MAME Broken Versions

[AGMS]

I started up MAME today (finally some time to do NABU programming), and it doesn't work, giving Adapter Failures on the NABU side and NPC disconnected on the server side. Turns out MAME version 0.271 on Linux (Fedora 39) doesn't communicate with the RetroNet server over TCP any more. I was able to downgrade to 0.258 and it works! Wonder what caused the breakage...

[AGMS]

I can confirm that MAME version 0.270 also works. Using Fedora 41 Linux.

[AGMS]

Still broken in MAME version 0.273.

[AGMS]

And yet again, not working in MAME 0.274.

[AGMS]

MAME still broken in version 0.275.

[GTAMP]

Sorry for the late reply. I could be wrong but I think it might just be a baud rate setting in MAME.

https://github.com/brijohn/mame/tree/nabupc_wip version is still the best to use since some features haven't made it upstream but I tried 0.275 on Ubuntu and got it to work after changing the default baud rate settings.

Push scroll lock in MAME to enable UI controls, push tab, go to machine configuration and set RX baud and TX baud to 115200. Set stop bits to 2.

DJ's adapter must also be set to 115200 for Linux.

nabu mame linux.jpg (332.28 KiB) Viewed 46363 times

[AGMS]

You're right, it's the MAME serial port settings. I had 111900 baud and 1 stop bit. Changing it to 2 stop bits fixed it! MAME 0.275 on Fedora Linux.

Theoretically you could specify larger baud rates, since DJ's adapter just sees a TCP connection which doesn't have baud rates. But unfortunately, the emulated serial chip maxes out at 115200.

[GTAMP]

You can speedup MAME with a hotkey (F10 usually). That will also speed up communications and DJ's adapter will happily reply to the TCP messages as fast as MAME requests.

[AGMS]

That’s a very useful tip, should speed up CP/M disk load times greatly! Which happens every time I do a test run of NthPongWars.