wraggster
August 18th, 2007, 14:28
kaisersoze (http://code.google.com/p/iphone-sdl-mame/) has posted some great news and screenshots of his port of MAME to the Iphone:
Project to port SDL MAME to the iPhone. The main cool feature I want to add is configurable layouts for touchscreen controls and gesture based inputs. Whether MAME will actually be playable from a performance and control perspective remains to be seen.
UPDATE: As expected, performance is an issue. For example, Pacman and Q*bert run well, but Galaga and Gyruss are marginal. The SDL port was the quickest way to get everything up and running without having to delve into the guts of MAME. One option would be to switch to an older (and pre-SDL) version of MAME that may have less accurate emulation (and different associated ROM sets) which may also be faster but require a boatload of porting work. I wonder how easy it would be to try and pull out code from earlier versions of games that have marginal performance? I'll have to do some investigation. My old 700 MHz arcade cabinet machine is running just fine on some old Linux svgalib version of AdvanceMAME from like 3 or 4 years ago (hey if it ain't broke don't fix it :) so that might be a good the place to start. If I go that route, you may have to use older ROM sets (which we all legally obtained, of course, cough, cough).
Progress report
Full MAME is built!
Now I gotta figure out how in the heck to actually control the darn thing! I think I'll redo all the menus with native iPhone widgets, not only will it look better but the existing menu interface is all keyboard based anyway, and it would probably be just as much work to add mouse/pointer support to it.
I had to stub out a couple of files as they wouldn't compile, and I had to just manually slap all the .o files directly to the linker as it doesn't seem to want to link against all the code in the .a archive libraries.
http://iphone-sdl-mame.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/screenshots/galaga.png
http://iphone-sdl-mame.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/screenshots/gyruss.png
Project to port SDL MAME to the iPhone. The main cool feature I want to add is configurable layouts for touchscreen controls and gesture based inputs. Whether MAME will actually be playable from a performance and control perspective remains to be seen.
UPDATE: As expected, performance is an issue. For example, Pacman and Q*bert run well, but Galaga and Gyruss are marginal. The SDL port was the quickest way to get everything up and running without having to delve into the guts of MAME. One option would be to switch to an older (and pre-SDL) version of MAME that may have less accurate emulation (and different associated ROM sets) which may also be faster but require a boatload of porting work. I wonder how easy it would be to try and pull out code from earlier versions of games that have marginal performance? I'll have to do some investigation. My old 700 MHz arcade cabinet machine is running just fine on some old Linux svgalib version of AdvanceMAME from like 3 or 4 years ago (hey if it ain't broke don't fix it :) so that might be a good the place to start. If I go that route, you may have to use older ROM sets (which we all legally obtained, of course, cough, cough).
Progress report
Full MAME is built!
Now I gotta figure out how in the heck to actually control the darn thing! I think I'll redo all the menus with native iPhone widgets, not only will it look better but the existing menu interface is all keyboard based anyway, and it would probably be just as much work to add mouse/pointer support to it.
I had to stub out a couple of files as they wouldn't compile, and I had to just manually slap all the .o files directly to the linker as it doesn't seem to want to link against all the code in the .a archive libraries.
http://iphone-sdl-mame.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/screenshots/galaga.png
http://iphone-sdl-mame.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/screenshots/gyruss.png