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Latest Version of Software Running on XP

pointertovoid

By pointertovoid
in Windows XP

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RainyShadow

RainyShadow

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Posted (edited)

MAMEUI claims support for XP - current version 0.234

I tried the 32 bit build from here and after a few minutes of waiting, it started :)

 

I can even try to emulate an AthlonXP system on my AthlonXP system, lol 

https://i.imgur.com/QCA5K7v.png

QCA5K7v.png

 

[edit]

The 32 bit build of MESSUI v0.234 works as well. It even started in less than a minute, yay!

 

Edited by RainyShadow
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cmccaff1

cmccaff1

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Posted

@RainyShadow - That's absolutely amazing!
A while back I tried to download the newest 32-bit build of MAMEUI available at the time, and got a GetTickCount64 error. I ended up downgrading to 0.204 (which was apparently the last known version to date which didn't trigger that error), and it was working fine.
I tried the latest build available from progetto-SNAPS (the 32-bit 0.234 you mentioned) and it is ALSO working fine!
No glitches or errors to report--it's truly incredible to be able to use such a recent MAME version in XP, and even more incredible that it apparently doesn't require SSE2 (as evidenced by it working on your Athlon XP).
Apparently a 32-bit build of 0.235 is now in the works...I'll definitely be testing it once it's available, as I'm sure you will too.

I'm not sure if you have tried this version, but on a side note the last version of MAME to use the classic rendering engine (before the developers rewrote MAME to use a Direct3D engine, which has remained the standard since then) was 0.106.
Feel free to give it a try on your Athlon XP...it should run brilliantly, and if you know where to look (and if you're crafty enough) you can find many variants of 0.106, and even older versions.

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RainyShadow

RainyShadow

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@cmccaff1

Well, i actually hadn't touched anything after v0.148 until recently. With all the other things to occupy my days, emulation took the back seat by that time...

I have v0.106 backed-up, along with the MAMEFX and MAMEplus variants :P I don't remember clearly, but i may have been using mainly Win98SE back then, lol.

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cmccaff1

cmccaff1

Posted
Posted (edited)
10 hours ago, RainyShadow said:

@cmccaff1

Well, i actually hadn't touched anything after v0.148 until recently. With all the other things to occupy my days, emulation took the back seat by that time...

I have v0.106 backed-up, along with the MAMEFX and MAMEplus variants :P I don't remember clearly, but i may have been using mainly Win98SE back then, lol.

I can't say I blame you! I still remember when 0.107 came out, and how stunned I was when I saw games that always ran at full speed with no frameskip starting to have issues...I went back to 0.106 and all of those problems disappeared.
I'm glad you're holding onto your backups of 0.106!
What's funny is, I stopped following MAME development myself around the time 0.148 came out, so I had no idea that the devs had started using a compiler that broke XP compatibility.
I had to get 'up to date' as far as what was going on, and that's how I found out (through Reddit) about 0.204 being the last known version to work properly in XP (at the time).
It's wonderful to be able to use a much more recent version now!

On my main PC (an old GX620 with a 2.8GHz Pentium D and a 2GB GTX750Ti [which really helps]), 0.106 still flies, and I can also run 0.234 with no problems (as long as you stick to uncomplicated titles [basically, nothing that is too 3D-heavy]).
0.106 (and earlier) are definitely the best MAME versions for computers with 512MB of RAM or less and/or a single core processor.
However, 0.67 and earlier might arguably be the best option for ancient (pre-SSE) machines.

Edited by cmccaff1
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Montana Slim

Montana Slim

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The guy who builds the 32-bit XP-compatible versions of MAME has 0.235 available as of yesterday on a Google Drive page here:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1eiNztWEpk0C7CiiZXz0SMDM_eJOmb0FO

It's just the executable, no other files or folders except "about.txt"

I found that link on the Retro Roms forum a year ago:

https://www.retroroms.info/forum/topic/32-bit-Mame-and-other-distributions-executables.htm

He doesn't archive older versions, but Progetto-Snaps does:

https://www.progettosnaps.net/index.php

And they put everything inside their downloads, all necessary folders and config files, etc.

Although I've tested the newer versions of Arcade in XP, I've stuck with 0.211 because in subsequent versions, the MAME team got rid of the ability to individually enable/disable the various artwork types. Now it's all or nothing.

I also like Mameuifx32 version 0.175.1...

Edited by Montana Slim
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cmccaff1

cmccaff1

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@Montana Slim - Very happy to confirm that progetto-SNAPS now has a 32-bit build of the latest MAMEUI32 (0.235) available, and that from my testing it works fine!
It should still be compatible with non-SSE2 processors (I can't confirm that as I'm using a Pentium D), so hopefully @RainyShadow will get to test it soon on his Athlon XP.

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RainyShadow

RainyShadow

Posted
Posted (edited)
9 hours ago, cmccaff1 said:

It should still be compatible with non-SSE2 processors

Yes, it is. At least the UI part, i didn't try to start a game yet - auditing takes ages even with empty "roms" folder...

[edit]

Games work as well :P

Edited by RainyShadow
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cmccaff1

cmccaff1

Posted
Posted
7 hours ago, RainyShadow said:

Yes, it is. At least the UI part, i didn't try to start a game yet - auditing takes ages even with empty "roms" folder...

[edit]

Games work as well :P

That's great! Thank you for your response!
I have noticed the audit takes a long time myself, but I personally don't use the audit feature in newer versions (it gradually got slower after 0.106, and now goes at a snail's pace [at least on older hardware])--as long as you have properly directed MAME to recognize your 'roms' folder, and you know what you've got in it, it isn't really necessary to do any auditing.
By the way, for what it's worth (and on another side note), I did some testing and found that 0.37b16 is the first version of MAME32 to properly support DirectDraw for rendering (or at least the first that would properly use my GTX750Ti & take a load off of the CPU).
0.37 was basically MAME's 'ESR' release...it got supported for a long time, and while emulation has come a long way this should still be a safe bet to run very well on ancient machines.
A strange quirk I did notice with it is that once you direct it to see your 'roms' folder you have to access games from the command line (open a command prompt in the folder and enter 'mame32 tmnt2po', for example).
I can't get it to open games in the typical way, but it does work fine with this method.

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RainyShadow

RainyShadow

Posted
Posted (edited)
4 hours ago, cmccaff1 said:

I have noticed the audit takes a long time myself, but I personally don't use the audit feature in newer versions (it gradually got slower after 0.106, and now goes at a snail's pace [at least on older hardware])--as long as you have properly directed MAME to recognize your 'roms' folder, and you know what you've got in it, it isn't really necessary to do any auditing.

That is if you have a specific game in mind. When i haven't picked one yet, i prefer to filter the list to only the available (and working) games first, then browse that. Auditing is done once, then you don't need it again until you update either your collection, or the emulator. 
With each version new games get added to the supported list, often old ROM files get replaced with better dumps, and some ROMs/sets just get renamed without having their contents changed.

Besides, i wanted to see what games don't need any ROMs (like Pong) in the current version :P

 

4 hours ago, cmccaff1 said:

A strange quirk I did notice with it is that once you direct it to see your 'roms' folder you have to access games from the command line (open a command prompt in the folder and enter 'mame32 tmnt2po', for example).

Initially mame.exe was the emulator itself, while the frontend/GUI was a separate executable like mame32.exe, mameuifx32.exe, etc., and may or may not have the emulator built-in.

You can use a dedicated frontend like QMC2 to browse for a game and have the emulator started with the needed parameters.

In my v0.36 folder i have both mame.exe and mame32.exe

 

If you use a ROM manager like Clrmamepro, it calls the emulator in order to extract the file lists. In my experience, using mame32.exe for this purpose always failed, so i had to get the clean (non-GUI) mame.exe of the same version and use it instead.

When preparing a ROM collection for PocketCultMAME to run on my Windows Mobile 6.5 phone, i used the win32 build of MAME v0.34 to get the file list.

 

P.S.

This is turning into off-topic, sorry.

Edited by RainyShadow
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RamonUn

RamonUn

Posted
Posted

@user57

Thanks a lot for your SumatraPDF builds. It is by far my favorite PDF reader.

Version 3.3.3 has good support for annotations, the upgrade is very significant for me compared to your previous 3.3 build.

I think those builds deserves their own thread on MSFN, I was really lucky to find them out.

Maybe you could fork the main Git and distribute binaries over there?

Krzysztof Kowalczyk has a quite reasonable release rate, so it would not be very difficult to keep up for the XP builds. This would also help other people to build it for themself, it is opensource software after all.

Also if you inform Krzysztof Kowalczyk, about your builds after forking his repo, he might even link it to the main page as unofficial XP builds, alongside the old 3.1.2.

What do you think?

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user57

user57

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it depents if he accept, i dont know if he want to do the oposite we better do not

dibya once said to me he only cares about vista or newer

the use of a newer compiler would go into that direction the use of "span" is just a type converter, but that version that support span triggers unwanted functions (even tho those functions have nothing to do with the type converter)

 

i found a programming error, that only apears on xp

AutoFreeWstr dir = GetSpecialFolder(CSIDL_PROGRAM_FILES);

WCHAR* path = path::Join(dir, info->exePartialPath); // <--- this is a fault because it doesnt check if dir has found a directory, in xp that directory doesnt exits

 

// then i fixed it up it just need a reaction if dir has found a folder (he is doing that on other parts of the his code but not on "DetectExternalViewer"

        AutoFreeWstr dir = GetSpecialFolder(CSIDL_PROGRAM_FILES);
        WCHAR* path = 0;
        if (dir)
        {
        path = path::Join(dir, info->exePartialPath); 

        if (file::Exists(path)) {
            info->exeFullPath = path;
            return true;
        }
      
        }
        str::Free(path);

 

 

and so on, and yep when i saw there was already a newer version "3.3.3" i applied the changes to that version what actually was very easy

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RamonUn

RamonUn

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Nice to hear that it is not too hard to port, I hope you will keep updating it.

So do you plan to make a public repo?

By the way the example you show is a generic coding error that should be fixed even for Vista or later because you have no guarantee that the registry settings are correct and that the function will return non-null pointer, so the return value of GetSpecialFolder() should always be checked in case of function error (2nd commandment of C programmer).

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