MAME 178 Patches (HiScore, NoNag, NoWhiteBox, DInput)

[DivinityCycle]

I figured there may be some MAME experts on this board who would know about this stuff. I've been working on trying to figure out how to get inputs from AntiMicro and AutoHotKey going into MAME successfully, which has been a crazy rabbit hole of silliness. So, at this point I am working with MAME 178 and have already gone through the process of updating my ROM collection for 178. I was able to locate a NoNag patch for 178, but all the references I can find to the "Force DirectInput" patch are old and the source files where those changes are supposedly made no longer exist in the MAME souce code. Also in my research I've found that MAME has the options (both command line and ini) to set the keyboardprovider, mouseprovider, lightgunprovider, and joystickerprovider options to whatever you want, including dinput for DirectInput. It kinda seems like the whole "force dinput via source code patch" thing has been made obsolete by these new features. Can any MAME-heads on here confirm this is the case? I'm still tempted to compile my own MAME since I can (theoretically) make one optimized for multi-core CPUs, My machines all have at least 4 CPU cores so I'd imagine I'll get a mild performance boost out of that.

Along the same "long running patches which are now obsolete" lines, I also found that MKChamp has announced he's no longer making hiscore patches after version 178 and has switched over to using a Lua plugin based solution instead. Has anybody tried this out? I'd imagine because this is an official plug-in it's the cleaner solution to use long term, but I haven't messed with it yet.

[Headrush69]

I find the new Lua plugin for hi scores works fine.

I don't think you'll get much of a performance boost from compiling your own MAME.

From the MAME Wiki page:

Does MAME benefit from SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) / HT (Hyper-Threading) / dual cores?

No. Previous versions of MAME included a -mt switch which allowed some tasks to be threaded off for use by SMP or multicore systems. However, as of MAME 0.173 this switch has been removed. The benefits from this -mt switch were relatively small, because accurate emulation such as MAME strives for cannot easily be broken up into parallel subtasks (it would be like trying to have a baby in one month by impregnating nine women). We also found that this particular implementation of the -mt switch created a lot of errors. There were exceptions of course, but MAME will have to support them via some new mechanism in the future since the -mt switch has been removed.