MAME working games only and 2D'ish CHD torrent

Hi everyone - long time no post. Hope you are all ok, and Harrision hope you are on the way to recovering from the aweful flooding.

I've had the EMU bug recently and my attentioned turned to updating my ancient MAME 0.138 collection. Of course the recent set is getting quite large.

So I posted over at pleasuredome and thought I'd just dump the text here. Just had an idea, perhaps suggested before, actually very likely, but do you think we need a working games only torrent for MAME? In other words a torrent which only includes working ROMS and CHD files?

Now that the collection is getting huge, I'm sure it must be possible to compile a list of working only games and delete those that are marked as not working. This should result in a very compact and useful torrent especially for those who need a smaller collection to run on retro dedicated emulation machines.

Another idea is a torrent of CHD games which are 2D only or not entirely 3D based - as many 3D CHD games don't run well on weaker systems.

I tried to put a list together myself of the best 2D semi-3D CHD titles that are working from info on the internet:

Border Down
Capcom vs SNK series(not sure if this is working)
Chaos Field
Chaos Heat
Guilty Gear XX series
Ikaruga
JoJo
Karous
KInstinct series
Melty Blood Act Cadenza Ver B
Night Raid
Primal Rage 2
Psyvariar - Medium Unit series
Ray Crisis
Red Earth - Warzard
SFIII series
Shikigami no Shiro
Super Puzzle Bobble
Trigger Heart Exelica (Rev A)
Trizeal
Under Defeat
XII Stag

Anyone suggest any more?

I can understand this may affect seeding numbers of the main torrents however, but should be ok if not offered as a free torrent.

What do you guys think, we could put something together. :)

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Well I got told in no uncertain terms that this question has been asked before at Pleasuredome and it will not be permitted to create a torrent with a cut down selection of working only and/or CHD titles that run at reasonable speeds - full only MAME torrents.

I still think they should allow a working only MAME torrent and a thinned out CHD torrent, however it's an awesome resource so who am I to argue? Plus there are other places to share such a project.

I know that there's a Hyperspin MAME set existing, which removed all clone ROMs.

I myself did a personal set some weeks ago, as I wanted to shrink it in size for my JXD s7300, so I went through the whole set (took me weeks), and only kept the "best" games, and all the classics I played when I was young, leaving me with still almost 2.000 games. This had been done with a 0.139 set, as the emulator MAME4droid Reloaded uses this set, instead of the usual MAME ports for handhelds that use the much older 0.37bx sets.

I didn't know that it wasn't permitted to upload edited sets? Probably because of legal terms.

Yep, it takes ages creating custom rom lists as there are so many games! I bet you are now proud of your custom collection however. Very few of the new MAME titles interest me, espcecially the slow 3D games, which many look like PS1 titles and bad compared to modern 3D. MAME for me means 2D goodness which seems to age well!!!!

I also thought as long as you offered a torrent and people were willing to seed, then I too had the impression Pleasuredome would allow it but apparently it's full sets only.

I have been directed to the following links:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=romlister (Includes mention of Hyperspin)
ROMLister (http://www.waste.org/~winkles/ROMLister/)
MCM (http://mcm.mameworld.info/)

So looks like some custom lists may be available or can be created and applied to full sets. :)

Hi mate. Great to see you back. Thanks for asking about the flooding. Everything is ok again now. Moved back last November and just need to sort out the garden now the weather is better.

It is a great idea to reduce the mame set to just working roms. There are also a lot of duplicate roms because of different versions of the same cabinets, so those could also be reduced to a single version.

Pleasuredome is a great resource, but they are very strict about what is and isn't allowed, and very rigid with their flexibility. As DC said, we would have alternative locations to host such a set.

I'm wondering if ClrMamePro could be utilised to strip non working roms from the main set?

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk HD

I'm sure ClrMamePro could be used, also those ultilities linked above like Romlister and MCM.

I'm going to put something together soon I think, need a nice compact set for my Retro Laptop which I take around friends houses. Has a 250GB hard drive, so don't want a load of clones and non-working ROMS. CHD set has the most fat, with the vast majority dance and lightgun games, plus a load non-working or just really slow 3D titles requiring huge amounts of CPU power..

True. Most of the best CHDs are the LD (laserdisc) games. Plus a few others like Alien vs Predator, and a couple of the racing games. The rest either don't work or require dedicated hardware such as dancemats or lightguns to use properly.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Harrison

True. Most of the best CHDs are the LD (laserdisc) games. Plus a few others like Alien vs Predator, and a couple of the racing games. The rest either don't work or require dedicated hardware such as dancemats or lightguns to use properly.

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Is Alien vs Predator a CHD game? I can't find a CHD for that, I think it's only ROM based?

Which laser disk games do you play - I don't think the Dragons Lair titles will ever be added to MAME. :( But there are other emulators for that. :)

Alien vs Predator is a normal ROM based game, no CHD.

Daphne plays the LD games fine, but Dragon's Lair 1&2 or Space Ace f.ex. are easily available to play from a DVD on your TV or such. I played it on the iPad, and that works great.

Yeah, AvP is rom based... I don't know why I thought it was CHD based. :unsure:

Dragon's Lair and the other Digital Leisure owned games won't be appearing on MAME any time soon because I think they have a deal with the MAME developers not to include them. So the LD emulator Daphne needs to be used. However Daphne and MAME do support a few other common CHD LDs.

The advantage of Daphne is that the LD images are much smaller than the MAME CHD versions. Daphne uses MPEG2 video versions of the original LDs and so this normally keeps each game's total video size to within a DVD (4.3GB or less), but Daphne therefore has to use different techniques to make the LD games work. Whereas MAME's way is to emulate the original arcade game exactly as it was originally, and this makes the LD images much larger (some are 60GB each).

Why such a huge difference?

With MAME the LD video files are uncompressed, so are perfect quality and look identical to the original LD version. It also means every frame is completely intact and the game can be emulated perfectly as it ran originally, allowing the game to jump to any point within the video during gameplay. This means that for additional LD games to be added to MAME all you need to do is dump the LD into the CHD format and dump the game's rom, then MAME should emulate the game perfectly. The downsize is huge LD CHD files for each game.

With Daphne a lot more work is needed to support any new games. Using MPEG2 versions of the videos makes the files much smaller, but with MPEG2 DVD style compression you don't have every frame of the original video stored. The compression works by having key frame every so often, and then reference frames with just the differences between. This means you can't just jump to a specific exact frame, but have to jump to one of the key I frames in the sequence so the playback codec can build the whole image. Therefore this causes problems for LD games because they work by jumping to specific frames within the video as the game is played. For Daphne to work each game has to be compressed into MPEG2 in a special way, breaking each sequence the game uses up and making sure a key frame is at the exact position for every point within the video that the game will want to jump to. So it is a lot of work to add a new game. MAME in comparision allows you to just dump the LD into a CHD and not worry about it.

So each had its pros and cons. The MAME way creates a perfect emulation, but huge files, The Daphne way creates less accurate emulation and lower quality video, but much smaller files. The thing is, at the moment if the goal is to streamline and reduce the size of the MAME set, to get rid of the LD CHD games that Daphne supports, because Daphne's versions (while less accurate and lower quality) still look good and play well and save you a lot of HDD space.

As for other CHDs supported by MAME. Many of them require specific hardware to function properly. There are loads of versions of Dance games Beatmania, Dance Dance revolution and Dancing Stage supported that can be removed as the game works perfectly but needs the hardware so is pointless keeping.

Working CHD games I play and recommend keeping are:

Area 51 and Area 51 Max Force
Biofreaks
California Speed *
Cliff Hanger
Gauntlet Dark Legacy
Hyperdrive *
Killer Instinct 1 and 2
San Francisco Rush *
Street Fighter III games
Super Puzzle Bobble

* check to see if your PC can emulate it full speed because you need a powerful CPU to cope. California Speed f.ex. will run at about 5fps on a Athlon 64, about 15fps on a Q6600, but at full speed on an i5 or i7.

Thanks for the heads up Demon Cleaner. :)

Wow, nice detailed reponse Harrision -thanks. I'll check out those CHDs you have mentioned and see if it's worth adding them to the list. :)