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Compatibility woes / deprecation (Miscellaneous)

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 21.02.2009, 04:21
(edited by Rugxulo on 21.02.2009, 05:36)

> A Few Thoughts, after having spent almost one hour reading the entire
> thread...
>
> The main point seems to be: If the DOS and/or Win 98 versions are working
> well, why needlessly eliminate them? Keep the old version up for distro,
> even if the newer ones are released. I am also extremely upset that the
> older DOS or Win 98 downloads just "disappear" for no good reasons, the
> maintaniers seem to go out of their way to erase them, and it's as if
> these legacy versions never existed at all!

The point was that even Win9x seems deprecated, not only DOS or OS/2 or whatever. And there seems to be no concrete reason besides "MS dropped it, and we don't use it". And yet it was never a big deal to support it before, so why now abandon it?? (Firefox is just the main example I saw, not the only instance and obviously not DOS-related. But I figured it was a fair analogy.)

> Case in point-- the DOS version of MAME. Where can I even download the
> last DOS version produced? Can't even find a link anymore. And, if I
> wanted to, how could I even compile one of the newer versions for DOS? Has
> anyone a link to a newer DOS binary of MAME or suceeded in compiling one?
I agree, I noticed this too, and it's very annoying. They used to support DJGPP fine, but eventually Win32 gained over and somebody killed off all remnants of DOS support, despite various requests on where to find DOS ports.

Anyways, I don't really use MAME anymore (StarROMS disappeared and I never ordered Hanaho's HotRod joystick w/ CD), but here's the two I know of off-hand (although not necessarily the latest):

* AdvanceMAME 0.106.1
* AMAME 0.59 (website gone, this is a mirror of only binary on Zophar.net, "Optimized for speed increases with AMD, Pentium II, and i486 processors")
* various other MAMEs listed on Zophar.net: MAME(K6), fastMAME (for 586,K5,Cyrix), MAMEAthlon, PMAME (for 586), MAME32ASM (unstable / faster w/ asm), etc. etc.

P.S. I found a site that says this (quoted from "M.A.M.E. Frequently Asked Questions V0.27 (6th of September, 1997)"):

> I personally use a P90/16MB/WIN95 and the DOS version runs like a
> dream really on nearly all the games. Nicola developed MAME on a
> 486/DX100 so my guess is that it runs well enough on that as some
> sort of a minimum configuration.
There is NO WAY IN HELL that this is still true, assuming it ever was. MAME has a reputation for being dog slow. Last I heard, MAME officially recommended at least 256 MB of RAM (maybe more now?). But I guess really really old-fashioned games (0.1 only supported five!) might? barely work on such "lowly" hardware. (And you must have a license, please don't pirate, not worth it! There are plenty of decent and free DOS games. See here.)

EDIT: MAME 0.1 - 0.10 history

EDIT: July 2002 specs for running MAME (for comparison)

EDIT: Why does MAME become slower all the time?

> The simpler hardware will work out in the end anyway due to
> ever-faster PCs (Pac-Man is very sub-optimal now compared with
> MAME 0.29 for instance, but almost any average modern system runs
> it with 100% speed).

EDIT #2: Apparently, Sep. 17 2005 was the last official DOS release, MAME 0.100, but I did (luckily!) find a download site:

http://mame.jp/0.100/

dm100s.zip              18-Sep-2005 08:29   136k  DOS source code changes for MAME 0.100. Requires the main source code archive too.
m0990100.zip            15-Sep-2005 00:16   1.2M  DIFF file from MAME 0.99 to 0.100. Use the command patch -p1 <m0990100.dif in a 0.99 source directory to update it to 0.100.
mame0100b.zip           15-Sep-2005 00:50   7.8M  Windows command line version of MAME 0.100.
mame0100b_dos.zip       18-Sep-2005 05:51   8.4M  DOS version of MAME 0.100.
mame0100b_dos_i686.zip  18-Sep-2005 05:59   8.6M  DOS version (Pentium Pro optimized) of MAME 0.100.
mame0100b_i686.zip      15-Sep-2005 00:54   7.9M  Windows command line version (Pentium Pro optimized) of MAME 0.100.
mame0100s.zip           15-Sep-2005 00:23  10.7M  Source code archive of MAME 0.100.

There's some (older and newer, ironically) OS/2 binaries here. Yes, Steve, I'm thinking of you. :-)

P.S. Hanaho's HotRod joystick emulates a PC keyboard with true "arcade feel" and is IMHO reasonably priced ($99 US), but they seem to include less Capcom games than previous (what, no more Willow? damn ...). Also, their site needs Flash 9 (ugh), and it claims to not work well on Win98SE (keyboard issues) although I get the impression that the MAME included is the DOS version (go figure).

P.P.S. XBox 1 has some good emulation sets (Taito Classics, Capcom Collection 1-2, Midway Arcade Classics 1-3, Namco Museum, Tecmo Arcade) and some game remakes even include the older original games (Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, Doom 3, House of the Dead, Wolfenstein 3D, TMNT 2, Panzer Dragoon Orta, Ninja Gaiden, Pac Man World 2). Some of these have been ported to PCs, also.

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