xmame status?

[Andre Robatino]

Matthias Saou wrote:
> Alex Jackson wrote :
>
>   
>>> Xmame (and xmess) haven't been updated since 0.106, but now there is a new 
>>> port of Mame, sdlmame, at version 0.109.  Is xmame deprecated?  And what 
>>> about xmess?
>>>       
>> The short answer is "yes".  xmame/xmess are probably permanently dead as of 
>> 0.106; the active multiplatform MAME/MESS port for the forseeable future 
>> will be the SDL port.
>>     
>
> Yeah, unfortunately it seems to be like that. The long answer is that
> some major core changes in 0.107 would require a lot of work to be done
> to xmame... too much it seems. sdlmame is a much simpler port of the
> main xmame, since it doesn't try to focus on many UNIX specific
> features and simply uses SDL to do everything. The big loss here is
> that currently sdlmame can only display with either OpenGL or software
> rendering AFAIK, whereas xmame had an Xv overlay mode that was really
> fast even with no accelerated OpenGL available (think recent ATI and
> NVIDIA cards with the free drivers).
>
> As you can see, I've kept xmame 0.106 for FC6, but also started
> packaging sdlmame in parallel. If sdlmame works with Xv some day, and
> with at least one frontend (updating gxmame for it would be nice), then
> I might drop the xmame package, but that won't happen overnight.
>
> Matthias
>
>   
  I installed and tried to run sdlmame.  It almost immediately exited 
due to it expecting to find roms and other files in a different, 
version-specific location (/usr/share/doc/sdlmame-0.109/dirs, 
apparently).  My mouse froze, though I was able to use the keyboard to 
log out and back in, at which point it worked again.  It would be better 
to use a version-independent directory.  Also, is there going to be an 
sdlmess to replace xmess?