Getting things back up and running (help/guidance)

[hearntd]

Hi all,

OK so I've decided to give my old machine an update as it hasn't really seen much use for a while and it was originally built and setup a very scary 7 years ago 🤯. 

So I've got a new PC, monitor and got Hyperspin and RL setup and got the old stuff up and running (from what I can see so far), now.... everything is old MAME is on 0.152 and obviously everything else is around the 7 years old mark. Also I'd forgotten that I have loads of duplicate versions of games i.e. what seems like about 30 versions of street fighter II, along with many others 

I guess question one is should I get the latest MAME 0.226 from a glance, or any other version I should look for? and two how do I get rid of all these versions of the games? and lastly anything else I should be looking out for that has changed in the years I've been away 🤣?

Cheers guys, (please be gentle...)

[SupraKarma]

Without going too in depth, I'll try to point you in the right direction, and give you my thoughts. The decision to update MAME is personal choice. My MAME setup is now going on 4 years old. But, 98% of the games worth actually playing have already been emulated, and, I have a full set of wheels/logos for all of them. Updating MAME would mean potentially having a couple hundred games without wheels, and I'd be willing to bet only 2% of them are games that I'd actually consider playing. MAME is a vast emulation project, and they've expanded to cover so many things now, that you really need to ask yourself if it's worth keeping up with. If they added an extra 200 fruit machines, is that really worth having? ...Again, 98% of the classics that are worth playing are already emulated.

As far as the 'clones,' there's a very easy way to take care of that, assuming you're using proper databases. Simply open HyperHQ and go to the 'wheel' tab, choose MAME, and choose the 'navigation' tab, and under 'wheel fliters,' choose 'parents only.' From now on, only the 'parent' game will show up in HyperSpin.

[Spawk]

Totally agree! Once upon a time, it was not uncommon to see mame go without an update for 6 months or more. Now they kind of mandate updates every single month! It's such a pain to do so I try to avoid it at all costs. Basically I would only do it now if a game I really wanted to play was marked as "not working" in my current version and now became playable in a new version.

All that being said, there are additions to features along the way as well, like the way mame handles artwork... and the use of HLSL/GLSL was added (or at least greatly improved) somewhere around .176 I think. I don't use HLSL or even vanilla mame these days. Another huge development in the last seven years is RetroArch. I will be forward right off the bat. I fuckin hate this program! LOL excuse the french. The way you make and save settings is just not very intuitive especially for newcomers. The ability to add a whole shader chain to any system, game, or content (folder) makes it well worth the learning how to use it though.

Also just to add to what SupraKarma said, filtering the wheel "parent only" doesn't restrict you from playing the version you want even if it's not the parent. Interestingly, HS does not get parent/clone info from mame itself but rather from the XML. So if we take Pac-Man as an example you can find Pac-Man in the XML and delete “Puckman” from in between the “<clone of>” tags and it will show up as a parent. Then go to Puckman in the XML and put Pac-Man inside the clone of tag and HS will see it as clone and hide from wheel.

Notepad++ (plusplus) is an excellent freeware program that you can use to better edit xml files. Just looks nicer than regular old notepad but more importantly, it does not have the same size limitations! I don't think a full fledged mame.xml would even load in regular notepad.

[hearntd]

Cheers guys, greatly appreciated.

I guess I just need to decide if I'm basically doing a "fresh" build if it's worth starting up to date,  I guess it will also support Windows 10 better as well.... I've seen the newer version of MAME looks a lot different from what I remember so I'll have a think.

Thanks for the info on the clones, I do seem to remember something about this now, it's been far to long since I set it all up. And recently I've been playing around with Pinball ROMS that are completely different.

Thanks again, lets see what I can break tonight 😂.