why are people using old versions of mame like v34 and v35 why dont they just use the latest version for recordings

-- bradley higgins (bradhig@yahoo.com), January 01, 2000

Answers

Why do people use versions like 0.34 and 0.35 final for recordings? because they are final, stable versions of MAME. And they also insure that people don't have to put up with a lot of hassle if they want to view a recording.

Think about it. In a few months, that beta of MAME isn't going to be "new" any more. It might have been fun to record all those games with m36b1 now, but why bother with that version when mame35 supported them all along? now if anyone wants to watch one of your recordings, they have to go find MAME 0.36 beta 1 if they don't have it. Final versions usually aren't that much of a pain provided that others are using it for the majority of recordings, but obviously for some reason you think new always equals better. So why do you think using the newest version is best?

-BBH

-- BBH (lordbbh@aol.com), January 01, 2000.

The reason you may have seen a lot of mame34 submissions recently is because that was the version that had to be used for the tournament that just ended...

Apart from that, I found that on my computer (a Pentium MMX overclocked to 225 MHz), a lot of games run a lot smoother on mame34 than on later versions of MAME. Apparently, and unfortunately, it seems that MAME is getting worse as far as optimised for speed is concerned...

Cheers, Ben Jos.

-- Ben Jos Walbeehm (walbeehm@walbeehm.com), January 01, 2000.

That's not as unreasonable or silly a question as it sounds, we've just had a lot of time to come up with an answer. Maybe it's time for a MARP FAQ...

Every time the latest beta changes, new bugs can be introduced into a game. Sometimes it has affected entire groups of games using similar hardware. Also, the MAME developers adjust the format of the recordings often so to play back recordings made on some beta versions you may have to use the same beta. Many of us are using final versions of .34 & .35 where possible to reduce the amount of chaos.

MAME .34 got used for the second tournament because of a nasty feature introduced in .35 that makes cheating much more powerful. The problem is still in the latest betas.

-- Aquatarkus (aquatarkus@digicron.com), January 02, 2000.

Obtaining ANY beta version of Mame is not difficult at all. They are all available at the official Mame site.

Stig

-- Stig Remnes (sremnes@samsen.com), January 02, 2000.

I didn't say it was a challenge to find existing MAME betas, I know the official MAME site has them all. But we don't want people to have to have every old version of MAME just in case they want to play back a recording, right?

-- BBH (lordbbh@aol.com), January 02, 2000.

Right. I agree with BBH. I don't like that either, having to get every single version. Usually, I first try to play back the .inp on the closest version I already have (usually trying the closest NEWER version first). Most of the times, this works. If not, I'll have to download the correct version and add it to my ever-growing collection, or I just decide I don't want to watch the recording anymore. It's just a pain.

Cheers, Ben Jos.

-- Ben Jos Walbeehm (walbeehm@walbeehm.com), January 02, 2000.

It's the changes to the beta romsets that gets me down in the end - the beta releases of mame are easy enough to get hold of. There are several good arguments AGAINST using the betas as have been mentioned. The only good arguments FOR using the newer betas is when a new game gets emulated that can't be played on the latest stable mame final or if an emulation problem in a previously emulated game gets fixed. In all other cases I would like to see people use the latest mame final.

You can't stop people wanting to use the latest and greatest though (and I'm guilty of it myself) so that is why I have given in and installed all mame betas on my system. Good thing I have a 6 Gb partition devoted to MAME :-)

-- Tim Morrow (tjmorrow@bigpond.com), January 06, 2000.