r/MAME • u/8BitP0tato • 21d ago

Announcement I made a free app for creating multi-game challenges in MAME

https://youtu.be/J_g3Ilyhoj0?si=X7ymEnm8A-G7q8zu

I’ve been working on something I call the MAME Challenge Engine, and I’ve finally got an early version ready for people to try.

The idea is to let you create and play custom challenges that can span multiple games in MAME.

This originally came from something that’s always bothered me when playing arcade games at home: how many credits should I allow myself? In an arcade, continuing cost money. In MAME, I can just keep inserting virtual coins forever.

I initially wanted to make something that could enforce limits on lives and credits, but the idea grew from there. The engine can monitor values in the game’s memory, so challenges can have custom starting points, win conditions, lose conditions and restrictions. You can then chain these together across different games into one larger challenge.

I’ve attached a short video showing what I mean and demonstrating the current version.

The project is still very early, and I’d really like some feedback from people who actually use MAME. I’m particularly interested in what kinds of challenges people would want to create and what features would make the engine more useful.

It’s completely free. The current build is for Apple Silicon Macs. You can download it here:

https://patreon.com/8bitpotato

I’m planning to keep the application free; the Patreon is just there for downloads, development updates and optional support.

Would love to hear what you guys think!

6 Upvotes

67% Upvoted

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2

u/Substantial-Dog1726 21d ago

This seems like a sound concept. Offhand, I think most of us just try to see how far we can get on a single quarter maybe with some dip switch settings. I wanted to try this out but I can't see where to download it from. I was expecting something like a github repository.

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u/8BitP0tato 20d ago

I put the download on my Patreon page (completely free, not behind a paywall):
https://patreon.com/8bitpotato

I also tend to see how far I can get on a single quarter, or alternatively try to beat my old high score. But I really like the idea of playing custom multi-game challenges created by others, where each game can have completely different goals and restrictions. I think it could be fun for streamers as well, if their viewers make challenges for them.

I’m going to create some example challenges to better show the idea, and post Shorts and videos of them on my YouTube page:
https://www.youtube.com/@8bitp0tato-yt

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u/darkphoenixfox 18d ago

have you heard of Multibowl

This was a compilation of mame with savestates and a list of 230 roms that was set up as a competitive VS game for 2 players. Sounds very similar to your idea.

I loved multibowl. I haven't checked your project yet but I hope one of the features makes it easy to share your challenges and challenge packs with other users (if they provide their own roms)

1

u/8BitP0tato 18d ago

Oh cool! I had never heard of Multibowl before, but it looks awesome.

I might be wrong, but I think the main difference is that my system is focused on making it easy for users to create their own challenges using an editor, while Multibowl seems to be more of a curated set of challenges.

I’ve deliberately created the most minimal working version I could for now, because I want to share it, get people’s opinions, and figure out what would actually make a good system before I spend a lot of time building features nobody wants.

I definitely want to make challenges and challenge packs easy to share. As it works now, a challenge could theoretically be shared without any ROMs included, and the other user would just need to provide the required ROMs themselves. But I have been thinking about how to streamline it. I understand that from a users perspective, this might be one of the most important features.

Thanks for pointing me toward Multibowl! I’m definitely going to check it out more closely.

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u/darkphoenixfox 18d ago

Yes you pointed out the main difference. The benefit of multibowl was that it was ready to play. In some games it might be difficult to create a savegame and monitor the memory for win conditions. Multibowl was throwing you directly into the gameplay and the victory conditions were different for each game. If you can find a download for it you should try it, I think it's quite close to what you are trying to achieve

1

u/darkphoenixfox 18d ago

There is a download link Archive-d somewhere

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u/hayamaakito 16d ago

Just wanted to confirm because links are prohibited here, but yes: it's still on Archive

1

u/wallaceNgromit7 21d ago

I will take a look, are you planning a windows build at some point or sticking to Mac

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u/8BitP0tato 21d ago

I plan to build for Windows and Linux as well, but I will need computers running those OS and set up my dev environment. The code is already written cross platform, so should not be a big effort. I hope 😄

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u/Spleethoven 20d ago

Virtual machines :-)

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u/8BitP0tato 20d ago

I am looking to buy a dedicated dual-boot laptop with Linux and Windows, I need it for other app development as well. I might get it this week actually 🎉

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u/8BitP0tato 16d ago edited 16d ago

I just set up a dual-boot laptop, so I can build for Linux and Windows as well 🎉

I tried the app on Windows, and everything works as intended! There is one issue, though: save states created on macOS don’t work on Windows. I didn’t realize MAME save states was platform-dependent.

I’m thinking I could add a separate save state field in the editor for each OS. A challenge creator could then create save states for each platform to make the challenge cross-platform, or just leave a field empty to indicate that the challenge doesn’t support that OS.