Back in the saddle again...

[kelvSYC]

Well, after what seems to be a long inactive period (real life and Wikipedia seems to be a good combo), and roughly 20-odd versions of MAME later, I'm back in the game.

First things first to address is that there is still a LOT of unofficial cheat file forks out there, and it would make sense if there was an easy way to unify them. The cheats forum backlog is very likely to have duplicate cheats, not to mention stuff that is already in the file. Having said that, has anyone tried to use a wiki to accomplish this goal? Certain bad things aside (vandalism, patent nonsense, that kind of crud), it shouldn't be too hard to, say, modify a wiki engine to collect cheats and dump a complete and up-to-date cheat list (and we'd do away with cheat list releases altogether!).

The second thing is that with new stuff, I might have to dig deep into my archives. I had complete MLC lists for cybots, but I seem to have lost it, so I'd have to search over again (and finding MLCs is repetitive tedium even for those games that are straightforward). I also had progress in doing a few other (secret) things, but I guess I have to start over (due to emulation issues or the simple fact that I had no idea what I was looking for).

Now, I see that cheat.c is still the same as before I went on hiatus, I guess not much has gone in the way of my two requested cheat engine features (multipart lists and conditional cheating). They're two things that I might be able to make happen on my own, yet in the time that I was away, I have learned that C is a little too low-level for me (and still, there's no guarantee that what I mod out of it will be in the MAME source, as IIRC the cheat engine contributes to the largest code bloat other than the emulation itself), and that I'd need to split cheat.c into several files (one for the "glue code" to several data structures, one for the meat and potatoes, at the very least) to see what I'm doing. Perhaps I'm just too pampered with Objective-C++...

I can't be of too much help, as my G4 is now considered "legacy", and there is probably little chance that I get a new Intel Mac with a universal binary MacMAME. So I'd only be of any real help in the games that do run at least 80% on my system (this, by the way, rules out Mortal Kombat, folks).

I'll try to spend the next few weeks addressing anything sent out to me over the last while - it's a whole new world out there, and the cheat community that I left isn't the same anymore...

[ianpatt]

Now, I see that cheat.c is still the same as before I went on hiatus, I guess not much has gone in the way of my two requested cheat engine features (multipart lists and conditional cheating). They're two things that I might be able to make happen on my own, yet in the time that I was away, I have learned that C is a little too low-level for me (and still, there's no guarantee that what I mod out of it will be in the MAME source, as IIRC the cheat engine contributes to the largest code bloat other than the emulation itself), and that I'd need to split cheat.c into several files (one for the "glue code" to several data structures, one for the meat and potatoes, at the very least) to see what I'm doing. Perhaps I'm just too pampered with Objective-C++...

Yeah, I'm very hesitant to add anything new until there's a good way to decrease the amount of code in cheat.c. About 80% of that file is UI code, though, and without completely changing how MAME handles its menus I don't see it getting much better. It'd be easy to split it off in to one file for UI and one for the core, though.

I've written up a new menu system for testing that would help in at least making it all easier to read and modify, but I haven't heard any feedback from Aaron about it yet.

Welcome back, by the way.