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OK, I fixed Land Breaker. I changed

to

on line 234 in eolith.c - now I'm wondering if any other Eolith games need this fix.

Thanks everyone!

Yes, there is a known bug ("low-VRAM" in 0.87b wiki ) with 8MB Rage128 systems and "big" games (typically vector games, or games with bezel artwork.)

The problem is that if you run at 1024x768 (or 1152x768 on your PowerBook) in Millions of colors, there isn't enough VRAM left for the texture. This should throw an error so MAME can revert to software rendering, but it doesn't.

If you change to Thousands of colors, or lower the display resolution, it ought to work.

I'm aware of the NVRAM issue with Food Fight, however that's not what's happening here. It never says NVRAM failed, it just prints:
RAM
ROM 7
ROM 6

and that's all she wrote; software vs. OpenGL rendering makes no difference, so I'm not sure where to go next with this.

Well, colour me confused. The problem seems to have "fixed itself" (but as an IT person I know "these things don't fix themselves, sah") and the NVRAM OK message now appears and the game starts with both software rendering and OpenGL.

Actually I think all the problems I've been seeing outside of this one are OpenGL-related. The Front Line collision issue is definitely being caused by OpenGL: starting game with Software Rendering on it works fine even with my redefined controls; start with OpenGL and bango: the shots miss their targets (grenades still work, though -- kooky).

Kid Niki seems to crash MacMAME occasionally when using OpenGL, either when the game first boots or when exiting to the front-end using Command+o.

Gradius 3 is very strange. I started it with OpenGL, and saw that if I wait for about 2-3min. after the screen goes black I start seeing what can only be described as blue graphics test patterns punctuated by the occasional sound ("bloop", "bleep"). I let this go for 10+min. like this and tried again with Software Rendering -- ditto. I then tried Kid Niki which started under OpenGL (surprise!) and then crashed MacMAME when quitting (no surprise) and when I restarted MacMAME I went back to running Gradius 3, but this time starting out using Software Rendering and it just started up normally (game runs a little slow, but that's normal on my system), so something seems to be happening if I switch from using OpenGL to Software Rendering which isn't quite clean. Thankfully this only matters if I try to run Gradius 3 with OpenGL first; running other games with it doesn't matter as long as I remember to switch to Software Rendering before launching Gradius 3.

Weird and kinky, but at least everything else seems to be working. Someday I'll have a system with enough video ram and new enough AGP chipset that it won't be an issue, but at least I've got something to point to!

Looks like my only outstanding issue is with the config, then!

Both games work fine with Mame v95

You might want to try getting a fresh Food Fight ROM...

How do you play Food Fight without the rotating joystick that it had (wasn't it like the 720? stick?)

I believe Food Fight used a 49-way joystick. That's somewhere between an 8-way joystick and a 720 style joystick.

The 49 way joysticks are all the rage now since Randy over groovygamegear released his 49 way interface. With his interface, you can select between 8 different joystick modes... 4way, 8way, 49way, diagonal, etc. Pretty cool.

Nope, Food Fight used a Hall-effect joystick which gives full analog joystick accuracy (8 bits in each direction).

Aaron

Thanks Aaron, I knew there was something different about the way those Food Fight games played...

Mahuti, the grrovy stick looks cool and they've got a lot of other interesting stuff. I like the chromed joysticks...

Sorry if the question is not very original. Can someone tell me how to compile the 0.95 source code? I'm using the 0.87 at the moment

@ Stefano - You'll need Xcode 1.5 or you can grab the binary from Alex's link on page 1! Hope this helps.