> Yeah can you send those to me privately. DB is too new to add (if it's a 2009 game) > but I don't know if any of the Type-X "dumps" going around are going to end up ever > being used in mame or not, and I don't even have a full listing of them. I don't know > if the additives can be removed properly, if the pure dumps are kept separate from > the additives. It's pretty boring hardware so I haven't looked into it. We'll take > all the clean rips you have though. No telling when they will be added though.
I'm by no means an expert on those games, but I did write a couple of programs to help get them working and I really don't think they will be of use to MAME nor should they ever be put in mame or at least not in the next 10 years or so.
They are windows XP executables with some hardcoded calls to a custom I/O board that handles the josyticks and what not. With a few exceptions they aren't modified at all. They are simply launched with an additional exe that intercepts the calls to the i/o board and re-routes them to standard keyboard keys. In some cases this couldn't be figured out so the exes were hacked via a hex editor to re-route the "debug" keys (which essentially lets you use a keyboard to test the games) to the desired keyboard keys.
So unless MAME has the capability to run a 64 bit version of windows xp and emulate a full 64 bit pc they won't be in mame anytime soon. And since windows 7/8/9 runs xp games just fine it makes more sense to simply get them running on the pc for now.
That being said it would be nice if some real emu programmers took a look at these games. Wrappers for the video card calls would be especially good because the coding of some of these games are so specialized that they have graphical errors if you try to run them on a different video card.