MAMED/MESSD for Digita ReadMe DOOMD for Digita ReadMe If you have never used MAME you might want to learn how to use it first on the PC before trying to play MAME on your dreamcast. You can experiment with operating the emulator a little more easily there than you can doing it on the dreamcast. 1. How to burn a MAMED Dreamcast CD: Burning a CD that you can play on the dreamcast is not an easy thing to do. Sega really didn't want people to find out about this so they made it extremely difficult so don't expect to succeed on your first try (go out and buy a BIG stack of blank CD's). MAMED for dreamcast was developed without any support from Sega and contains no Sega software. The easiest way is to make the CD is to download the MAMED Disk Juggler CD image and use DJ to write the CD. This is a very large download (25MB+) and you may want to use a download manager to get the file. The image is compressed using WinRAR which has a nice feature of being able to repair the archive if it is slightly damaged during the transfer. You can download a demo version of WinRAR here. The DJ software is available for free from the Padus web site but the demo version only writes using the slowest speed available on your recorder. Not all recorders are supported, especially when trying to write this very special dreamcast CD format. You should use the latest version of the DJ software because previous versions may have trouble on some recorders. I was able to burn the MAMED CD image without trouble on my really old Memorex 2x recorder using the default settings with DJ v3.00.783 but others have reported that you must use the "raw write" setting in the advanced tab in order for it to burn correctly using their recorder. If it does not work with your recorder you may need to use Nero instead. To burn the MAMED CD image using Nero you must first convert the DJ image to the nero image format using cdi2nero available here. Nero, like DJ, has a free demo version available from Ahead Software. To burn the MAMED CD image on the macintosh you need DC Mac Pack 4.0 and Toast. Run CDIRip from Mac Pack 4.0 and select the DJ image. It will result 2 data tracks. Burn the 2 tracks as the Mac Pack says with TOAST. Select CD-ROM XA and drag the first track on the window. Write the session and then close the window. Select CD-ROM XA again and drag the second track on the window and then choose write CD. Note: the current CDIRip doesn't support the latest DJ images but mainly version 2 and early version 3. If you have followed the above instructions correctly the MAMED CD should boot in your dreamcast and display a list of MAMED packs. Each pack contains drivers to run certain games. The dreamcast has very limited RAM compared to a modern PC so I had to break the MAME program up into smaller pieces that could run on the dreamcast. But this still only allows the smaller games to run. You can scroll up and down to pick a pack and then press the red "A" button to select and run it. You should now see a menu with "RESCAN" and "EXIT". The MAMED DJ CD image available on this site does not come with and games on it. You must make a second CD with the roms required to run a game. MAME works by emulating the actual circuit board inside the arcade machine. The circuit board contains computer chips, some of which contain copyrighted software code. The contents of these rom chips must be supplied by you because MAMED does not contain and copyrighted roms. Do not ask me for information on where to find roms, you will be ignored. Also, please do not distribute MAMED with any roms. Remember that the roms for MAME change slightly sometimes from version to version, so be sure the MAME roms you are using match the base version of MAMED for dreamcast you are using. To make a roms CD, burn an ordinary iso with all your zipped MAME roms in the root directory or in a "/roms/" directory. You can also put PNG files in a "/snap/" directory that match the rom names and they will be display in the game list. Most of the standard MAME directories can go here without problem ("/samples/", "/cfg/") but some have not been tested. Simply swap the CD in the dreamcast and select "RESCAN" from the menu. You can also burn a CD that contains both the roms and the MAMED program using the self boot kit available on this site. You must still provide your own roms but everything can be put on one self boot CD. Simply follow the instructions contained in the self boot kit. 2. Using MAMED for Dreamcast: Once you have booted the MAMED CD and selected a pack you then swap in your roms CD and select rescan. A list of game rom names should appear. Using the first joystick connected to the dreamcast you can use the directional to scroll up and down and page up and down the game list and select the game you wish to play. If you select "EXIT" you will return to the pack selection menu. There is also an options menu which can be used to change some game parameters. This options menu is different than the standard MAME in game menu because it allows you to specify options that are normally only available from the command line in the PC version of MAME. You get to the game options menu from the game rom list by pressing the left trigger on the first joystick. To toggle a selection press "A". Game Options -Pad Orientation This option doesn't do anything and is something from the camera version of MAMED. -Resolution This option allows you to select between different resolutions. This is useful to be able to play games like rampage which use a high resolution screen. It is also useful to have enough pixels to display games rotated vertically and still be able to see all the pixels. Experiment with this option to find the resolution you like the best. -No Rotation -Rotation Right -Rotation Left -Flip X -Flip Y These are all MAME options for display to adjust which way is up for game and system graphics. You can experiment to find which option works best for you for which game or system. -Sound This enables sound MAME, but it can be disabled with the fake sound option. -Samples This enables sound samples that are required for some ROMs. Place the samples in the samples directory on the roms CD. This can be disabled by the fake sound option. -Fake Sound This disables sound at the low level so MAME can think sound is running. Some ROMs require sound to be enabled to operate properly. This can be used to disable sound without affecting these ROMs. -Artwork Just put the artwork files in the artwork directory. -CPU Slice Speedup Some game drivers have exceeding high number of CPU context switches when they really don't require so many. This option reduces the number of context switches to exactly 1 per frame. This may not work on some driver and may crash others but on the few it does work on you can expect a dramatic speed boost. (try Xevious, Dig Dug and Galaga for example) -Auto Rotate Detect the orientation of the game and rotate the screen and directional to match. You'll need to rotate your TV vertically for vertical games. Really useful when running in a camera, no so useful when playing on a TV. -Dirty Rects Dirty rects option allows the video code to only update the parts of the screen that have changed and can improve video performance. You can force this option on or off or only turn it on for drivers that support dirty rects -Hide Clones Clones can clutter up the game rom list so you can turn them off here. You need to rescan to see the results. Also remember some games like neogeo games are all clones so if you turn them off you will not see and games. -Memory Gauge You can't really select anything here but it will let you know what the current and maximum memory usage is during the current session. After you have selected a game from the game list it will be loaded into memory and run. If the game does not run and returns to the game list there was and error. Some games are simply too big to run, even some games which have small roms may require even more memory for emulating ram or sound and video HW. Don't expect a game to run even if it has a small rom. You may be trying to use a rom which is for a different version of MAME than this version of MAMED for dreamcast was based on. This site may help you discover what roms have changed for different versions of MAME. The game may also be broken either due to a bug in my code or something in the MAME core. Don't worry, I'll fix it as soon as I can. You can check the MAMEd compatibility and performance reports for a list of known working games. The first thing you should see is the MAME information screen. Use the joystick to press OK if you do not have a keyboard by pressing left and then right on the first joystick connected to the dreamcast. After you have dismissed all the information screens the game will start running and you can play it. MAMED supports up to four joysticks connected to your dreamcast so you can play games that require four joysticks. If a keyboard is connect it can also be used. All the joysticks are mapped to keys on the keyboard and are not considered real joysticks in the MAME core. This is because of a significant performance loss if I do it the other way. You can reassign all keys and joystick buttons using the MAME core in game menu system. Many features are available with the MAME core in game menu system and I won't bother to list them all here, feel free to experiment a bit with it. Each joystick corresponds to a MAME player. So pressing start on joystick 2 is the same as pressing the 2 player start in a game. So in a game such a galaxian which has only one joystick which is shared between two players, you must press the start button on the second joystick to play a 2 player game of galaxian even though you would share the 1st joystick in actual play. The joystick buttons A, X, B & Y correspond to joystick player buttons 1, 2, 3 & 4. The right trigger is the coin switch corresponding to the joystick player. The left trigger on the first joystick is mapped to the "TAB" key and will allow access to the MAME core in game menu system. To generate an "ESC" without the keyboard press A, B, X, Y & Start on the first joystick all at the same time and then release. This will return you to the game list menu and stop emulating the game. There are still some memory leaks in the code when quiting a game and this will cause trouble when trying to run large games or many games without rebooting. You can check out the memory gauge in the game options menu available from the game rom list. Remember some games can be deceptive in their memory usage, for example vector games take a lot of ram because of some rather large anti-alias tables that are created when the game is loaded. Vector games also take a long time to load also because those anti-alias tables are made using a lot of floating point calculations. 3. Other tips and tricks: Remember to have the neogeo bios rom on the roms disk to run neogeo roms. This goes for other games too that are clones. You must have the parent rom and the clone rom on the roms CD for it to run. So if you have a MAME roms CD that is sorted aphabetically you may be missing a parent rom that is named completely differently from the clone rom that might be on a different roms CD.   Some of this information was provided by others from the message board. Special thanks to Jacques, Pal, Grimmy58, quicksilver, Gooey, crjack and HyperGamer and anyone else I've forgotten to mention.