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Raspberry Pi 2 and mame
#336691 - 02/05/15 05:38 AM
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So in the past the raspberry pi b+ was limited to mame4all which uses an ancient romset 0.37b5
its was the only version of mame that could run smoothly on the 700Mhz chip
Advmame is also available but its really slow and laggy on most games unless you over clock the hell out if. and it to also uses and old romset 0.106. which is okay... but obviously the latest mame includes bug fixes and better emulation and new features. cant even -listxml for rom management tools...
The new raspberry pi 2 has come out. 900Mhz quad core. 1G ram
6 times faster than the previous model.
My question is how well would mame run on this?
How do you port a version of mame optimised for the rpi2?
Does mame support multicores?
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Re: Raspberry Pi 2 and mame
[Re: coma]
#336724 - 02/06/15 02:16 PM
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> My question is how well would mame run on this?
Piss-poor.
> How do you port a version of mame optimised for the rpi2?
With difficulty.
> Does mame support multicores?
Sure, but not for any driver that would remotely run on the Raspberry Pi or the Raspberry Pi 2. I'd say the best way I've heard it described as it relates to emulation for anything other than the most inaccurate or old of emulators, is that at least it's not "What the fuck are you even thinking," but it's still "There, there, maybe you read the specs wrong."
The ARM series doesn't appear to have remotely the same instructions-per-clock throughput as Intel, even with mobile devices are barely pushing the 2GHz barrier, to say nothing of the fact that your average $50-range development board is not going to have remotely the same sort of performance as said mobile devices. Christ, the RPi2 is even still using ARMv7, that architecture has been dated for years in anything resembling a modern device.
Look, I know it seems to be a popular thing now to see how ancient of a version of MAME people can shoehorn onto a device to see how well Pac-Man and the other five games that version ran on a Raspberry Pi, but if you care even remotely about accurate emulation or about hardware preservation, you would realize that you get what you paid for. An ARM-based development board that costs an order of magnitude less than the CPU for a reasonably modern PC is not going to give you decent performance as far as a modern version of MAME is concerned, Ebon Upton's apparent reality-distortion field notwithstanding.
People keep getting this idea in their heads that a codebase with piss-poor modularity and almost no generic core code whatsoever is somehow superior because it runs well on their 66MHz 486DX, but the reality of the situation is that abstraction costs CPU cycles, and additional features cost the same. People like that aren't unique to MAME, roughly 5 percent of the userbase of the PC edition of Minecraft still runs it with GPUs that only support the fixed-function OpenGL pipeline. Older emulators or older versions of modern emulators might run faster than more modern incarnations of both, at the cost of features and/or game compatibility. At the end of the day you're still pounding your hand angrily on the dashboard of a Ford Model-T and demanding to know why it doesn't have power steering, ABS, and an iPhone dock connector.
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Re: Raspberry Pi 2 and mame
[Re: MooglyGuy]
#336741 - 02/07/15 12:53 AM
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The pi is a cheap development board. it can do and be used for a million things. its a developers dream. and though not as powerful as a modern pc its cool that you can use it for emulation or creating a miniature arcade machine cabinet that works.
honestly does anyone care about "accurate emulation or about hardware preservation". doubt it... people care about game preservation. being able to play all their retro games that they grew up with. the rest is working with what you got.
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Re: Raspberry Pi 2 and mame
[Re: coma]
#336744 - 02/07/15 05:40 AM
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> honestly does anyone care about "accurate emulation or about hardware preservation".
> doubt it... people care about game preservation. being able to play all their retro
> games that they grew up with. the rest is working with what you got.
Then leave. This forum is called MAMEWorld. You are obviously unfamiliar with the fundamental intent of MAME, despite somehow managing to be registered here for the better part of a decade. I applaud you on your commendable attempt at bluster to cover for the fact that you apparently know so little about either MAME, the Raspberry Pi 2, or both, as to both not know that it supports multiple cores, and the fact that absolutely nothing that has a chance of running on your dream system will benefit from it. If you want to play some hacked-up decade-old version of the MAME source base, there are plenty of forums to suit your needs. There are even sub-forums on this very site that would be more than happy to stroke your ego and tell you what a special snowflake you are for wanting to run MAME on a garbage CPU. The Programming subforum, which in particular is largely only patronized by active MAME devs and people seeking questions from active MAME devs, is not one of them.
Lastly, this
> 6 times faster than the previous model.
Speaks to a fundamental misunderstanding of what clock rates are, what ARM extensions are, and why benchmarks are of precisely fuck-all relevance to how an actual application that relies almost purely on single-threaded integer performance is going to bench on something that is scarcely 23% faster in reality than whatever artificial benchmarks you've ginned up. The only speed around here seems to be what you yourself are on.
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Re: Raspberry Pi 2 and mame
[Re: MooglyGuy]
#336753 - 02/07/15 08:23 AM
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if i was that familiar with them would i be on a forum asking questions? the fact that im on here asking for help implies this isnt about ego. theres no need for an ego stroke here, just answers. and your entitled to your opinion however limited and negative it is. The raspberry for emulation is hardly a dream machine. but for alot of other things you can do with it yeah its awesome. it has limitation but like all good devs im curious to know how far the boundary is and what the possibilities and limitations are with more cores. you may know a lot more than me, as your arrogant demeanour implies but it also shows how limited you are. not very creative i bet.
The way see it mame has 2 goals, preservation of old games and true emulation of hardware. with the limitations of the Pi only one of those goals can be achieved. and though an extremist zealot such as your self may not like it.. oh well... suck to be you. im happy just to find out what can be done.
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| R. Belmont |
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Cuckoo for IGAvania
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Re: Raspberry Pi 2 and mame
[Re: MooglyGuy]
#336772 - 02/08/15 05:36 AM
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> Speaks to a fundamental misunderstanding of what clock rates are, what ARM extensions
> are, and why benchmarks are of precisely fuck-all relevance to how an actual
> application that relies almost purely on single-threaded integer performance is going
> to bench on something that is scarcely 23% faster in reality than whatever artificial
> benchmarks you've ginned up.
In fairness, the original Pi was ARMv6 ISA, so v7 does gain you some perf at the same clock vs. v6. That said, phones/tablets are on either v8 (Apple A8/A8X, Nvidia's "Denver") or v7 with instructions tuned to use fewer cycles (Apple A7, recent Qualcomm Snapdragons) so RPi 2 is now where phones/tablets were 2 years ago, much as the original RPi was when it was introduced.
A 1.3 GHz ARMv7 (original Nexus 7, Nvidia Tegra 3 SoC) with modern MAME works decently for games up to around a Space Harrier level of complexity (dual 68ks + Z80 + FM sound), which is where things break up. CPS2 / NeoGeo are fine. But deduct 400 MHz and I suspect things will get a lot less fine.
And by the way, there's ultimately no escape from reality as preached by MAMEdev. Dolphin recently fixed their sound emulation once and for all. But as part of that, they had to make it break up when the emulation overall isn't running at the full 59.97 FPS. Just like in MAME.
(My real terror? The presence of Windows 10 and Office on the Pi2 means a *lot* of people with no business owning one will be buying them).
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| elvis |
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pew pew pew
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Re: Raspberry Pi 2 and mame
[Re: coma]
#336774 - 02/08/15 10:24 AM
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> though an extremist zealot such as your self may not like it.. oh well... suck to be
> you. im happy just to find out what can be done.
I don't think you could call the view that MAME strives for accuracy first and foremost as "extremist zealotry". As a documentation project, it's not an unreasonable point of view at all. Speaking for myself, I quite admire the project for sticking with this philosophy.
You've gotten your answer about the RPi2 - you won't see much benefit for MAME specifically. Other emulators that care less about accuracy and more about getting frame rates up at the expense of accuracy will benefit from the changes. There are already videos surfacing of the RPi2 playing GameCube and Playstation titles at full speed, and I'm sure other projects will do the same for arcade titles.
And honestly, cheap x86_64 hardware is pretty readily available these days, and in very small form factors.
(And yeah, I think the RPi is fun - I built a Moon Patrol cabinet out of a RPi model B, and SDLMAME 0.106, and it ran just fine overclocked to 1GHz, albeit with inaccurate framerates).
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Re: Raspberry Pi 2 and mame
[Re: elvis]
#336775 - 02/08/15 10:40 AM
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> > though an extremist zealot such as your self may not like it.. oh well... suck to
> be
> > you. im happy just to find out what can be done.
>
> I don't think you could call the view that MAME strives for accuracy first and
> foremost as "extremist zealotry". As a documentation project, it's not an
> unreasonable point of view at all. Speaking for myself, I quite admire the project
> for sticking with this philosophy.
I dont. When i first read that years ago i though thats pretty cool that they made that their goal. That being said the stance that it should only be that and that other ports of mame with other goals are stupid i thought was narrow minded and zealot. Why limit yourself? And why not try make the best of a situation. growth comes from overcoming a hurdle not by stay in the safe zone. thats true for the individual as well as for the community.
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| R. Belmont |
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Cuckoo for IGAvania
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Re: Raspberry Pi 2 and mame
[Re: coma]
#336789 - 02/08/15 10:42 PM
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> The way see it mame has 2 goals, preservation of old games and true emulation of
> hardware. with the limitations of the Pi only one of those goals can be achieved. and
> though an extremist zealot such as your self may not like it.. oh well... suck to be
> you. im happy just to find out what can be done.
False choice. You basically can't buy a brand new PC or Mac now that doesn't run MAME pretty well, even in Pi-like form factors like the Gigabyte BRIX or Intel NUC. None of those are anywhere near $35, but this is one case where "you get what you pay for" is on extremely firm ground.
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Re: Raspberry Pi 2 and mame
[Re: R. Belmont]
#336792 - 02/09/15 12:44 AM
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Well for 35 and although not the best its not that bad either. Specially when u consider the goals of raspberry.org
Still after elvis' post I had a look. Boards with newer tech. Alot of these dev boards use the arm6 of 7 chips. They are very low power. Only very very few go into x86 x64 territory. Ill take a look at the one you mention, I found one called the Odroid-XU3 and at first glance looks well made. Still I like the idea of creating a dedicated emulation machine for $35. Not because I cant afford but cause I think that sounds awesome. Heck ill give them out as xmas gifts or something. Not to mention how small it is. Create a small case that looks like an arcade machine and bam you got something portable, something that looks pretty cool u can take with you Say to a hoise party on holiday, to work lol.
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| R. Belmont |
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Cuckoo for IGAvania
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Re: Raspberry Pi 2 and mame
[Re: coma]
#336811 - 02/09/15 06:24 PM
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> Still I like the idea of creating a dedicated emulation machine for $35.
So do I, because it *would* be cool, but we're about 2 years out from where I'd attempt it 
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Re: Raspberry Pi 2 and mame
[Re: R. Belmont]
#336864 - 02/11/15 03:32 AM
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| elvis |
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pew pew pew
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Re: Raspberry Pi 2 and mame
[Re: coma]
#336867 - 02/11/15 05:36 AM
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Plenty of Mini-ITX stuff out there today that's very powerful. Granted it's 4 or more times physically larger than an RPi, but we're still talking much smaller than a regular desktop system.
I see plenty of people cramming old laptops into small benchtop arcade builds lately too. While the 'Pi is certainly tiny, it's not like we're starved for choice when it comes to hardware that doesn't consume a lot of space (particularly when you compare the market to what we had 10 years ago).
I built an RPi powered cabinet purely for laughs. And laughs I got, making a full sized cabinet that was a huge empty box with a tiny credit-card sized computer in it.
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Re: Raspberry Pi 2 and mame
[Re: elvis]
#336918 - 02/13/15 07:02 PM
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> Plenty of Mini-ITX stuff out there today that's very powerful. Granted it's 4 or more
> times physically larger than an RPi, but we're still talking much smaller than a
> regular desktop system.
>
You might be including this in you mini-itx category, but the Atom processor/platform does pretty well with MAME. Worth checking out if you want something, generally, full-featured in a small form factor with low power consumption.
The other thing to keep in mind is that older version of MAME tend to be a fair amount faster than the new versions. So, if you don't need to play a game that was added in the latest release, it might be worth it to use an older build (0149?).
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| ASI |
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Re: Raspberry Pi 2 and mame
[Re: coma]
#337618 - 03/11/15 10:25 AM
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Its seems to be conflicting views here for this thread.
Do you want arcade accuracy or just to be able to play they games.
As we are all aware accuracy is what mame is all about, to which this is not going to work on raspberry pi2.
If its about playing the games, which is really what got a lot of people interested in mame in the first place.
Then we have to take a step back of either using older mame sources or other arcade emulators. This will allow the playing of the games at expense of true arcade accuracy.
But the fun is in the playing of the games too.
In reality MAME is there as a documentary evidence of how these machines worked, not to be able to play them.
The user just wants to play the games and in a lot of cases dosnt care that game x may be 1 cycle out of sync.
So as coma orignal asked Pi2 - Mame will still work badly on the machine, so take older code or other older arcade emulators adapt and rewrite for pi. Then you can have your portable arcade machine.
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