Ben Jos, can we get a status report of the enhanced tg4ish secure mame version you were working on? Is developmenet halted?

If No Mercy is using a slowdown/rerecord and they are a former marper, there's a pretty good chance they'll be able to crack m35tg3. I'd really like to give the acused a harder challenge to overcome with Ben Jos's new Tournament Edition of mame.

I'm not sure of IP addresses or game coincidences, but what i don't understand is why Vaz would leave marp for exclusive playing on the commodore 64...

-- Anonymous, February 18, 2001

Answers

I have to admit that I haven't done anything in quite a while. I guess you can call it burnout. I have that lots of times when I write programs. As soon as the problem is solved, I lose the drive to completely finish it. Because, yes, in a way, MAMETE is finished. The only thing I still have to do is actually put all that code into MAME. Right now, all the code resides in a little standalone program, and all the problems are solved. It would not take me very long to actually put it in MAME, and I really have to force myself some time soon to indeed do that...

Cheers, Ben Jos.

-- Anonymous, February 25, 2001

By the way, I have a little suggestion for MAMETE (if it hasn't been done already)

Since MAME ignores the .hi file on a recording, how about a way to ignore the .nv file on recording? Hell, maybe the MAME team should be told about this since a present NVRAM file has ruined many a recording on MARP. Then again, they might not listen...

-Matt

-- Anonymous, February 25, 2001

That's a great idea an probably not too difficult to impliment, just find the place where any nv file is read and force an error opening the file to read and write.

Ben if you need any help finding interface spots in the mame code or more of a catalyst to get you going (ignoring my constant emails of questions when it'll be done :) just ask.

Oh BBH, do you have any ideas on a good name of the new editition? we pretty much ran the gambit on names and kind of decided on MAMETE standing for mame tournament edition, not a bad name at all but do you have any suggestions? I think there is a thread about it somewhere in this board.

-- Anonymous, February 25, 2001

I don't think the MAMEdev team will listen. They don't care about highscore sites, ease of use for competitors from those sites, hackability of .inps, re-recording, and so on.

But, yes, disabling loading of .nv files should be easy enough. Are there any drawbacks to doing this? Most of the games I play do not use NVRAM, so I don't know. Still, three things come to mind:

(1) Some games store highscores in the .nv file. I personally stopped caring about .hi files and my own highscore tables a long time ago, especially since I record pretty much every game I play and so don't even see my old highscores, but some people will start complaining that their highscores are no longer being saved. In my opinion, this is a very weak argument when compared to the benefits.

(2) Some games use information from the .nv file as seeds for random numbers, so that the games aren't the same every time they are played (which, of course, also is the reason a lot of recordings do not play back correctly without the correct .nv file). For instance, I know that Columns and several other Tetris-like games always have the pieces come out in the same order after having deleted the .nv file. Theoretically, someone with little Columns skill could memorise this order. This sounds like a somewhat good argument, however, before the advent of .nv files, starting MAME would reset the emulated machine, and so, those games would also always have the same starting state. And if someone wants to go through the trouble of memorising something like that, I don't care. It's probably a lot harder to do than memorising 5 or 6 Pacman patterns, anyway, and (as much as some of us would like to see it) Pacman-like games are not going to get banned for that reason. :-)

(3) Aren't there some games that won't work without loading an .nv file? I seem to remember a game that only works by forcing a write of the .nv file, then exiting, then starting it again. BBH? If so, then forcing the load to fail (or not even trying to load the .nv file to start with), would permanently disable those games. In this case, a workaround might be to somehow use a hardcoded .nv file (compiled into MAME) for those games. This would be a problem, though, if the number of games is large.

Cheers, Ben Jos.

-- Anonymous, February 25, 2001

(3) I don't know of any game that requires an nvram for playback, it only would require it if you recorded with it.

(2) I do dislike the future knowledge that maintaining a clean nvram state will be given to players. How many double negatives are in that sentace? But games like tetris and collumns are not really memorization games when knowing the next piece gives you a similar advantage. And no one can memorize more than 100 colors and shapes, unless they repeat which i don't think they do. And you'd have to make no mistakes, cause if you did your memorization would go to waste.

(1) hi scores are ridiculous when you have marp and can save inp files. down with nvram. However, By not affecting the nvram files dirs (the file can still be there mamete will just no read or write it) the hi scores can still be preserved for other versions of mame that are used in the nvram file...

imho. mamedev will not care about any playback issues, mame is for playing with them not recording.

-- Anonymous, February 27, 2001

OK, I know it's not much, but it's a start...

Last weekend, I re-familiarised myself with the code I had written. I had planned on doing more than just that, but other things interfered. One of these days, I have to sort through the enormous stack of papers on my desk to find all the notes I had made.

At least I did something. I hope to do more next weekend.

And, yes, I'll probably make it so it doesn't load the .nv file when recording or playing back. Are there any issues with this? Like point (3) I mentioned above.

Cheers, Ben Jos.

-- Anonymous, April 23, 2001

Hey cool, nice to hear some updates. Yeah, if anyone knows a yes answer to question #3 please remit. Are there any known games that REQUIRE a nvram file to playback? For the games I know, I know of none. if recordings work when recorded with an nvram file, they'll also work with out one. Some also ONLY work with OUT an nvram file and with no sound (the leland games.)

-- Anonymous, April 23, 2001