Thread by @textfiles

OK, we're working on the next generation of MAME emulation at Internet Archive. I have an "Arcade Repair Shop" and these things may or may not work soon. (If there's no screenshot, don't bother, it doesn't work yet).

archive.org/details/arcade…

But if you wanted to watch, go ahead.

Right now there's about 500 of them in the repair shop. Getting things up and running in the IA system is a little intense. Mostly, I have to rip the driver and resolution data from a great site called ARCADE DATABASE, a wonderful hack that scrapes MAME source code to give info.

The site is at adb.arcadeitalia.net/default.php and it's really lovely. Tells you everything you need to know. I write rippers that pull out driver, resolution, screenshots, etc. Right now it's just doing driver checks. (There are 73 unique drivers I'm adding).

I wrote scripts to generate blank configuration files, and they're all uploaded. And I just wrote a super complicated pair of scripts to upload the driver ROMs and the JSON files. They're running now.

Last bit before I turn in.

So, 500 are going to be tested automatically. Nearly all will fail because they almost all need secondary ROM files to work, and I have to have those discovered. But one of them worked! (Sort of) and that means in theory more will work!

These are incredibly hard on systems - some of the CHD files are gigabytes, others are as small as 3-90mb. So this will be an ongoing thing! I'll let you know when some come alive.

Oh good, another one working. And then you have to sit while this imaginary machine running inside another imaginary machine running inside a browser loads an imaginary PCMCIA card.

Aaaand, it works. Excellent. Goodnight.

So, the best/funnest part of this is the moment when the system is booting these massive drives and my test laptop pauses for a moment, turns the fan to MAXIMUM SPEED and does a HERE WE GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Update to this whole project - after a few rounds back and forth, we now use ALLOW_MEMORY_GROWTH for these items, because some were exploding out of the memory allocation for in-browser MAME. This will (hopefully) make a ton more work and allow us to refine them after.

Initial MAME/Internet Arcade items were very much able to run within browsers in general, and we got them to very good speed (although slower machines always have an issue). This new crop, though, we're really pushing boundaries. They're huge and sometimes we'll find them slow.

It's a mystery! Might be the 300mb arcade machine running inside it in next generation javascript.

THE GREAT NEWS: It works!

THE NOT SO GREAT NEWS: It's a little slower

THE BAD NEWS: Like, literally running at 5% speed

I had to wait 4 minutes for it to get to a title screen.