What is
GeoMAME?
GeoMAME (for NeoGeo only) is pretty much a port to the Mac
of some of the crucial enhancements PC users have had in their MAME derivatives,
such as save states, combos, and user-configurable overclocking. Thanks to
Deimos0's wonderful source code, i've been able to add these features to the Mac
Version.
What are the main enhancements in GeoMAME?
There are several
enhancements in the GeoMAME emulator:
- CPU Speed Adjustment: You can over or underclock the CPU. Overclocking is
great for games like Metal Slug where lots of enemies fill the screen and slow
down the action. However, this makes the CPU more difficult to emulate and may
actually slow down other things. Underclocking is good for games that are not
processor intensive. A simple underclock to 10MHz may speed up a game 10%.
- User selectable bit depth: The MAME team has decided for us which game need
16-bit color to look better. There are several flaws with this philosophy --
one being that Glide support on the Mac side won't work at all with 16-bit color,
a second being that the user cannot make this decision for themselves. GeoMAME
will run all games in either 8-bit or 16-bit color, allowing the user to select
for him/herself.
- Save states: Yes, you can now save the emulation state of the game and
restore that particular point in time anytime later. This feature is not 100%
perfect, as there are some small palette issues and the music might be a little
messed up after restoring. Likewise, restoring a saved game from a different
stage than you saved it presents some problems. Its best to either save at the
end of a stage before the next stage begins or only restore in the same stage you
saved in. I'm working on this....
- Programmable combos: For those hard to press button combinations, including
quarter circle forwards and stuff. Via a configuration file, these combos are
now loaded at startup and can be mapped to any button on the keyboard not in use
elsewhere.
- Auto-fire: You can set the four action buttons to continually repeat firing
as long as the button is pressed. Great for Metal Slug!
- Improved GUI: Thanks to Franky, thee gamelist window is now wider and the
screenshot window is set the proportions of a Neo Geo screenshot.
- Small application size: Since this emu only supports Neo Geo games, its size
is roughly one-fifth the size of the full MacMAME release. Great if you only
use MacMAME to play NeoGeo.
What is the difference between the Old NeoMAME PPC and GeoMAME?
NeoMAME PPC was more of a programming hack than an emulator with new features.
The clock speed was fixed (at an overclocked CPU), you needed up to three
separate apps to play at different bit depths, and there weren't any real "new"
features. For this reason, i've decided to distance myself from the NeoMAME PPC
project by changing its name to GeoMAME (not to mention the name NeoMAME has been
used by both Franky and Apollo69 prior to my use)
Why version 1.0 when the MAME project is at 0.35?
GeoMAME is based on MAME 0.35, and probably won't be updated any time soon to any
later cores. The only updates which will happen are support for new NeoGeo games
or redumps. This probably won't happen very much (i'm hoping).
Special Thanks to the MAME and MacMAME teams for consistently putting out an
incredible piece of software in spite of the adversity currently facing the
emulation community.
