> > I've been keeping track (as best as I can understand it). Are we going to see DICE > > merge with MAME? > > My understanding is that MAME works differently to DICE, but the netlists already > created for DICE only need 10% changes to work in MAME. Whether DICE continues is up > to Adam.
Adam can do optimizations which MAME netlists can't support. Therefore DICE will have better performance. The design goals of netlist were different:
- Replace the old discrete core at some time. - Only very limited understanding of electronics and physics needed to convert schematics to netlist format. - Have a tool to replace the various attempts in MAME to do discrete analog emulation. - Be able to test netlists outside of MAME.
Discrete games were only a minor part of the plan. Pong just happened to be a perfect test bed since it had some challenging features like pulling TTL outputs to ground. When I started, I had no idea whether I'd end up with 1 FPS or 60FPS.
I hope that the netlist format encourages more people to contribute. Nearly all pre-90 game had some sort of output filtering with audible impact. Most of this yet is not emulated in MAME.
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