MAMEUIFX

21/06/2015
Bits and Pieces...

Ok, I spent the last two days on two fronts. The first one was correctly implement in MAME OpenGL drawing code the glFinish() functions to reduce bottlenecks between CPU and GPU without impact the overall performance. I believe I found the correct place in source code: now, before starts to draw a new frame, CPU and GPU are forced to come back in sync and empty the queue of commands. Then they can start to work again in asynchronous way which is the main feature of OpenGL video mode. I don't know if the bottlenecks are caused by bad MAME drawing code or simply is my old PC. Though, with the new option now called "Force synchrony between CPU and GPU" the problem is fixed here, so if you experience a similar issue (periodic fluctuating framerate) you know what to do. The option is disabled by default.

The second front was a funny challenge: this bug http://mametesters.org/view.php?id=2640 is properly fixed even if I had to re-enable an old hack which was disabled in the driver.

That's all.

thank you so much mamesick for keeping the interest regarding opengl. its nice to see all the changes "behind" the development.
awesome dude

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"Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music."

Thanks for kazan fix. I'm waiting to test this one.

Finally MAME 163 so it's time to test

So MAMEUIFX will soon be able to play video snaps, wow. How do you plan on presenting that... adding an additional tab called "Video"?, or will the user have to right click on the game and choose to play it's Video Snap? Or some other way? It will be interesting to see this. I guess I better start downloading the Video Snaps now, heh.

The same identical behaviour of "Listen game music with M1FX" menu option. Right-click on game and choose "Play ProgettoSnaps MP4 movie" or select it and click the button on the toolbar. Simple but efficient. Integrated video player in Windows GUI is so bad and full of bugs that it's better launch automatically from the internal shell the associated video player passing gamename.mp4 as parameter.

26/06/2015
Let's play a movie!

Added support in MAMEUIFX interface for ProgettoSnaps Movies:
http://www.progettosnaps.net/videosnaps/videosnaps_files.php



The default external movie player associated with the .MP4 extension will be automatically launched by the Interface:



There's no check for clone/parent because AntoPisa (mantainer of the project) told me that the main goal is to create a movie for every game, even if at the moment there are only movies for the parent ROMset
In the next release, obviously.

A really nice feature. I dont think that movies for clones are really necessary, this would just quadruple the disc-size needed for the movies, even if i know that in some cases a clone can look different from his parent. This would be a little overloaded IMHO. Same goes for snap and titles... i keep my setup "parent-only", nice and small sized.

My feature request for this would be, that the movies are played automagically in the snapshot window, that would be really awesome.

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"Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music."

Yes, apart the fact that I should have to write my own video player or use source code, libraries and so on from an open source one like MPC-HC or VLC. Unfortunately Windows APIs don't provide features to such a thing like this natively. Or maybe yes but this would require so much time to study and learn how to implement that it's not the case.

29/06/2015
Summer cleanings an fixes...

I spent part of this weekend to improve and clean up the source code of some of MAMEUIFX features:
- Autofire: converted the code to be fully integrated in MAME core C++ classes instead of using global external static ugly variables.
- Show current time (LEFT SHIFT + G): same as above.
- Toaplan Samples support: same as above with the removal of some variables and portions of code that weren't used at all.

Then I had a look at some games/drivers I use to play and that are buggy:
- Blandia: http://mametesters.org/view.php?id=4701 is properly fixed without the use of any hack and the global emulation of the whole SETA.C driver is now improved.
- SSV.C: This driver has some cool games in it, like for example Dyna Gear and Storm Blade. I fixed the visible area for all games, some of them were ugly displayed and with some graphic bugs. Now the overall situation seems better.
- Nebulas Ray: http://mametesters.org/view.php?id=2124 This game is now no more slow as hell. If you read carefully Haze comments to the bug report, you should understand that the problem is performing raster interrupt effects on sprites. Well, I tried for curiosity to remove them and... ta-dah! Game is now again solid 100% and no more glitches on sprites! I have to say my source code is not the proper solution but it works from start to the end as far as I tested it. I had to handle some special priority background/sprites/foreground cases with an hack but the most important thing is that the game is working perfectly because the raster interrupt effects are disabled only for sprites.

That's all.