Timeline for How do arcade ROMs work
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
7 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nov 5, 2018 at 10:35 | comment | added | Luaan | @Bregalad Yes - segaretro.org/Category:Discrete_logic_arcade_games, and MAME's own mamedev.emulab.it/undumped/… (for the undocumented ones). Needless to say, MAME supports discrete logic arcades too, it just needs some extra effort (and the games are extremely simple, so the effort isn't worth much). MAME supports Pong and Breakout (both TTLs with no ROMs) just fine :) | |
| Nov 5, 2018 at 9:10 | comment | added | Bregalad |
The arcade cabinet is the hardware. It's the same as any computer or game console, and so it needs Software (ROM) to do anything useful. I'm fairly confident that at least some very old games runs based on discrete logic, without software.
|
|
| Nov 4, 2018 at 3:26 | comment | added | Jules | @JackKasbrack - MAME is more like a library that makes it easy to implement new emulators than it is a single emulator itself. It has components for emulating a variety of CPUs, bus designs, address decoding systems, standard and less-standard graphics hardware, and so on. To implement a new system, you just write a little bit of code that wires all of those together, and maybe write new emulation for anything that's unique in the system you're adding. | |
| Nov 4, 2018 at 0:46 | comment | added | Ken Gober | Supporting a new arcade game in MAME requires both an update to the MAME software itself (to include emulation of the arcade cabinet this game ran on) as well as the ROMs for the game's code. Keeping the ROMs separate from the MAME emulation code means that MAME itself can be redistributed without copyright problems, because it's typically only the ROMs that have copyright issues. | |
| Nov 4, 2018 at 0:44 | comment | added | Kelvin Sherlock | MAME is a Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. | |
| Nov 3, 2018 at 23:47 | comment | added | Badasahog | I'm confused as to how an emulator such as MAME exists, given that (you would think) the differences in hardware between arcade machines would require an emulator for each of them, since an emulator is for hardware, and they all have different hardware. | |
| Nov 3, 2018 at 23:29 | history | answered | Brian H | CC BY-SA 4.0 |