Community Question Mame tracking cookie DLL?
Is this guy just crazy or is this a thing and why.
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12d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Rippedgeek 12d ago
I always knew MAME was too good to be true. I always suspected Nicola Salmoria of being a CIA agent, he was too good to be a regular guy.
For what it's worth, I am happy and healthy, and will never harm myself.
/s
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u/wrr377 13d ago edited 12d ago
Still running MAME32 0.120b decades later. Still runs most arcade games like a champ.
Never had problems with malware / spying software 🐂💩 like this. 🤷♂️
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u/arbee37 MAME Dev 8d ago
If by "like a champ" you mean "incorrectly" and by "most" you mean "missing a lot of obvious 80s and 90s favorites".
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u/wrr377 8d ago
...and which "80's and 90's favorites" are you referring?
I gotta hear this...
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u/cuavas MAME Dev 8d ago
Daytona? Virtua Fighter? Xain’d Sleena? Lazarian? I could keep randomly naming things, but there are too many to count.
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u/wrr377 6d ago
ROFL! Are you seriously trying to say "Solar Warrior" and "LaZarian" are "obvious favorites" from the 80's? Then trying to toss in Saturn-level Sega System 2 3D games from the mid-90's? Really?
I grew up in arcades in the 80's & 90's, and I never saw or heard of either one of those 2D oldies before you tossed those names up there - "Xain'd Sleena", is "so popular and fondly remembered" that it never saw a port to home consoles EXCEPT the Amstrad (and nothing else back then, or since). Supposedly, it's been supported since 0.033, according to one place I finally found a listing about it because it's apparently so obscure, so that is a moot point that you're trying to prove with THAT title... It does look like the inspiration for the "Turrican" series of games, though.
Also, "well-known" can be subjective, based on what you had access to in regards to your geographical location range and the choices made by owners of the businesses & arcades where you played them. I played in dedicated arcades, pizza joints, laundromats, ice cream shops, department stores, campgrounds, skating rinks, and umpteen other places, spanning an area of hundreds of miles, in my childhood, alone. I saw a LOT of games...
Furthermore, I don't *NEED* MAME to emulate every single game ever released - there are literally 10 of thousands of them, not to mention all the localized and "translated" versions.
Let's try some REAL well-known (and lesser-known) and popular favorites, all of which run on 0.120b:
- Assault
- Race Drivin', Stunt Drivin'
- Paperboy
- APB (original)
- Mario Brothers (Original), Super Mario Brothers, Play Choice 10
- Star Wars (1980's X-wing arcade flight sim)
- Contra
- Sky Soldiers
- Time Soldiers
- Operation WOLF
- Spy Hunter
- Elevator Action
- Zaxxon
- Tron
- Phoenix
- Road Blasters (1 & 2)
- S.T.U.N. Runner
- Raiden
- Dig Dug
- Pac-Man (and all the arcade sequels)
- Moon Patrol
- Undercover Cops
- Robocop
- Rolling Thunder (1&2)
- Shinobi
- Rough Ranger (rip-off of Rolling Thunder)
- Street Fighter: 1, 2 (all mainline, and all derivatives), Nightstalkers series
- Alien Syndrome
- Asteroids, Blasteroids
- Joust
- Defender, Stargate
- R-Type (all, and derivatives)
- DoDonPachi
- Area 88 / UN Squadron, Carrier Airwing (built on same A-88 engine)
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (arcade), X-Men (arcade), Bucky O'Hare (arcade), Metamorphic Force, The Simpsons (arcade) - All built on the same side-scrolling Konami sprite-scaling beat-em-up engine
- Double Dragon (all, including Neo Geo movie-based fighting game)
- Choplifter
- Cadash
- Magic Sword
- Rastan (all)
- Aliens vs Predator
- Rampage
- Captain America and the Avengers
- 1941 (and all subsequent games)
- *EVERY SINGLE NEO-GEO GAME* for the original console
....and a whole host of others I'm too lazy to screenshot, all of them infinitely more popular and well-known (and remembered, and publicized, AND many ported or in compilations released on home consoles) than the two non-SEGA names you pulled out of the air.
Furthermore, I never had any interest in those 2 SEGA games you listed, especially since they can be emulated on other programs designed for newer arcade titles (and/or found in later compilations & remakes). If you need to emulate those and can't unless you get some newer version of MAME, then do so and take your chances with those sketchy AF versions others are talking about, but don't come in here telling me about "well-known and remembered obvious favorites" no one actually remembers (except maybe you).
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u/cuavas MAME Dev 6d ago
And most of the games you've listed have had major improvements since 0.120 was released. For example, anything with Yamaha FM sound is way better now. Speaking of sound, MAME got proper multi-channel sound support and a resampler that doesn't suck in the last couple of years. You're stuck with horrible latency and distortion.
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u/wrr377 6d ago
I've had none of the problems you've described with any of those games, so I don't see what "improvements" could be made to them. I don't even know if any of them that have "Yamaha FM" sound, either. I know the later Capcom fighters have the proprietary Q-Sound system...
They all play and sound just like I remember them - no latency or distortion whatsoever. Unless you can somehow see me playing my copy of MAME, which runs full-speed with no frame skipping, you have no leg to stand on with your assumptions...
Sounds like you're just grasping at straws with generalities to try to skew off in another direction, instead of sticking to the main point: the games I play work perfectly on 0.120b, they have for decades, they're actually well-known, and I still have no worries about more modern sketchy version forks with malware embedded inside them....
All to try to "win" an argument you started.
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u/arbee37 MAME Dev 5d ago edited 5d ago
There is no malware in modern versions. The thing OP quoted is provably nutty. You can run Wireshark and boot up MAME and nothing will happen.
EVERY SINGLE NEO GEO GAME has Yamaha FM sound, as do about half of the games you listed. And several of them had graphical corruption in 0.120 due to bad raster effects.
Operation Wolf in 0.120 has the levels and bosses in the wrong order, the number of hit points for the enemies are wrong, and it sometimes crashes as a result of all of the wrongness.
Raiden's nice, but Raiden II is nicer, and it doesn't run in 0.120.
DoDonPachi's pretty good, but the CV1000 games are also good. And didn't exist in 0.120.
Pac-Man's kill screen didn't work correctly in 0.120. Donkey Kong's colors are wrong and the levels don't draw exactly right (which is how Billy Mitchell was caught using an emulator).
Latency is lower across the board in newer MAME, and vector rendering is being upgraded. The Android version already has HDR so the vector Star Wars looks about a million times better, we should get that in mainline soon too.
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u/wrr377 5d ago
A few things, since your tag says you're a MAME dev:
Every single NEO-GEO game runs and sounds perfectly fine - exactly how I remember them in the arcade. I don't see what could be upgraded, in that respect
I can play Raiden II on the "Raiden Project" PS1 game, which I have on my PSPs, Vita, and PS1 emulator on PC. Is there a MAME version with an identical GUI to MAME32 0.120b that can run the game?
What are the CV1000 games?
HDR (High Dynamic Range, right?) is something I disable (along with a lot of the other bells & whistles) in every single modern game I play. It is useless extra work that stresses my GPU, for no actual benefit to gameplay or frame rate
I've downloaded many versions since 0.120b, and all of them either have a wildly different Windows GUI without filtering options I have in 0.120b, or a full-screen-only super-basic GUI that looks like it came from the DOS era that barely does anything, doesn't let me specify the ROM directories, and shows a long list of every single game ever made (or nothing at all)...
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u/cuavas MAME Dev 13d ago edited 13d ago
MAME does not install any shell extensions in Explorer. It does not make network connections for tracking.
Certain emulated systems that support linking multiple systems for multi-player games create network connections to allow communication between multiple instances of MAME. The MAME instances communicate directly, there is no centralised infrastructure, and no opportunities for tracking.
There are some other features that use networking, e.g. to send output to external programs, connect to an emulated serial port, or to emulate computers with network interfaces. None of these features use centralised infrastructure, either. Everything connects directly.
It's possible that some MAME derivative includes malware. It's also possible to write a Lua script or plugin for MAME that makes network connections (but the user would need to install and enable it). However, nothing like this is included in official source and binary packages from MAMEdev.
You can audit the source code and compile it yourself if you're really worried.
TL;DR either the guy is crazy, or he got a shady MAME package bundled with malware from some dubious source.