41
votes
Why does the original Donkey Kong update the screen in a curtain closing pattern?
This isn't a deliberate animation, it's an accident of the way the screen is being photographed, combined with the fact that a Donkey Kong arcade machine uses a CRT turned on its side.
A typical CRT ...
- 11.4k
39
votes
Accepted
Why does the original Donkey Kong update the screen in a curtain closing pattern?
Ken's answer is close but not quite right.
On the real arcade hardware the signal sent to the CRT monitor is read directly from RAM as the electron beam scans over the screen. That means that ...
- 15.1k
13
votes
Why exactly does MAME (apparently) require different ROMs for different versions of MAME?
When MAME started, the aim was to make the classic games work on a "modern" machine.
For that, a lot of shortcuts were taken:
hardcoding some game data / hardware color palette in the code
...
- 10.7k
9
votes
Accepted
Can you program an arcade game and have MAME or another emu run it?
Games have "sets" (AKA versions). The software changes but not the hardware. For instance Pengo set 2 is harder than set 1 and has a different music (to avoid lawsuits?)
If you can "mod" an existing ...
- 10.7k
9
votes
Configuring the slots in MAME for different hardware
You can get information about command line options from the manpage, by using -showusage or -showconfig (which is explained to you after typing mame -?, mame -h or mame -help), or from the online ...
- 26.1k
9
votes
Breakout style arcade game from 90s
Thunder & Lightning
Published in 1990 on arcade
Definitely a breakout type game
Different characters in the game. The description matches one of those shown in the following screenshot (stereotype ...
- 195
7
votes
Accepted
How can I get MAME to run modified ROMs whose checksums don't match the originals?
There's probably some obscure way to do it in the GUI... But it behaves exactly like you want it to if you just run MAME from the command line with the target machine as an argument.
In cmd.exe or a ...
- 1,459
3
votes
How can I get MAME to run modified ROMs whose checksums don't match the originals?
You have to run the game without the MAMEUI, in order to do that, launch your game in cmd windows, with (example) mame64 pacman
This will give you an error if you don't have the correct cksum for the ...
- 31
2
votes
Why exactly does MAME (apparently) require different ROMs for different versions of MAME?
MAME emulates a fixed, finite (if rather large) list of arcade games. The complete circuit board layout of every game is stored in the MAME executable. All code and data needed for emulation of most ...
- 1,951
1
vote
How to get games working on MAME?
Just get the latest release of MAME (at the time of writing that's 0.258, soon there should be 0.259) and the romset corresponding to that release, and everything (every rom from a romset) should be ...
- 10.2k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible