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ZX Spectrum via Mame


patient007

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The Mess emulator was merged into mame a while back, so i thought it would be good to try  the latest mame 207 with ZX Spectrum roms.

I have tried Spectaculator and it works ok but the video output removes the border and i had strange patterning with the tv scanlines etc plus its not been updated for years and isnt free !

Retroarch was ok, i had issues with controls not working at first but managed to sort some of this out, so i will still use this. But for games that wont work i was hoping to have Mame as a backup.

 

Only thing is i cant get a single game to run. Outside of Launchbox i managed to get a Spectrum Basic screen up but no game runs ?

Its like it is ignoring the game completely ?

I have the Spectrum bios/rom in a folder called Spectrum inside of the Mame/roms folder which its happy with as the Spectrum Basic screen comes up.

The games themselves i have tried in the same place and also mame/roms and even from a different drive.

 

Anybody have this or other Mess titles working with these newer Mame versions ?

 

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2 minutes ago, patient007 said:

The Mess emulator was merged into mame a while back, so i thought it would be good to try  the latest mame 207 with ZX Spectrum roms.

I have tried Spectaculator and it works ok but the video output removes the border and i had strange patterning with the tv scanlines etc plus its not been updated for years and isnt free !

Retroarch was ok, i had issues with controls not working at first but managed to sort some of this out, so i will still use this. But for games that wont work i was hoping to have Mame as a backup.

 

Only thing is i cant get a single game to run. Outside of Launchbox i managed to get a Spectrum Basic screen up but no game runs ?

Its like it is ignoring the game completely ?

I have the Spectrum bios/rom in a folder called Spectrum inside of the Mame/roms folder which its happy with as the Spectrum Basic screen comes up.

The games themselves i have tried in the same place and also mame/roms and even from a different drive.

 

Anybody have this or other Mess titles working with these newer Mame versions ?

 

I wont be much help here im afraid, but i had the same issue with spectrum in MAME. I could only get it to load to the menu, but never to launch the actual game. I tried various command lines for it and never could suss it out so i went back to the fuse core in Retroarch. Speaking of that and your controls, i set it to always emulate the Kempston joystick in the Quick Menu/Controls section of retroarch as most games supported that and it works fine for most games.

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after googling for like the whole day i am no nearer to actually running a Spectrum game in Mame.

My command line was mame spectrum -cass 10thframe.tap

I think all this does is 'mount' the game for the Spectrum emulation, and i still have to type the commands to load the game like one would do on a real Speccy.

 

I cant find any mention of a quickload or autoload function in mame which would be handy !

How does one load a spectrum game like its on a real spectrum but with a PC keyboard ? LOL

I think i need a valium.

 

Anyway a couple of posts i read mentioned using snapshot files of games. So i had Fuse save one but it wouldn't load it back in.. great !  (another valium please)

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hi,

Locate your spectrum.ini file within your mame installation folder and overwrite the scripting options part with this..

 

#
# SCRIPTING OPTIONS
#
autoboot_command          j""\n 
autoboot_delay                  4
autoboot_script           
console                                0
plugins                                 1
plugin                    
noplugin        

Then when mame has booted into the Spectrum and the sequence is complete press "F2" to simulate pressing play on the tape, I am pretty sure this can be automated too, but unsure how to make it happen, even though i have it auto playing  tapes on other systems.     

Edited by Marko19
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  • 1 year later...

Sorry to intervene but it seems crazy to emulate Spectrum via MAME when there are so many great emulators.

Try RetroArch core in which you can configure shaders etc

Personally, whatever I use RetroArch wherever possible.

Uniform interface, one place to control everything, play from your couch, great Launchbox integration

 

 

 

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Thanks - I might give that a go. I did manage to get MAME to run my spectrum games though - problem was that my laptop didn't have a Scroll Lock key.  I plugged in an external keyboard, then once Load"" had run (see above), I pressed scroll lock, and then F2. This started the tape player, and the nostalgia kicked in with that noise.

A few other useful bits: Shift+F2 stops the tape. F11 shows how fast the spectrum is running (100% is normal - more is faster) and F10 toggles normal/faster.

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2 lines down from "autoboot_command", there's the line "autoboot_script".   I think (per the straw I'm grasping at) you can point that to a lua script you create, that could probably do all sorts of cool shtuff for you.  But beware, the straw I grabbed may very well be the short one. :D  

Otherwise, no.  You're stuck with emulating the computer(s) through MAME as the MAMEDev Team meant for it to be:  As authentic and accurate as possible "to preserve decades of software history". 

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  • 4 years later...

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