It’s a good idea to take a backup copy before you start chopping and changing things of course. Since the thread is a little daunting to wade through, here’s an example configuration that just does the very basics.Īll you need to do is copy and paste this into your own mame.ini file, replacing all the existing HLSL settings. You will also find mention of an “ini file creator”, but more on that later. Here you can browse screenshots of what other users have done with their HLSL configuration and grab their settings to try for yourself. My favourite is this thread over on the Shmups forum. Luckily there are lots of places we can do just that. Unless you’re an expert user, you’re probably going to want to borrow a HLSL configuration from elsewhere on the web rather than try to come up with your own. If you can see these changes then HLSL is working on your PC. You should see some scanlines on your game and the brightness of the picture should have changed. Nevertheless, if you’ve never tried HLSL before, you should save the file and fire up MAME again, just to make sure everything still works. For the absolute bare minimum this is actually all you need to do, but it’s unlikely this default configuration will yield very pleasing results. If you’ve never edited configuration files before, there’s a newbies guide here. Change this from 0 to 1 and then save the file. Open this up in notepad and find the line that reads “hlsl_enable”. Browse to your MAME directory and find the mame.ini text file. You can enable HLSL from the GUI, but it’s just as easy to do it by editing the ini file.
When using HLSL, make sure your Windows desktop resolution is set to your displays native resolution for best results. Once you have confirmed that things are working, it is time to enable a basic HLSL configuration.
Set the path to your ROMs (Options->Directories in most GUI versions) and check that basic emulation is working just by clicking any game, Neo Geo favourite Metal Slug is always good as a trial run.
Once you have downloaded MAME Plus or whichever build of MAME you want to use, extract it to a folder on your PC. When creating the tutorial we used MAME Plus, which can be downloaded here, but you can use any recent build of MAME that you are comfortable with. We covered the basics of what these new shaders can do in our article here. Your first thoughts might be that this would only be useful for 3D games, but HLSL can work at a per-pixel level.
HLSL is an acronym for “High-level shader language”. The main focus of this tutorial will be on HLSL. There are lots of tutorials for setting up MAME on the internet, so we’ll assume that you are at least familiar with getting the basic emulation working, though we will cover that briefly too. Games which would be completely lost to everyone bar an elite few are now playable on your PC, as long as you can find the ROMs of course. Because of this, MAME, the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator is probably the most widely used and most loved emulator on the PC. Tracking down the original hardware for the many thousands of coin operated games is simply impossible for all but the very richest of collectors.
Arcades that are now either closed or dedicated to gambling machines hosted wall to wall video game cabinets back at the peek of the coin-op boom. It’s hard to imagine for anyone who wasn’t around in the 80s and 90s just how huge the arcade scene used to be.