Home Page Forums MAME MAME 2024: When Progress Comes Along, You Must WIP It

Will this only be in 0.272? I've just added the share_directory option to my mame.ini file and started the Apple Mac Quadra 630 driver with System 7.6 but I don't see the folder in the emulation.

A quick look here - https://github.com/mamedev/mame/commits/master/ - indicates that the changes have not yet been pushed. Which is fine; this is the Work In Progress (WIP) thread, after all.

The changes aren't in yet, and you won't automatically see the files, you have to have client software running.

Holy cow RB, that's going to make getting files out of old disk images SO MUCH EASIER.

The file transfer stuff landed for 0.272 (or it's in top of tree if you build yourself). It's built into the base SCSI CD-ROM device so many systems will get it automatically. This also facilitates my next trick, supporting the additional commands so that software inside the emulated system can mount CD-ROM images.

Here's some MAME-recognized CD-ROM images in my share_directory:


Double-click an image, and presto:

I've added support for the RIPPLE IDE controller for the Amiga 2000/3000/4000. It's a modern controller supporting drives up to 2 TB and also allows booting from CD-ROM. Here's a screenshot where I've hooked up a 40 GB CHD:



This is using Amiga OS 3.2.2 as the original versions from Commodore or Amiga Technologies don't support drives as large.

You can also update it's firmware from inside MAME:

The next Zorro-II card supported is the Toccata SoundCard:

[video:youtube][/video]

This was a popular card and is widely supported. Luckily the AD1848 chip it uses was already emulated by MAME and it just needed a small improvement.

Oops, I did it again: the PowerBook Duo 210. A sub-notebook that was designed to slot into a dock (with motorized insert and eject, of course). The dock adds the usual stuff: slots, video output, connectivity to a full-size keyboard and mouse, etc, etc.

These machines (and all further Mac portables until 2000) are based around the "PG&E" power manager chip, a custom 65HC05 based microcontroller with 160 pins. That's 11 8-bit GPIO ports, analog inputs, analog outputs, hardware SPI, hardware Apple Desktop Bus, a hardware quadrature decoder, a hardware keyboard matrix scanner, timers, and pretty much the kitchen sink. Due to the complexity of this thing it's still a ways from anything I wouldn't call NOT_WORKING, but at least you can boot an OS and use the quadrature decoder to move the mouse pointer.

After adding a Zorro-II sound card, why not a graphics card? I tried adding the Picasso-II card, which is a real graphics card using the CL-GD5428 VGA chip, however it seems that it exercises the chip much more than we can currently handle. Kale also had a look and he made it show at least a (slightly garbled) test screen.

So I've taken a step back and looked at something easier: A simple framebuffer. A few of those were available for the Amiga, and the Rainbow II (or FrameMaster) was quite straight forward:



This shows the "Diashow" tool. It can be controlled using ARexx to show a gallery of pictures.



This is the "RainbowPainter", a simple image editing tool.

Since we don't emulate any CPU replacement board yet, I had to cheat a bit and put a 68020 CPU with FPU into the A2000 because the software requires the FPU (probably for JPEG decoding).

It's a late Christmas miracle!

So the reason we didn't have this 5 years ago is that the DRC doesn't report unhandled opcodes, it just throws an illegal instruction exception inside the emulated system. I finally figured that out, and it turns out that in spite of copious warnings from Apple not to use the leftover POWER instructions that the 601 still supported (but the 602/603/604 don't), the ROM for these first-generation PowerMacs is positively full of them. I implemented about half a dozen POWER instructions in MAME's PowerPC emulator and things started working.

[video:youtube][/video]