DigitalGhost's Blog

Servers up and downs should be resolved

2012-01-18T12:57:00.003-05:00

Hey guys,

The server has been going down intermittently the past few days. I think I have it traced down to a memory usage problem and it should be resolved.

New MAMEHub Release

2012-01-04T20:45:00.001-05:00

Hey guys,

Over the holidays Spoot and I have been busy working on MAMEHub, and a new MAMEHub release is out!

Here's a list of the changes:

Spoot has completely overhauled the MAMEHub GUI. I think everyone will be really impressed with the work he's done. Here's a few of the changes:

The two entry dialogs have been merged into a single dialog
There's a list of emoticons to the right of the chat window for inserting emotes into the chat
Country flags in the user list
When you click on a game, you get a host of data:

Game info with # of players, save state support, etc.
Title & in-game snapshot
Video of gameplay
image of PCB, Box, Cart, etc. etc.

Input Settings window where you can configure inputs (options -> input settings)
Tutorial (Help -> Tutorial)
A ton of other fixes and features, whoo hoo!

NVRam syncing was broken since the update to 0.144 but it works now
Fixed memory corruption that occurred when someone joined late or the rom size was large.

If it's been a while since you've tried MAMEHub, definitely give it another shot with the new GUI and let us know if you like the changes on the forum!

T-Shirt Contest!

2011-11-30T01:42:00.001-05:00

Hey guys,

With the 1-year anniversary of MAMEHub coming around the corner, it's time for some MAMEHub apparel! Do you have a penchant for designing awesome logos or graphic tees? If so, visit the forum post: http://forum.mamehub.info/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=189 and post some pics with your ideas and we'll vote on them to decide the logo for our first MAMEHub t-shirts!!

Requirements: Please make sure your image is either high res or vector-based, or at least that you can provide a high-res version if you win.

Once we've decided on the best submission, the MAMEHub community will send the winner a copy of his own t-shirt (provided that we can ship it to wherever you live), so put on your French Beret, get out your palette, and start designing!

Forum work

2011-11-19T06:02:00.001-05:00

The forum now has a new look and is purged of spambots. Also I added some stuff to user registration that should keep them out.

Thanks to spanner for designing the new forum style. Check it out! http://forum.mamehub.info

Is this MAMEHub running in android?

2011-11-15T02:28:00.001-05:00

The world may never know....

New user registration is back up

2011-11-09T19:22:00.000-05:00

Hey guys,

There was a bug that broke new user registration. This bug has been fixed.

Some amazing videos this week

2011-11-08T12:18:00.001-05:00

Hey guys,

Every day it's great to get up and see awesome videos that people have recorded (I added a link on http://www.mamehub.info/ which shows mamehub videos of the week, thanks spanner!), and this week there are some especially interesting and amazing videos:

4-Player NES online: I just did a quick websearch and found out that the netplay in nestopia, fceu, etc. only supports 2 players, so this 4-player NES online video is a first in gaming history! (Games are world cup soccer, super spike volleyball, and gauntlet 2)

Mega Man Co-Op fighting game: This looks pretty sweet, and a 1-credit run is pretty awesome. Clearly lag wasn't a problem here :-P

5-Player Bomberman: This video is actually more than a week old, but it is arguably the most fun MAMEHub video ever made. Once you start watching, you have to see how it plays out.

Versus Tetris: Pretty awesome, funnier if you remove the word "up" from the video description.

Rally Cross Challenge on Amiga:

Prop Cycle, apparently this arcade cabinet came with an actual exercise bike that you had to pedal to go anywhere in-game.

Someone getting to the minus world in vs. Super Mario Bros with MAMEHub:

AMAZING Videos, keep having fun =)

New installer for mac

2011-11-02T11:36:00.000-04:00

I added a version 0.7a for mac. This includes a README for installing and the dependencies for mac, so hopefully people with macs will have an easier time getting on MAMEHub:

You can grab the new mac version from the download page: http://www.mamehub.info/download

Updates to mamehub site

2011-11-02T11:03:00.000-04:00

Yesterday most of the work was done on the new MAMEHub site

Spanner has made an awesome style for the forum. Check it out: http://forum.mamehub.info/
Anything posted to the news section on the forum will also be posted to the news section of the site: http://www.mamehub.info/news .
The forum now lets you embed youtube videos in posts. To do this, click on the youtube button while editing a post, then in between the [youtube] tags, put the ID part of a youtube link. So for http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQE2WFReFf4 you would put IQE2WFReFf4 in between the tags.

Updates to MAMEHub itself are coming. I'm working on adding input switching and Spoot is busy with the next version of the GUI, so stay tuned!

MAMEHub is back up

2011-10-31T14:50:00.001-04:00

ISP is back online. MAMEHub is back online!

Server is down

2011-10-31T12:22:00.002-04:00

Hey guys,

It looks like the ISP for 10ghost.net is down. I will post again once it's back up.

Automatically disable syncing for games with huge ROM

2011-10-30T06:04:00.000-04:00

Added a change tonight for games like SF3 Third Strike that have a huge NVRAM and RAM/ROM spaces. If the game needs over 64 MB of RAM/ROM, syncing will be disabled. This means that auto-join is disabled and also that resyncs aren't possible. The reason I'm making this change is that it currently takes about 15 minutes to perform the initial sync between server and client for SF3 Third Strike, and nothing short of redoing the Internet is going to fix that. Disabling those features allows clients to connect instantly.

Games like this with huge RAM sizes are now playable! Give these a shot and let me know how it goes =)

Port forwarding not a requirement anymore

2011-10-28T23:44:00.000-04:00

Hey all,

Now if you can't forward your port, you can still play on mamehub! You can't host a game, but you can join games that other people host. If you can't port forward orknow someone else who can't, tell them to give the new version a shot and let me know how it goes.

Updates

2011-10-28T16:38:00.000-04:00

Fixed a critical bug in server sync compression (Thanks to Afdal for finding the bug)
Registered the domain www.mamehub.info
Fixed bugs related to Instajoin

The first draft of insta-join looks like it's working pretty well. I still have to make it join quicker and also fix some memory issues, but that shouldn't take too long.

First draft of instant-join

2011-10-27T16:24:00.000-04:00

Hey guys,

The latest version of mamehub now has a first draft of instajoin. Even if the game has been going for hours, a new client should be able to join and be caught up in under a minute.

Give it a shot and let me know if it works!

GUI Updates

2011-10-26T11:57:00.003-04:00

Thanks to spoot for his GUI updates:

MAMEHub no longer crashes on some macs on startup
New emotes
Eliminated the popup for the initial game audit

Updates

2011-10-24T22:37:00.000-04:00

Changed the default screen resolution in windowed mode to something more reasonable for the average screen size.
Fixed a bug where MAMEHub would lock up when someone left the game

Input engine overhaul

2011-10-22T15:17:00.000-04:00

Hey all, overhauled the input engine and made a ton of fixes:

Chat windows are now transparent
Fixed a bug where while a new player was joining, inputs were being dropped among the remaining players
Fixed memory corruption bug when when a 3rd,4th,etc. player joined the game
Fixed several bugs where inputs were going to the wrong buffer
Fixed a bug where old input buffers were corrupting memory
Fixed bug where CSMAME would crash/freeze when a player quits
Fixed bug where inputs with type UNUSED were corrupting memory
Future inputs are stored in a queue instead of a vector, this speeds up catch-up when a new person joins

0.7 growing pains

2011-10-17T20:05:00.002-04:00

Hey guys,

Had a configuration bug with the 0.7 auto updater, but it should be resolved now. If you couldn't log in, give it another go.

MAMEHub 0.7 Released

2011-10-17T18:58:00.001-04:00

Hey all,

MAMEHub 0.7 is released! Here's some of the features in 0.7:

The auto-updater has been updated to SVN 1.7. This should greatly reduce errors when updating MAMEHub in the future.
Dynamic frame delay: Frame delay is now based on ping but also on how often inputs make it on time. If you have a low average ping but occasional ping spikes, the new model should adjust the frame delay so there is no stuttering.
Improved WebM recording. The WebM encoder has been upgraded and bugs fixed so quality is far superior.
In-game chat commands: The game host can chat "/lock" to lock the game from new players to prevent people crashing into your game.

As always, install 0.7 to an empty directory, don't overwrite a 0.6 installation. Also **DON'T*** copy folders from 0.6 to 0.7, only copy files. The bug with copying folders is actually fixed in 0.7 so this won't be an issue going forward.

Here's a good strategy to updating MAMEHub:

Rename your MAMEHub directory to MAMEHub6
Install MAMEHub 0.7
copy your ini files and rom files from 0.6 to 0.7 DO NOT COPY FOLDERS
Profilt!

More updates and server down for maintinence

2011-10-17T14:03:00.002-04:00

Two things:

Added dynamic input lag on the host. If clients fail to send inputs in time, the server will increase the input lag to compensate. If clients are all sending their inputs on time, the server will lower he input lag to make the game more responsive. This should address issues people have when they play with high ping variance, and will also make games more responsive for the rest of us.
The server needs to be upgraded to the latest version of Ubuntu and will be down for maintenance for a few hours.

Improved video recroding

2011-10-16T21:55:00.002-04:00

Hey guys,

Found a few bugs in the video recording. Videos are much better quality now. Remember you can hit SHIFT+F12 to start/top the video recorder.

Updates

2011-10-16T00:26:00.000-04:00

Fixed bug where a new client was not processing all of the inputs during catch-up
Added in-game chat commands

Only one command exists now, /lock. type /lock into in-game chat to lock the game from new connections

Fixed a few audit bugs in GameAuditer

MAMEHub updates

2011-10-13T13:45:00.002-04:00

Hey guys,

Here's a list of updates in recent versions of MAMEHub

Performance improvements

Input queue and input player mask now uses an array instead of a hash table
Input arrays are preallocated to avoid expensive reallocs
There's still more to do here, expect another update, but expect a significant improvement already

Game search box

Now you can type a search query into the text box below the game tree in the "host game" section to filter for specific games so you don't have to find them in your list of 40,000 games :-P

Amiga support

MAMEHub now supports loading and running Amiga programs.

GUI Bug fixing

A failure during rom download no longer hangs mamehub
Fixed a bug where downloading a rom too fast caused the download to fail

Corrupting MAMEHub by copying from 0.5 to 0.6

2011-10-10T11:09:00.000-04:00

Hey all,

If you are migrating form MAMEHub 0.5 to 0.6, don't copy any folders from your old install to the new one. Each folder contains a .svn subfolder that is used by the auto-updater, so copying from an old version to the new one will corrupt the auto-updater.