Important stuff about WolfMAME...

[The TJT]

Tommi,

Have you tried your spinner for 720 yet? I have a nasty feeling it may not work as the mamedevs changed the controller system for this game from dial to joystick at about 0.85. It no longer works for me anyway! I just get straight up, down, left, right movements.

I've been /away from my computer couple days, haven't tried it yet.
Little regulation catching up to do.
I think you're right though. MAWS shows controller as a "stick", and I remember reading somewhere that there was controller emulation update for 720...So that original controller is emulated now, so that you could hack an original 720 arcade controller to play with MAME.
Usually when stick is emulated contoller, you can play with mouse too(starwars etc)...In the case of 720, it might be that because the stick movement is so strange, mouse might not do the trick. I don't know if there's workaround this using controller cfg file.
I might ask mame board if it still can be played with mouse, or even to add old type of mouse support, since not many are going to play it with original controller anyway...
Ideal would be of course to have original optical spinning stick AND old kind of mouse x-axis drivers BOTH emulated, 2 different drivers for 2 different contollers...If it can be done separately, that is...if not, maybe simple switch could be added to choose from old control driver vs new.
Too bad if new contol driver messes up spinner play. Maybe Haze reads this?

[The TJT]

Here's the reply I got:

> Hi, I'm wondering if previous "dial" controls can be used with 720 somehow?
> Standard.cfg???
> So that mouse uses only x-axis...and the game can be played with spinner as
> before.

Only if you edit source and recompile. (see below)

> 720 used somekind of directional optical joystick, it was quite different
> from Ikari Warriors etc "clickin' joy"...since it was optical, I think(and
> sometimes loosed direction and needed re-calibration)

Not quite true.

The original controller was a special spinner with a joystick handle instead of the normal knob, and two sensors and encoder wheels instead the normal one. One of the encoder wheel & sensor acted just like on a normal spinner and did the actual direction control; this encoder wheel had 72 teeth and 72 gaps. The other encoder wheel & sensor were to keep the joystick calibrated, and only had two gaps sperated by one fat tooth (with the width of 2 teeth + 1 gap of the other encoder wheel). It would see these gaps every time the stick passed straight up. Most of the 720 controllers that went out of calibration quickly was due to a broken "calibration sensor".

The code to add the old way (and the "calibration sensor") can be found in the source to the most recent MameAnalog+ at my web site (in src/drivers/atarisy2.c).


Robin
http://www.urebelscum.speedhost.com/ or
http://www.angelfire.com/retro/u_rebelscum or
rain.prohosting.com/urebel

So, with current controls it's really only meaningful to play the game with original controller with a mouse y-and x-axis hack. Without original controller, it's virtually impossible to play it well. A bit sad, there won't be many to hack that thing...So far none I know of. To get full stick from ebay and get it steady would be a problem...more easy to play original cabinet.

I think it's upto Barry if he wants to change controller code for wolfmame... (hoping)

[Rat]

Is this .wlf file included in wolfmame 0.90 also ? will it be a requirement from now on ?

[mahlemiut]

Since 0.89u6. It's recommended that you do include the .wlf file as it contains a few settings that can be used on playback. No requirement (as yet, at least), but it may help playback some touchy games.

[Rat]

OK thanks.

Might be helpful to put an explanation on the upload page also ?

[LN2]

The .wlf is a nice step...but why have it as a separate file? Just add it in as part of the inp header.

I always figured the inp format should be where there is some delimiting set of characters that the code checks for to decide where the actual gameplay input data begins.

...so even if the size of that header varies drastically, it won't matter for "basic" playback. If the header is wrong then info extracted from that would just be wrong. ie. missing wlf info.

heck, let's just take this step...

have the separate .wlf, .inp, .nvram etc. files...but then automatically have them as a zip file for playback...so the playback engine in MAME would dezip to RAM or cache file on the HD and play from that.

It's likely possible to even handle that live on recording and playback...just applying the zip routines to zip the data up before saving to a file even.

It's a lower priority type of feature...but would simplify things for the users some.

[kfx]

Seems like the INP´s recorded in wolfmame91u1 are gettin very large, at least some of them.

Played at little Mr. Do´s Castle, and even though I suck at it, the INP file was over 15 MB, 135kb when zipped.

Seems like at least on this game the INP size has gotten at least 3 times bigger from wolfmame89 to wolfmame91u1 for the same number of frames.

Is there a good explenation (spelling?) for this or is it just the MAME driver for this game that has change?

[mahlemiut]

As part of Aaron Giles' input port rewrite, input ports went from 16-bit to 32-bit. So now inps store 120 bytes per frame, rather than 60 bytes since 0.84u4. But I strongly discourage any use of any version from 0.84u4 to 0.87 (inclusive), as due to a bug in said rewrite, INPs for some games got extraordinarily large. Don't even think about making a Pitfighter inp in those versions. Do use 0.87u1 or later, the bug was fixed then.

[kfx]

Thanks for the quick reply

[Chad]

is there a real reason to force all games to have the same frame length. I mean, if you can't use gameA inp to playback gameB, you'd think it'd be ok to store less bytes per frame for some games with less input possibilities and more bytes per frame for more inputs. I guess it keeps things standard, but i mean if you have 120 bytes, store the analogue information in there too... oh well i'll get off the box.

[LN2]

I agree...it's clear from older versions that even 40 byte framesizes were just fine.


I can understand more for analog games.

...so why not 1 size for "analog" games and another size for strictly digital controls?


inps were large enough in older versions...so oh, let's make them 3 times larger?!?!

geesh, I'll need a 30 gig swap HD just to play certain games.

[mahlemiut]

Still far better than videos... I'd so love to see a certain Progear video... far too much to download while I'm still on dialup though.

[The_Pro]

Still far better than videos... I'd so love to see a certain Progear video...

Link for the curious?

[mahlemiut]

I don't have a link, it's on a private FTP

[MJS]

I had been thinking about making videos from inps... and I've already done a short one to try.
The result was awesome, because I kept the frames lossless (and with the actual frame rate) until recompression and burn.
I will post the procedure once I manage to make a big video succesfully.

...or I can upload to certain ftp if I get access to it!