forums.marpirc.net

Who's Neil corlett?

welby1 wrote:Who's Neil corlett?

someone who (when alphamame was being used as a secure sourceless version of mame: the best way to secure mame if no one wants to use a dissasembler) extraced the source from a high level disasembler and posted it for everyone. There was a point to what he was doing; we was trying to preserve the sanctity of mame being open source. But it was lame in the fact he didn't tell us before he was going to do it. I disagree there are no ways to make a secure mame (wolfmame is the lock when there are plenty of locksmiths around), it will just be very difficult to do (maybe impossible with open source but not proven yet by people who just claim that it's impossible.)

Haze wrote:Mame always has a potential cheating problem, its an open source project. As far as I know yes Barrys builds with no source for the encryption _are_ in violation of the license, but personally I don't mind turning a blind eye to it in this case because his reasons and intentions are clearly good, he also gives us any other changes he makes that could help drivers etc., I don't know what Nicola thinks these days but thats my take on it and its probably the only situation in which I don't mind.

In some ways alphamame inps were a bit annoying, they were useless for fixing / debugging drivers drivers although they did appear to stop cheating.

From some time ago now, but it would suggest that Haze has either had quite the change in opinion, or Neill Corlett has taken over his mind (or forum account).

Well, I personally didn't mind turning a blind eye to it too much, it was somewhat useful then, but Aaron is in charge now so there is no security. I also disgree with trying to force people to use a non-standard inp format for submissions, hence the current posts. If I develop a driver I like to be able to watch inps for it WITHOUT having to mess around converting them back to some normal format I can play, and without having to use a custom build of Mame.

I disagree with the cars and locks argument, if everybody had the keys to your house, or your car THEN there would be no point in locking it, and that's basically the situation there is now.

Either way, it looks like the easiest way to solve the issue is to simply add support for the extended format to the mainstream Mame builds, which shouldn't be a problem for anybody.

Adding wolfmess support to the offical build would be a good thing, provided aaron accepts it, I would make the patch if you like and support it if things change. I disagree with forcing wolfmame for 1rst places as well, since i don't think it will do anything but piss some people off that happened to record a great game BEFORE they found out about marp and can't submit it, we aren't that widely known. But i also think the forcing can't do much harm otherwise unless there really is rampant cheating. I also agree with the car and lock issue because everyone who has a little money has access to hire someone to break into your house/car. Yes, the wolfmame source is available to everyone but you have to have a little knowlege about making programs to hack wolfmame plus the desire to be a cheat, not everybody has that.

Just for the record, I don't mind the speed recording data and so on being added officially to MAME, either. Reduces my workload. And all those people who think the MAME32 GUI is god will be happy too.

Don't know if you intend to add pause/save state/gfx viewer disabling on record or not.

I might even be able to concentrate on the input viewer code more now. (After I at least get some more work done on the MESS driver I'm still working on... )

Thanks, Barry...getting many of those features included directly in mame/mame32, is an excellent idea. Maybe all of the mame options/settings/speed performance and commands(like pause) could be logged at the start and end of an inp. Perhaps an options file encoded in the inp

Well we'll have to see.

Disabling of pausing etc. is highly unlikely to be accepted in the mainstream build, it has no benefits to developers and could actually be annoying rather than useful. Likewise I don't think Aaron would be too keen on the automatic skipping of the disclaimer/game warning screens when recording.

For the sake of compatibility (which is what I really care about in all this) I think support for the extended format would be useful however. From looking at the wolf diff it wouldn't be a great deal of extra code to maintain in order to support the new format.

Haze wrote:Disabling of pausing etc. is highly unlikely to be accepted in the mainstream build, it has no benefits to developers and could actually be annoying rather than useful.

Pause is biggest cheat

Haze wrote:Well we'll have to see.

Disabling of pausing etc. is highly unlikely to be accepted in the mainstream build, it has no benefits to developers and could actually be annoying rather than useful. Likewise I don't think Aaron would be too keen on the automatic skipping of the disclaimer/game warning screens when recording.

For the sake of compatibility (which is what I really care about in all this) I think support for the extended format would be useful however. From looking at the wolf diff it wouldn't be a great deal of extra code to maintain in order to support the new format.

First I'd like to thank Haze for participating in this discussion. You're the greatest, man!

Next, we'd of course welcome and support the simple patches that would make the official build compatible. Next, like barry mentioned, adding the speed and default refresh rate timings (that go along with the compatibilty padding) to the inp would be useful to both sides. As for the last thing, Would disabling of pausing + throttling during recording really be that annoying? I'd assume all of the pausing that is a usefull part of developing can be done with out the -record feature on. I think we would be happy to just get the first part, but if all three parts are included there would be little reason to apply or have this poll :)

For simplicity, couldn't commands(such as -no pause) grouped into a 'wolf' option that can be selected/deselected in the 'default game options.' That way, anyone who doesn't want to disable any features, simply wouldn't select it. Adding info like framerate, wolf option setting, and perhaps start/finish time being stored directly in the inp...no more guessing about sound on/off, frameskipping or any info that aids in playback/confirmation.
I'm no programmer, but it seems that it shouldn't be too difficult to create a couple of additional commands(like -no pause) and make it so that the inp file also records that information.

Well Aaron is in general opposed to 'feature bloat' (you may have noticed he's been stripping down the commandline options a LOT) so I imagine he wouldn't want an option just to change the recording behavior.

I don't think disabling pause should be a great problem, the timestamp stuff you have in there would surely make it obvious anyway, and the re-recording issue makes it rather pointless anyway as you could just re-record without pauses (and that can be done right now..)

From my perspective it's just annoying that the main source of inps is trying to use a non-standard format, and something to resolve that situation without having to convert every inp I want to play would be good.

The code is fairly straightforward, so I might give it a look over and see what Aaron thinks, of course he may decide that it has no place in Mame and opt to leave things as they are, which wouldn't make my life any easier.

anyone that is a real cheater will always find a way to cheat anyway.

wolfmame is great cuz it protects against "casual-cheaters" meaning gamers which would perhaps "bend" the rules if it is convenient.

ie. using autofire, pausing, slow speed etc.

It does protect against someone playing a game thinking it is at speed when it really is at only 85-90% type speed.

I had 1 game I was doing really well at....game seemed to play smoothly etc. after 2-3 games I had a nice recording with new top score to submit. I checked with wlfview and found it was only at 88% average speed. oh well...

So is this an enforced rule now, or more of a 'guideline'? I only ask, due to recent win97 submission on: gtclassc-ac...it is his first submission under that name, so it may just be a newb. Just curious if it's only to keep certain people from submitting. I haven't ran mame in over 6 weeks now, but if the rule is just there, but not enforced, perhaps I'll play again.