MameXM-1.03.182 unsigned 2010 March s60v5 games

Mame porting to Nokia 5800 XpressMusic and Symbian S60V5 Phones
* * * LATEST NEWS * * *
V.1.03 released : 2337 games support, full Mame 0.37b7 integration, 5 virtual keyboard layouts

Q: What is MameXM?
A: MameXM is a port of MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) for Symbian S60v5 OS.
This emulator can run over 2000 games of ‘golden’ arcade era
(’80 and ‘90) and NeoGeo games too.
MameXM is freeware, released to public domain.
Q: I put mame roms zipped in C:\Data\MameXM\Roms or E:\MameXM\Roms but the ’scan for games’
command did not find anything (or finds only few games).
A: The roms must be in Mame 0.37b7 format, this means that the roms for the latest
mame version (0.134) generally did not work with MameXM.
Mame 0.37b7 was released in 2000 and the various game-rom contents is today
(2009) quite different from the past. Version by version mame core uses
more ‘refined’ rom dump even in slight different format.
So you must own the so named ‘Rollback rom set’ that contains all rom-files
removed from past mame version, and mix this Rollback Set wih the newer
romset (and the MameXM definition file) to obtain the correct mame 0.37b7
romset needed by MameXM.
* * *
Running neogeo games requires at least neogeo.zip and the zips with the roms games.
Q: Why a mame-engine so old?
A: Becouse it’s so lite to fit into the mobile hardware. Newer mame-engines are
too big and cannot well sqeezed into limited mobile hardware resources.
Q: Why the sound emulation, in many cases, is so slow?
A: Sound hardware in many games is implemented with Yamaha OPL family chips
(they got sound chips named YM-xxxx).
These are emulated with intensive floating point calculation, and the 5800
device has not the floating point hardware unit.
So all the FP calculations must be done by compiler-provided emulation FP
library that uses many integer operations for just 1 FP operation.
This fact causes the slowness of the sound emulation. So, if you disable the sound,
you get an impressive speedup of the emulation. In many cases unplayable (too slow) games
become smoothly and fully playable (eg: neo-geo based games).
* * *
Another speed issue is the background 5800 XM audio process. Yes, when
the xm plays seems that an ‘audio helper process’ runs in background
adding slowness to simulation! I have experimented that using a
bluetooth earpiece removes the ‘helper process’ slowness.
So, disabling sound, results in a big improvement in emulation speed.
Q: What about video emulation speed?
A: Symbian has not an uniform software layer to improve video raster bitmap render.
The documented routines are generally too slow for a gaming engine.
The direct to graphic memory addressing is undocumented and may change between
different devices. So the graphic render cannot be fully accelerated.
EG: with pacman running on 5800 XM at about 25-28 FPS, the 75% of processor power
is ‘eaten’ by Symbian (fat) refresh screen routine. A shame.
There is no documentation known by me on how to bypass the slowness of (i believe) alpha-rendering
routine (unused in mamexm).
Q: Where are MameXM configuration files in my phone?
A: In C:\Data\MameXM

Q: What config files are in this dir?
A: gameroms.ini : list all scanned and available game roms
lastgame.ini : points to the last game played
license.ini  : user has accepted the MameXM license
options.ini  : default options, and specific game options (eg. video mode, autofire keys)
\Data        : subdirectory with mame core engine configuration for played games
these files contain the keyboard mappings for the games and all the others
mame-game parameters eg: dip switch config.

Q: Accelerometer?, improved UI?, UI screen rotation?, external gaming devices?, …?
A: Maybe in next releases



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