MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: Tank 8 as FPGA version

Hej Mattias,

First, welcome to the forums! It appears as though you are located in Sweden. It turns out there are 2 developers on the MAME mailing list who live in Sweden, and another recent heavy contributor, so you're among friends.

> Pretty cool - I did not know that Mame could work with discrete in this way.
> Impressive.

There are actually two discrete subsystems in MAME - one was developed 5+ years ago and hasn't seen much love since (this is what's used in tank8), and the other is under active development. There are a lot of fun things going on in that department these days. The term "netlist" is used a lot with the modern discrete system, so things such as this:

(a full pong machine - no roms - simulated with relatively modern netlist code)
https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/5d1...rivers/pong.cpp

(a full list of netlist uses)
https://github.com/mamedev/mame/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=netlist

(examples of where to look for netlist code and what it looks like)
https://github.com/mamedev/mame/tree/master/nl_examples

and this:

https://github.com/mamedev/discrete

are directly relevant to what you are doing. It's even possible whatever layout program you used to develop your simulations could be imported into MAME and it would "just work". I believe there are many opportunities for you to benefit from MAME as well as MAME to benefit from the knowledge you have.

> Btw when I looked at some tank8 rom files available as downloads I noticed that they
> have extension .c1 .j1 .f1 .e1 .l1 .k1 .j5 .h5 .n6 etc. Is there a file extension
> logic and a guide on how to inspect and use these ROM files as non MAME (or are they
> deeply MAME configured)?

MAME's naming convention for ROMS goes ROM_label.PCB_location. This is so people who own the PCBs and need to service their board, can easily locate the ROM in question on the PCB (among various other reasons). Each ROM file is 'dumped' exactly as the ROM datasheet describes, and is independent of MAME - MAME has many different ROM loading procedures that adapt to the myriad of different ROM types produced over the years. In other words, these ROM files can be loaded by a ROM programmer, programmed directly to a ROM chip, and work on the PCB without any fuss. They should be useful to you.

There is plenty of other interesting things to talk about as well, so please enjoy taking a look at what MAME has already done, and let's see if there is a way both projects can benefit eachother.

/Andrew