" /> MAMEblog: April 2006 Archives

« March 2006 | Main | August 2006 »

April 13, 2006

SpiffMAME: Background

SpiffMAME cabinet

SpiffMAME is my MAME-cabinet, which I have spent countless hours building/rebuilding. In this article I will try to write a little about the background for building SpiffMAME, and some of the choices in the early stages of the project.

Since I was young I have been very fond of computer games. In particular the older games where graphics and sound are limited by the hardware, and where the game developers have had to be really creative to get good gameplay. But I really think the gameplay of those games is so much better than most of the games developed today on multi-million dollar budgets.

Where I grew up there was no easy access to arcade games, so I cannot say that I spent a lot of time (and money) on this in my youth. I spent a lot of time on my Commodore 64, but only played arcade games when I ocationally found a machine somewhere. Still I have always been intrigued by these machines.

I first got the idea to build my own arcade machine after reading an article in a Danish computer magazine about a guy who built his own cabinet running an early version of MAME. At this time I had been playing a lot with various emulators (mainly C64), and I quickly got hooked on the idea to have my own coin-op machine. Having a machine with a single game was not an option, both in terms of the size, and in terms of the investment (being a student with limited financial freedom), but a machine running MAME could run a wealth of games.

Continue reading "SpiffMAME: Background" »

April 12, 2006

Updating the romset

OK. So I finally got some time again, and decided to do something about all the things I wanted to write about here on mameblog.com. Of course, since it has been a while since my last post, and that was about upgrading the packages, there is a bunch of new packages, so I'm going through another iteration of package upgrading.

But since I am also updating my romset, I thought I would share a little information about how I maintain my romset using the advscan utility. Way back I downloaded a complete romset (I think it was for version 0.70), and ever since, I have been using differential updates (one for each MAME version) and verifying with advscan. Let me explain how I apply one romset update at a time and check for any missing ROMs. Then I will give a few hints on how to fix it if it turns out some roms are bad.

Continue reading "Updating the romset" »