35 replies to this topic

[slaanesh]

MAME4ALL Dingoo v1.0 released.

* MAME 0.37b5 for the A320 Dingoo (by Slaanesh) based on MAME4ALL (by Franxis)
* This release uses Linux for Dingoo. Please install Dingux (by BooBoo) first before even trying to use this!
* Please see the readme.txt included in the release for full details.
* Many improvements still to come.

Download from MAME4ALL Dingoo homepage

[Mortys]

Hi slanessh
Thanks for the release and it works quite fine but i got a strange bug.
what i can say is that i got strange artefact of the inputs[[A
it is like mame did not take the system as main app
i lanched mamefront with a simple command
and sometime the screen glitche and for example when there sould be black border i only get the system. I 'm using the lates booboo zImage.
Another example while playing Shinobi, pressing Down+B drawn the Mame4all menu.

Edited by Mortys, 11 July 2009 - 10:41 PM.

[darkman]

This is great! Now I am going to need to install Linux on my Dingoo.

[slaanesh]

Hi slanessh
Thanks for the release and it works quite fine but i got a strange bug.
what i can say is that i got strange artefact of the inputs[[A
it is like mame did not take the system as main app
i lanched mamefront with a simple command
and sometime the screen glitche and for example when there sould be black border i only get the system. I 'm using the lates booboo zImage.
Another example while playing Shinobi, pressing Down+B drawn the Mame4all menu.

Ah yes, the input.

Okay well this is because getty is still running whilst MAME is running. The standard rootfs is launching a few getty processes so that you can login to linux. getty is just echoing the keypresses to the console.

The best solution is... to wait for a new root FS. Ideally we need a rootfs that takes the user straight into an app launcher without launching getty - as already described by BooBoo. The rootfs that just about everyone is running is really aimed more for developers running serial over USB terminal to access the Dingoo rather than the average user.

Best solution at the moment? It's a bit tricky. The current rootfs setup is for init to respawn getty as soon as they are killed. So killing them off before launching mamefront won't work. The /etc/inittab need to be updated. I have mine set to start only once.

I don't have a really good solution (yet). Is this happening with other emulators? MAME isn't capturing any keystrokes, input is via the I/O (ie. controller) hardware directly.

EDIT: In regards to the keystrokes. Hmmmm. Looks like it's console logging.

EDIT: Yes, it's console.

The console can be unbound from the framebuffer with the following:

echo 0 > /sys/class/vtconsole/vtcon1/bind

No more input to the screen. The side effect is that no more console logging will appear on the screen.

You can edit autoexec.dge to look like this:

#!/bin/sh
cd /mnt/sd/mame4all
echo 0 > /sys/class/vtconsole/vtcon1/bind
./mamefront

Edited by slaanesh, 12 July 2009 - 07:06 AM.

[Mortys]

I've try that but nothing chnage.
The strange thing is that I don't have this problem with other homebrew (Liero, Scumm, HExen...)
Edit : No more console but the screen is still flickering. It's definitly not happening with the other homebrew.

Edited by Mortys, 12 July 2009 - 03:53 PM.

[slaanesh]

I've try that but nothing chnage.
The strange thing is that I don't have this problem with other homebrew (Liero, Scumm, HExen...)
Edit : No more console but the screen is still flickering. It's definitly not happening with the other homebrew.

This totally works for me. I have not screen glitches at all after this. I've emailed BooBoo and he's said it's getty running in the background.
The next version kernel/rootfs should solve these problems.

For the time being, can you let me know the contents of your rootfs /etc/inittab?

EDIT:

Just to clarify:

autoexec.dge should be copied to the root of the VFAT partition of your SD card.

ie. If you have installed MAME4ALL in the root of your VFAT partition of your SD card it should look like this:

SD:/autoexec.dge
SD:/mame4all <dir>
SD:/mame4all/mamefront
SD:/mame4all/mame
SD:/mame4all/mame/roms <dir>

etc.

Edited by slaanesh, 13 July 2009 - 06:51 AM.

[pongplaya]

This is great! Now I am going to need to install Linux on my Dingoo.

me too........

thx a lot slaneesh

[slaanesh]

Improvements for next release:

* Video Scaler so that high resolution games (like Rampage, Tapper, etc) can be viewed in their entirety.

Other improvements to follow. I'll keep you posted.

[DaveC]

Improvements for next release:

* Video Scaler so that high resolution games (like Rampage, Tapper, etc) can be viewed in their entirety.

Other improvements to follow. I'll keep you posted.

Can that also be fixed for the Wiz or have you dropped that entirely? Right now Rampage etc are not scaled right for that either.

[vEGA-rJ]

Slaanesh if I install Mame in VFAT, how can I start it from there?

With Dmenu?

[slaanesh]

* Video Scaler so that high resolution games (like Rampage, Tapper, etc) can be viewed in their entirety.

Can that also be fixed for the Wiz or have you dropped that entirely? Right now Rampage etc are not scaled right for that either.

Improvements to MAME4ALL Dingoo are easily made to the Wiz as well.

Slaanesh if I install Mame in VFAT, how can I start it from there?

With Dmenu?

Either with Dmenu or see my above post about autoexec.dge
However, using my autoexec.dge means that when your Dingoo boots Dingux, that's all it will boot.

[slaanesh]

By the way, if anyone finds segmentation faults with any games, please post here. Please confirm that it *is* a segmentation fault and not out of memory.
I'm also interested in knowing which games run out of memory. You'll get a different kind of exception in this case. I'm not really handling out of memory problems very elegantly (yet!).

So far the list is:


Segmentation faults

• Pole Position

Out of Memory

• Xmen
  
• In The Hunt
  
• Mystic Rider

Edited by slaanesh, 19 July 2009 - 12:04 PM.

[chaos engineer]

I already love it. First, I thought why should I have it on the Dingoo, I have it already on the WIZ. But then again, it's is just pure fun to have Mame4all on this cheap and nice Chinese thing. Slaanesh, thanks a lot for your effort.

[rookie1]

Both In the Hunt (inthunt.zip) and Mystic Rider (mysticri.zip) not able to run. Just says 'Killed'. Is this the sign of out-of-memory?

[slaanesh]

Both In the Hunt (inthunt.zip) and Mystic Rider (mysticri.zip) not able to run. Just says 'Killed'. Is this the sign of out-of-memory?

Unfortunately, yes it is.
I've just completed adding some additional renders so that large resolution games such as the MCR games Tapper, Rampage, etc can be played and you can see the entire screen at once.
There's a fast 8-bit color renderer that basically just drops rows and columns. There's also a 16-bit color renderer that does some mixing and gives quite a nice result.
I've also added a horizontal only scaler (from the Wiz version of MAME4ALL) useful for M32 (R-Type, etc), CPS1 (Final Fight, etc) and Atari (Gauntlet, etc) games where the horizontal resolution is greater than the Dingoos 320 pixels. This is also quite nice in the 16-bit color modes.
In all cases these new, additional renderers are a little slower than the ones already in place as they have to do a bit more work, however for games like Tapper it all still runs full speed even at the Dingoo's default speed.

Next on the list is to see if I can get some of the larger games to work.