MAMEWorld Forums - Programming - Anyone interested in an up to date Mac port?

Greetings to all.

I'm going to keep this really simple:

Are there any souls out there interested in an up-to-date Mac port of MAME?

By this, I mean a Cocoa-ized port of MAME. OpenGL, CoreAudio, the works. Sort of like MAME OS X- but, uh, not... I've looked into porting and updating the MAME OS X code extensively, but I ultimately decided it just wasn't worth it- there's a lot of proprietary code flying around in there (including a bunch of IB plugins, and surprise, Xcode 4 doesn't do IB plugins all that well) and some design decisions I don't personally agree with.

So I'm thinking of starting my own project to re-port MAME back to Mac OS X.

Initially, it will just basically be an Xcode 4 project designed to build MAME (no makefiles!) into a convenient *.app bundle that can be drag-and-drop installed on any 64-bit Intel Macintosh. This would include SDL.framework and some fixes to automatically assume that CWD is the directory for which "MAME.app" would reside in, so you can just double-click on it without having to run Terminal.app first.

Then, eventually, Sparkle would likely be added to keep things up to date as I keep everything up to sync on my end with Mamedev.

And finally, I'm thinking about building a totally custom Cocoa user interface (something clean and simple- presumably with the smarts to verify ROM files and keep them organized nicely), dumping SDL in favour for OS X's native OpenGL API(s), Core Audio for sound, and HID compatibility via IOKit. This would, ultimately, come much much later.

But the first step is an Xcode 4 project for 0.143u3, and go from there. Before anyone says anything- yes, I know Xcode blows chunks. And yes, I understand MAME's build system rather intimately, having spent hours digging around in there already (so I'm well aware how things like filestr and makelist and make68k/tmsmake are dynamically generating files that are brought back into the source code during compile).

So I guess the point of this post is to essentially gauge the interest in another MAME for OS X port. Raise your hand if you're interested, or something- because I'm not very apt to invest the metric truckload of time this will inevitably suck up over the coming months if nobody is interested (I know people still occasionally complain about MAME OS X being so bloody old- so there's a few of you out there).

-CMPX

Edited by CMPXCHG8B (08/24/11 11:05 AM)