software I'd be a happy person. Unfortunately, only registered XBox developers can legitimately obtain this software (okay, apart from the fact that only registered XBox developers actually have an XBox that can run the software).

Otaku, July 20th, 2001.

[Marc]

Thanks, Knight. I should have thought of that...

[Knight]

You better off running M.A.M.E. on your pc or Dreamcast, because it's very hard to find the XBox version!!

[Marc]

I want to run MAME so I can play Tag Team Wrestling and Mat Mania. If I were to buy a Dreamcast, how would I hook up MAME on it and how would I find the two games? I know very little about MAME.

[Snoopy7548]

and u also need a modchip

[Marc]

So I need a Mod Chip, a dreamcast, a monitor. How do I get the games? Are the mod chips hard to find and install? Mod chips void waranties, right?

[Snoopy7548]

oh, lol, u need the modchip if u wanna run mame on the xbox. but theres no modchips for the dreamcast, just a boot cd. you can find some stuff at www.megagames.com and on the lefthand column, click on console games, then go to dreamcast.

[Knight]

The pre-2000 Dreamcast don't need a Modchip to run mame!!

http://www.dcemulation.com/

[Marc]

Ok...a couple of more stupid questions. If I were to buy an old DC, and a boot disc, I could play Tag Team Wrestling and Mat Mania? How much would the disc cost and where could I get the games? Thanks for the patience...

[Marc]

I downloaded MAME for the PC, but can't get it to work because it says I'm missing a DLL file or something. Where the hell do I get ROMS and the missing file?

[Marc]

Help me out, please...

[Plewis]

NO! Roms are bad and so are you!



















Im serious... you were suspecting to scroll down and see me say jk or something... but Im not





























jk