Noticias sobre el proximo MAMEX B7

those interested can follow development.

Back to B7. Due to my HD crash, and the MAME team kicking ass and romping through new versions of mame, i decided to take a aproach of a semi-re-port. Here are my reasons.

First of all B7 was hacked all to shit! I did some driver improvements, got some games working, added some HDTV stuff, and some spice to the game selection gui, but heres the dilemma. Due to trying to squeeze more ram, and after a few attempts at virtual memory failure, my approach was to segment all game drivers into sections, sections allow me to unload them and load them as needed, freeing up ram. So when you selected a game, only that game driver remained in memory. This worked good, saved about 9 megs of ram per game... One problem, over 1800 files needed #pragmas at the top, and bottom. Why is this a pain in the ass? Well as the MAME team releases new versions these files need updating instead of just replacing. Thats alot of work. So, as for not recovering the full source of b7 even. I'm going to dump this one in the gutter.

So what ARE we going to do? Well, my vision is 3 XBE files. 1 launcher, 1 neogeo/cps2 version, and 1 version without neogeo/cps2. Kinda like b6 but with the launcher extracted. Why? Well... what this allows me to do is to make a fancier launcher without fear of eating up ram, once we pick the game, we launch the trimmed xbe that only contains game code, so this frees up more ram for the games. This is good. Not alot of ram saved, but every little bit helps. When the game exits, it launches the launcher back at the place you left. The dual version in b6 seemed to work well in getting more games running, and i was holding back at creating a fancier launcher due to not wanting to eat up ram for the games.

Just thought I'd update everyone on whats going on, hopefully we are back on track soon and caught up with the MAME team for .64 I know there are some new games you guys are dying to bitch me out about because their isn't enough ram to run!