MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: minor MAME samples question

>(other than regressing to an old version of MAME)

It is possible to run an older version of MAME that is set for a specific game while keeping up to date with newer versions of MAME. That is what users had to do with Asteroids discrete audio when it was altered by Keith Wilkins (former MAMEdev) in spring 2001 until Derrick Renaud joined MAMEdev and fixed up a lot of the discrete audio including fixing Asteroids audio.

> to force MAME to use a sample set for sound rather on a particular game rather than pure
>emulation. Particularly, in a game like Q*bert that uses the Votrax SC-01.

A lot of Asteroids fans also had to wait for some time until Derrick Renaud was able to improve a lot of the centralized discrete audio code and fix up analog audio sounds such as Asteroids or add analog audio to many of the 1970s era games.

> The sound emulation is still a work in progress to date and it makes the game less fun
>to play. I appreciate that it was most likely an absolute enormous undertaking and it is
>amazing that the emulation has progressed to a point of pure hardware level simulation on
>the sound chip, great for the long term, but it would be nice if there was some option to
>force samples while work progresses.

Consider it a momentary setback. That is what has always been the case with many updates of MAME over the two decades. The biggest ones were the breakage of many Sega games (mainly bootleg versions of Sega arcade games) when Aaron Giles had updated the memory address feature in fall 2000 and wasn't fixed until 2005. Aaron's updated memory work allowed other games to be supported that wouldn't have been possible with old memory address system. It also helped that other devs (Charles MacDonald, Guru, Aaron Giles, dwidel) were able to figure out how the Hitachi FD 1089, FD 1094, an encrypted MC 8123 worked and were able to support the original Sega games. And Aaron Giles finally fixed up the way Sega games were handled in late 2005. The Asteroids audio (already described) was another example.

I don't see it taking as long for the Votrax speech to be corrected, but it may be a while since OG is also busy with other stuff such as improving Konami video rendering gameplay output.