I've just updated the wiki topics about these two things. I'm advertising them here so anyone can check them out, modify them, give some feedback, etc. Enjoy! I hope it's useful.
Modded MAME wiki article I've applied the lag-eliminating patch from Shmupmame along with upy's mametgm patch to the MAME 0.137 codebase. You can download the result here (lee_n's mirror). Enjoy, and post your experiences!
The difference is huge for me.. game feels so good and smooth it almost feels like I'm cheating. Hard to believe 1 frame was causing that. I wouldn't be surprised if we see a lot of people getting new personal bests at this years carnival.
I add another positive feedback to this patch. Who would knew that one single frame would make such a difference ? (I made 3 rubbish game, then one 370-ish, then another rubish, then one 380-ish, then 430. This thing is magic).
In T.A. Death my experiences so far are very positive. I also played some Normal and Master mode and had trouble with sonic drop. It's the same problem I had with MAME releases before I started using vmametgm. Doing the up-down motion it happens often that the piece isn't moved straight down to the bottom, but instead is soft dropped. It got a little better after playing for a while, still irritating not being able to nail the soft drop timing every time. Anyone else having the same problem? For a very long time now I've been using MAME exclusively when playng TGM. Is it recommended to use ZiNc instead technically?
Yeah, I've been looking to fix this myself, but the code is . What you're experiencing is misdrop protection in TAP. With a joystick, you don't want to accidentally drop when you engage a diagonal. With a keyboard, that's exactly what you DO want. So basically, the code has to detect whether the pressed input is from a keyboard or joystick, and if it's from a keyboard, apply input filtering for diagonals that lets you firm drop while DAS'ing to the wall.
I see. Thanks for the detailed explanation and great job those involved in creating and sharing this. So far I only played on keyboard. Will test it some other time on joystick.
Downloaded it and set that shiny new Death record. Tried Normal and it seems to help slightly in 0G also. Good stuff. What's this I'm hearing about a new Zinc plugin? I've been totally unable to play any TGM1 without getting frustrated (i.e., suiciding before level 300 and any games I complete are invariably above 11 minutes).
I compiled two binaries for Mac, and lee_n is hosting them both at http://nihon.se/shmupmame shmupmametgm-osx64 has upy's input polling increase and input filtering in addition to the shmupmame buffer removal, but only supports TAP and TGM1.
Ah finally it works! I tried a few other builds including a TGMMAME build but I was never able to get round the input lag on a stick. Thank you for providing this! 100% of my TGM gaming has been on NullpoMino until now, but I can use this build to try to set some "records". Presumably this build would qualify for submitting records? Are best scores in the region of S1 on TAP worth submitting? Edit: I see the records do go down that low. Reading that wiki article I hear the .inp files are not the regular MAME format. Hopefully they will be submissable!
Well, I'm currently 1 on TAP, so not quite S1 yet and I've submitted that. Sure, it won't land you very high on the leaderboard. But for me that's part of the fun too. Work your way up.
Indeed. It's good to see there are active people around at a similar level - I discovered TGM last December, bought a stick and got stuck in. It's amazing how you get sucked in!!
This does feel a little better. I tend to get a little further when playing death. How much difference is there playing TAP through MAMETGM on CRT and LCD respectively? A whole frame?
Depends on the LCD. But you can reduce it of you tell MAME to output the same resolution as your LCD.
I tried it : wonderfull. There is a gap between this last version and the precedent. I am waiting now to get my joystick working and I will really take huge orgasms. Like Ai mentioned, DEATH is now perfect for me, but Master mode is strange. I also got a lot of problem with my drop/lock/drop which doesn't work everytime, if I don't play carefully in thinking about it, It is even unplayable. Also the DAS gives me some problems with a lot of tetriminos which stop at the 9th or the 2nd column instead of going to the 2 extrem positions.
If you'd really internalized the DAS, you might have been subconsciously releasing left or right one frame before you saw the tetromino hit the wall. When there was a frame of input delay, the tetromino would've kept moving for another frame, and ended up at the wall. Now that there's no input delay, the tetromino stops when you tell it to stop, and ends up one space short. This sort of thing should resolve itself with enough practice.
