Mame for LD2000

[buffo]

Awesome! Tempest was always one of my favorites. (Damn, now I need to go find that joystick with the spinner knob on it so I can play it correctly... Wonder where that damn thing is hiding?)

Mike, this is truly awesome. We've been talking about a MAME project like this for several years, and while many programmers have commented on it, none here have taken up the challenge. Thank you very much for doing this! (Thanks too to Pangolin for the SDK that made this possible.)

Can't wait to get home and fire it up!

Adam

[soforene]

Looking good so far and I have some feedback.
The list of games in the GUI appear to be fixed (which means you can't play anything not on the list).

It would be nice if the program could check the contents of the roms folder and then populate the GUI with the updated list of available games.
Alternatively let us know where this info (games that appear in the GUI) is held (and is it easily amendable).

Excellent work so far though.

[mikkojay]

Looking good so far and I have some feedback.
The list of games in the GUI appear to be fixed (which means you can't play anything not on the list).

It would be nice if the program could check the contents of the roms folder and then populate the GUI with the updated list of available games.
Alternatively let us know where this info (games that appear in the GUI) is held (and is it easily amendable).

Excellent work so far though.

Yeah, that list is hard coded. But that IS the list of supported games. Sorry, Star Wars is not on there.
I actually recomiled mame, and my version removed support for all but this list of games, so really this list is it.
I banged out the GUI in a matter of an hour so that I could drop the package out on the FTP. If you click the ? button, it will tell you what roms you need. The GUI for the 1st EasyLase version was far more exotic & did folder checking, etc, but it was written in C# and I didn't feel like adding the .NET runtime as a dependency to this package. I have found that using .NET for things like this leads to endless streams of email with error screenshots- yech! I can however, redo that functionality in this version no problem at all.

You can also just double-click and run from lazymame.exe and use the mame gui to select your game. This is OK if you have a limited list of roms, but if you have a bunch it does this weird random list thing. A good way to wind up with a complete list of roms is to send me a PM WITH YOUR EMAIL ADDR so I can fwd something useful.

Thanks for the feedback- those are the ideas I like to hear.

-Mike

[Zoof]

Hey Zoof,
I plan on playing with both into the future- it is nice to have 2 options. They both have benefits, and supporting both covers a good chunk of the viewing audience, especially since the soundcard guys have tapped into easylase.dll. Using the LD2000 SDK has been great- it has tons of functions, all laid out nice and tidy. One of my main motivating factors to get a QM board was to be able to play with this SDK. How's the 3D world going?
-Mike

Good to hear you haven't abandoned the good ol' easylase
The 3D stuff is going great. I'm trying to get it all nicely into a library so keep an eye on laserGL.org in the near future

[allthatwhichis]

I still get a bit of flicker. Any ideas on optimum scanner settings and size? Are Vector graphics easier or harder for scanners to draw, or is there a difference?

[mikkojay]

I still get a bit of flicker. Any ideas on optimum scanner settings and size? Are Vector graphics easier or harder for scanners to draw, or is there a difference?

This is unexplored terrain- My best suggestion would be to experiment an let us know your results.
Also, keep in mind that some of these games are drawing a shitload of things on the screen, oftentimes disconnected- meaning that the blanked beam has to hop around quite a bit to paint everything. In the simpler games, like Star Castle, things are really solid. When you have a big attack happening on something like Tempest, the object & point counts get seriously high. I might try a side-by-side test with the easylase, which is using points mode VS the LD vector mode. I first tried points mode on the LD, but for some reason I ran into a lag that slowed the gameplay down. I may end up flip-flopping back to points mode to get the best display possible. Bill also mentioned a few ideas we could try, so that might be the avenue we take for phase 2 of this one.
I just wanted to get something out there for folks to try in the interim. I might have to take a week or 2 off programming though, I have wayyy too much playing to do with that excellent LD2000 stuff now that I own a QM card! That, and Valentine's is coming up and I need to give my girl some quality time before she disowns me...
Later, Mike

[DZ]

This is awesome, I could sit here and play lunar lander all night. Sad thing is, I haven't even turned on the projector, I guess part of it is just knowing I could!

[allthatwhichis]

This is awesome, I could sit here and play lunar lander all night. Sad thing is, I haven't even turned on the projector, I guess part of it is just knowing I could!

I am ashamed... Best projector I know of; you're the one who should be making videos...

[DZ]

I am ashamed... Best projector I know of; you're the one who should be making videos...

[buffo]

Ah ha! Another Lunar Lander fan... I played it for about 30 minutes straight once I got LazyMame working. What I learned was that it's easier to play it on the monitor than on the laser projector, because on the projector you don't know how fast you're moving left-right or up-down, and that information really comes in handy. Still, I managed more than a few 5X landings.

This will definitely be demo'd at FLEM. Can't wait to hear those explosions played back with our new and improved "DZ-Buffo" deafness generator. (Can you say 3200 watts RMS into four 15 inch woofers, two 12 inch woofers, and 4 horns? Yowsa!)

OK - back on topic. I agree with Aaron that there is a good bit of flicker, and I think a lot of it can be eliminated. Some of the screens that flicker really badly aren't complex enough to warrant so much flicker. So yeah, there's probably some tweaking that can be done to improve that.

But I can't tell you how cool it was to load up Star Trek and hear "Welcome Aboard, Captian!" Well done, Mike!

Adam