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MacMAME 0.28 Rom Set?

Byte Knight

Byte Knight

6502
While playing around with MacPortrait and my Dell P1917s LCD rotating monitor, I thought it would be cool to see how vertically-oriented arcade games would look on it. Bottom line is that they look awesome in MacMAME!

IMG_7595.jpg

I was able to find a full rom set (0.78) for the Unofficial v0.81 of MacMAME, which is the last version to run under OS9, but I've not been able to locate the full rom set for 0.28 which is the last version to run under OS7. I've searched high and low on archive.org without any success. Complicating things is their numbering system in which MAME version 0.8 comes way before 0.28 which comes way before 0.211.

Anywho, does anyone have a full rom set for MacMAME 0.28?
 
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Nobody out there with the roms huh? :(

I was able to find a rom set for 0.8 and 0.37b5 from archive.org and combined the working roms into one set of 93 games compatible with MacMAME 0.28. Unfortunately I can't find working roms of some of my favorites like Burgertime, Discs of Tron, Galaga, Jungle Hunt, Popeye, Wizard of Wor, and Xevious...
 
In most cases you'll be able to get something that works by rearranging a newer set, but that's not a fun project. It took me a long time to piece together one set that worked on old MacMAME so I could show it running in modern MAME's 68K Mac emulation.
 
Arbee said:
In most cases you'll be able to get something that works by rearranging a newer set, but that's not a fun project. It took me a long time to piece together one set that worked on old MacMAME so I could show it running in modern MAME's 68K Mac emulation.
Click to expand...
That's a lot of levels of emulation! I tried rearranging the 0.37b5 set for 0.28 with some success, but there are still a ton of non-working roms. Do you happen to still have your old rom set?
 
https://github.com/mamedev/mame only goes back to 2007. SourceForge has a mirror of the github which contains the same source code (but slightly behind GitHub). The SourceForge mirror also has downloads of older source and binaries. For example, 0.28 from 1997 can be found at:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/mame/files/mame/0.28/

MAME has a -listroms command option to list all the ROMs for all the games (drivers).
There's also -listsamples.

It should be easy to write a directory scanner to find all the ROM parts. You need a combination of -listsamples, readroms(), and printromlist(). It should try matching name, length, and checksum. I think length should be mandatory. One of name and checksum should also match. Best match is when all 3 match.

The directory scanner should check zipped files of later MAME ROMs so the user doesn't need to unzip them. I suppose the zip code from later MAME can be back ported to 0.28.

The directory scanner should be portable so it can be added to later versions of MAME.

If someone has a MAME 0.28 directory scanner for modern macOS, I can search my old MAME folders.
 
joevt said:
It should be easy to write a directory scanner to find all the ROM parts. You need a combination of -listsamples, readroms(), and printromlist(). It should try matching name, length, and checksum. I think length should be mandatory. One of name and checksum should also match. Best match is when all 3 match.
Click to expand...
Thanks for the suggestion, but I brute-forced it by unzipping several different versions of the roms, deleting "Folder" from each of the folder names, and then seeing if they loaded up MacMAME. Not a quick process...

I found the mother lode of roms today on the System7Today Hotline server of all places, and I've managed to patch together 166 working roms for v0.28.

In the process I discovered MacMAME PPC v0.33b3 which also works with System 7 on my 6100, and it supports 501 roms! I'm gonna work on a working rom set for that next.
 
Neat!

Back in I think 2011 or so (maybe earlier), I discovered the preterhuman Hotline server and found it quite interesting. it had lots of Mac and PC software which was very hard to find online back then (of course nowadays, at least for Mac stuff we have Macintosh Garden, which has almost all of that uncommon stuff, and more, in one, convenient spot. Present day Mac collectors are spoiled rotten by all the software availability!)

I'll have to get a Hotline client and take a look.

c
 
Fair warning: MAME versions that early got everything wrong with the games. Gameplay speeds, sound, colors, computer AI behavior, even level order and boss hit points in extreme cases. We just fixed a copy protection failure in Kangaroo that made the gameplay wrong dating back to when it was originally added. If you're OK with that though, great :-)
 
Arbee said:
Fair warning: MAME versions that early got everything wrong with the games. Gameplay speeds, sound, colors, computer AI behavior, even level order and boss hit points in extreme cases. We just fixed a copy protection failure in Kangaroo that made the gameplay wrong dating back to when it was originally added. If you're OK with that though, great :)
Click to expand...
Wait - are you involved in the MAME project?

And yes I've noticed several bugs in v0.28 games including only getting one life despite the DIP switches being set to 3. But I wanna play the games in System 7 so I'll just have to put up with 'em!
 
The 0.28 and 0.33b3 rom sets are available for download from the CQ AppleTalk file server (they're too big to d/l from the BBS) in the Emulation folder at afp://cqbbs.ddns.net if anyone is interested. Make sure to leave a message in the "I was here" folder if you get on!
 
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