Project Mutant Arcades: Mission Statement

[ressurectionx]

My plans for the first release, hopefully in a few months...

 

Guaranteed:

 

1) About 90 games changed so the US rom is the rom included instead of world/international/japan/etc. The standard will be US roms first, World/International roms second, Japan/Foreign roms third, as far as choice of roms included.

 

2) Streamlined mapping so all similar games have the same controller configuration.

 

3) Analog joystick and L/R button tweaking in the source code for best performance on all included games.

 

4) About 400-450 new games. (Yes, many are old, but 230 of the roms in the last update of Arcades were pointed out by me and the screenshots were provided by me. There are plenty of newer games that were still left out. My GUI will also make it very easy to filter the Retro games out.)

 

5) Streamlined source, eliminating all unnecessary clone data and notes providing build times for coders of less than 1/3.

 

6) An easier to navigate "Genre" system which separates, for example, overhead shooters like Ikarii Warriors from side scrolling shooters like DoDonPachi. Currently there are so many different types of games in the "Shooter" genre that it doesn't make any sense.

 

Hopefully in the release:

 

1) I would like to make the ability to mask all of the Retro games easily, perhaps with a push of a button. I have many ideas, but I'm just brainstorming now and I'm still pretty far off from getting the source code cleaned and keymapping done first. Once I figure out how to alter the GUI, I will have many more ideas.

 

2) Fix the 2 player alternating problem. If you haven't noticed, about 95% of all 2 player alternating games are horribly mapped out. 2nd player start selects 2 players, but you control both players with the 1st controller. I have an idea about how to do this, it's just figuring out what code I need to alter. I'm actually halfway there now. When this is accomplished, 2 players will work with 2 controllers, like any other 2player alternating game on any other emulator for XBox.

 

3) More stuff along the way. I keep thinking about new stuff I want to do all the time. I'm also very open to suggestion.

 

 

Some may think much of this just trivial details, and though it's true that a lot of it is, finishing these tasks will provide as perfect a base for MAME emulation to work off of as is possible.

 

 

I hope this clears up any questions about what my plans are from this point on. I hope to have a release out to a few people for testing within a few months. Quite a lot of work to be done.

 

Regards,

~Rx

[Sybarite Paladin AxL]

While I'm not an XBOX owner, I wouldn't like all the roms to show up as US. Mainly because US sucks when it comes to certain game differences. Japan first, followed by World would be my choice really.

[BlackKnight]

While I'm not an XBOX owner, I wouldn't like all the roms to show up as US. Mainly because US sucks when it comes to certain game differences. Japan first, followed by World would be my choice really.

It should be country of origin first, then international, then foreign versions.

[gavin19]

There is a case for including multiple versions of the same game in some instances. For example, some games have a higher default difficulty in different locales. Progear (No Arashi) defaults to a higher difficulty level when using the native Japanese rom.

 

World/International/US should be default if only for the sake of possible language issues.

[+ T +]

I'm not really into all these cut-down MAME builds myself but I thought I'd give my 2 cents on the ROM region issue.

 

Basically the MAME dev team have chosen what they consider to be the definitive version of each game and made that the parent set. The reason US sets are rarely chosen as parents are the occasional addition of some annoying things like the 'winners don't use drugs' screens which are only seen in US variants of certain games. So I think in most cases, if only one ROM variant is to be used, it should be the default parent set since the MAME team definitely know what they're doing here.