1. Introduction

1.1 Welcome to XMAME

This the the *nix port of the almost legendary mame. Mame is an arcade machine emulator, started in 1997 by Nicola Salmoria. It started out as a series of emulators for individual games. This series of emulators was combined into a simgle multi-game emulator. This is the current form of mame; no longer a one-man show, there are over 100 contributors to the project.

1.2 Keep everything up-to-date!

The most recent copy of this guide, the xmame-sources and many more can be found on the xmame project homepage at http://x.mame.net/

1.3 Pending Jobs - or TODO

If you think you can help with the todo list or you can make a contribution that you feel is interesting, please send mail to the xmame/xmess coordinator. See Mail for contact information.

• Optimise mouse warping.
• Remove osd_input_init_post, add display ready flag.
• Updating of fps is off (dirty marking problem) with vector games.
• Update porting.txt.
• Convert all remaining sound drivers to plugins.
• Rewrite display/input code to be more modular, oo-ish, and usable as a separate library.
• Split -[no]scanline option into emulated and real scanline options.
• Add an option to specify which resolution to use, add clipping and panning if it doesn't fit and use it anyway.
• Use Pentium TSC for uclock where available.
• Network:
  • Fix since the dos team broke it, find out if the dosnet team is still alive.
  • Add mouse/joystick support to network play
  • Try converting network support to tcp, currently we have no error correction.
  • Make network code more robust, version check, input settings check, etc.
• Check x11-joystick. Rumor has it it's broken, but then again there's only one bug-report, so it seems no one is using it.
• fm soundhack for linux-i386.
• Make which messages are emitted and when configurable (log-type's and log-level), make fileio emit messages about which files it tries to open, to help debug rom-loading problems, and walk through all messages xmame emits giving them all a standard format like:

  OSD:        Info:    bla
  X11-window: Warning: bla
  Svgalib:    Error:   bla
  

• Add scancode 128-255 for non-PC keys like F13 -- F24, more keypad keys, etc., update all display targets to use this.
• Also see the text todo file, kept around to quickly enter stuff while hacking: todo.