Vacation is over, and unfortunately I have not made any progress in creating a Android port for MAME. My search continues though and I'll continue to campaign for the cause. I'm thinking of starting a collection to give out a reward to the first developer that is successful, but I'll have to check with the MAME guys first.
Dropping out of that C programming course is coming back to bite me in the ass. Who knew? At work, everyone thinks I'm a computer expert, but I feel like such an idiot when it comes to this stuff. And I kinda liked the Android OS before I found out MAME wasn't ported and why. I had high hopes knowing Android was derived from Linux, but instead Google puts the user in a bubble, the so called Dalvik virtual machine.
That's messed up if you think about it. Like using WinXp running virtually on a Win7 PC to run ALL your programs, and being locked out of doing anything at the Win7 level. Well, not really locked out, as some could rewrite the Android code...
But I digress.
Time for some fun. I think some MAME gameplay videos are in order. We must show the people why we want a port!
I still will try to help in any way possible ive been posting things and emailing devs that ported mame to psp,if they can port to psp they should be able to help u on porting this to android,ill keep on looking and if i here anything ill let you knoe a.s.a.p............MAME.........ftw!!!!!
ReplyDeleteDont give up. The reward is too great and you know it.
ReplyDeleteThe silent masses will love you - even if they never let you know!
Keep up the good work pal.
ReplyDeleteMame is such a great app, and Android users cannot miss this piece of software.
Mame4all was ported well for low powered platforms (in terms of Cpu) such as Dreamcast, Dingoo, Dingoo, Psp and GP2X Wiz, Ipod Touch and Iphone.
Most of them don't have an official sdk, however they succedeed in porting Mame.
The man that ported it to GP2X Wiz is named Franxis and it's possibel to speak with him on GP2X Forums.
On the Andrroid side I don't know emulator programmers, and the scene seems to be not so active, maybe beacause of the Market accepting all kind of apps.
Robert Broglia, for instance, made an almost perfect port or Snes9x for Android (free).
Can someone speak with him for asking some trick?
Thanks for doing what you've done so far. I thought I saw in one of your posts saying you'd made a .so version of MAME in preparation for making an NDK app of it. I wonder if you could post a diff, or a tarball of what you did to get it built.
ReplyDeleteI'm about where you are as far as Android coding goes. I went a little further and did an IP calculator app to prove to myself I could go beyond hello world, but no NDK experience. But I once ported the Odyssey 2 emulator "o2em" to Linux from Windows, so I'm a little more familiar with C, emulators, and game libraries (Allegro, in that case). I work exclusively in an Ubuntu Linux environment already -- only Microsoft product I own is an Xbox 360 -- so mingw/cygwin might not be an issue for me.
God speed you on this awesome cause, all of you. If anyone ever takes up a collection count me in for $100. If it could be done Javascript or HTML5 I'd try it myself. Maybe Actionscript?
ReplyDeleteIt's definitely possible to write an emulator for early arcade games in ActionScript or JS/HTML5. People have done it for Space Invaders at very least, and there's a NES emulator out there written in Javascript. But while you could use the MAME sources as a reference, it wouldn't be a port, but a whole reimplementation.
ReplyDeleteAnd either way, you'd face huge performance issues on even a high-end Android phone. I think an NDK port of MAME using SDL is the best approach, and if that somehow proves impossible, taking one of the Java arcade emulators and trying to port that to native Android code.
Done :)
ReplyDeletehttp://code.google.com/p/imame4all/
Great!
ReplyDelete