Gentlemen of UltimateMK....a new dawn for playing MK online has emerged!!!!!

[isamu]

Hello Gentlemen...

I will start off by saying that many of you and many within the MK community have relied on Kaillera for many years to satisfy your Mortal Kombat online appetite. Kaillera has managed to gain massive popularity. I remember when it first hit the scene. It was a breakthrough! Being able to play all 2D MK games online was nothing short of amazing. Sadly....Kaillera has remained a stagnant lag infested program using very outdated net-code technology. I am among the many MK fans that have clamored for a new program, along the lines of GGPO and 2DF that supported MAME instead of Final Burn Alpha. Yes I too, read that huuuge thread over at the FBA forums where many of you asked the devs to make FBA support the MK games, only to be responded with a few posts from them saying in a 'round about way that It'll be a cold day in hell before we see MK games running in FBA.

Well my fellow MK fans, those days are FINALLY over!!!

I am EXTREMELY happy to announce a new program for Windows called Client Server MAME/MAME Hub!!!!!!!!!! What this is, is a program completely unrelated to Kaillera, but improved upon its features and functionality in a HUGE way. It allows you to connect to other folks for an online play experience surpassing even ggpo!!!

OK so let's break down what we have here:

Client Server MAME is the base program. It is a variation of the command-line version of MAME itself. It has been completely designed and written from the ground up with VERY good netcode(think ggpo or better) in mind and is very good at preventing desyncs!

Furthermore, we have MAME HUB. MAME HUB runs along side CS MAME! What this is, is a new GUI application that allows you to connect with anyone for an online game in either MAME or MESS in an extremely easy and simple fashion! You can completely avoid having to deal with command lines whatsoever. It's basically like Kaillera's interface but with more options!

But that's not all folks....the author of this awesome program, Digital Ghost, has added a SPECTATOR feature to the MAME HUB. This of course speaks for itself. Hop in and watch others compete in a seamless and intuitive fashion. Even better, it does NOT lag, hinder or bog down the games experience at all!

It gets even better....the program allows you to play ALL mame games with as many people at once as the game allows!!! That means 4-player Aliens vs Predator, 4-player D&D Shadow Over Mystaria, and 4-player Marvel vs Capcom switching between characters!!! How ridiculous is that?????

You guys NEED to support this program! It's GGPO/Kaillera taken to the next level!!!!!!!!!!!! The author, Digital Ghost, has painstakingly wrote this program to be as lagless as possible, and he has committed to supporting this application for the LONG HAUL! He is even welcoming more beta testers and needs input from YOU on how to make MAME HUB/CS MAME better!

Please people....go and try it for yourselves. We've been asking for a new Kaillera-like netplay program for years, and now we've finally got it. It deserves your support and your input! I was RABID supporter of Kaillera back in the day! But this new MAME HUB/CS MAME program bitch slaps it in EVERY way! It has impressed me to no end! We're talking *MAME* with good netplay...not FBA. Meaning far more supported games(Mortal Kombat II with lagless netplay anyone?), the blessing of the MAME Dev themselves(something Kaillera will *never* have), and the BEST support ever, courtesy of the author, Digital Ghost!

CS MAME/MAME HUB is not an improved contribution to the online netplay scene folks, it is a fucking REVOLUTION!!!!!!!!!!!

So without further ado, Here are the links:

Link to program binaries: https://github.com/MisterTea/ClientServerMAME/downloads

Digital Ghost's Blog: this is where he makes *very* frequent updates with the latest news on MAME HUB and CS MAME. It really REALLY behooves you guys to go there and leave comments so he can take your input and help make the program better. I cannot stress this enough!! http://10ghost.blogspot.com/2010_12_01_archive.html

DigitalGhost's Blog complete with tutorial: DigitalGhost's Blog: MAMEHub Tutorial


Here is a video of two people playing TMNT online using ClientServerMAME in MAMEHub: YouTube - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on MAMEHub 0.1

Thread in MAME about the program: MAMEWorld Forums - News Submission Board - MAMEHub 0.2 Released

 

[9.95]

Wow... I think I remember reading about this when the program was in its infancy... and now I'm very excited to try it. I am on board... I will see what I can get done as far as testing tonight this weekend.


I posted this over at TYM and CMK as well.

 

[Lucky Day]

love it.

I will be trying this tonight at about 8pm, if anyone else wants to kind of get a playtest together let me know.

 

[9.95]

I have a ton of work to do but if I can swing some online time I will just to test.

 

[9.95]

Right now, the only thing I can see for sure is that the UMK3 Juggernauts hack does not work.

Would there be any way to add UMK3j to the mame set so that it will run the game?

 

[NinjaGrinder]

wow this sounds promising, I'm definitively gonna take a look at this and see how it works. Thanks and let's hope for the best

 

[9.95]

Ok, upon some further investigation, I can get MameHub to boot and a game to load, but vmame itself(the modified version of mame that client/server mame is built off of) is very difficult to configure. I'm not completely lost when modifying the ini file but most people will be.

In order for this to be popular, there simply must be some kind of frontend to configure mame or buttons. The beautiful thing about GGPO and 2df is its ease of use.

People who are not the most computer savvy are not going to use this because of it's relatively difficult entry level for basic setup and they will go back to playing on kaillera.

What can we do to help with this and see progress with it?

 

[Lucky Day]

^^^ agreed.

This only version .2 though, so I assume that will be ironed out by official release.

 

[Lucky Day]

I'm testing this out right now, anyone wanna try it?

log into the client, there is a chat.

 

[Lucky Day]

Button mapping can be done in Mame by pressing Tab btw.

A front end option would be nice.

I've tested Xmen vs. SF and the program seems cool, nobody to play with though. Also, I'm not convinced there's not input lag, but I'm going to test it on a better pc in a few mins.

 

[Shock]

Button mapping can be done in Mame by pressing Tab btw.

A front end option would be nice.

I've tested Xmen vs. SF and the program seems cool, nobody to play with though. Also, I'm not convinced there's not input lag, but I'm going to test it on a better pc in a few mins.

There's no way to avoid input lag, there's only ways to divide the lag smaller and smaller and maybe one day there will be a global internet with no latency, but that doesn't exist right now. While I believe the program is and will be very good and make netplay a lot better, overall, there are still going to be issues. I remember people praising 2DF and ggpo for being "lag and delay free" and while again, they are VERY good netplay codes, there are always exceptions in connection qualities, same goes for netplay code as good as it is for HD Remix and SSF4, very good often for netplay standards, but still can be bad.

 

[Lucky Day]

There's no way to avoid input lag, there's only ways to divide the lag smaller and smaller and maybe one day there will be a global internet with no latency, but that doesn't exist right now.

Nah, I mean within the emulation, not via networking.

 

[Lucky Day]

Posted from TYM so I dont have to re-write:

Ok guys (sorry THTB I dropped connection, but I'm coming back).

We tried this out for a while tonight.

UMK 1.2 was successfully played by a few with mixed results, but keep in mind this is still a work in progress.

I didn't personally play UMK, but I played NBA Jam (which has a smaller rom size, which helped it connect easier for us), but I can say the promise is very good with this software. NBA Jam ran pretty much flawless when our connection was good. And booted up easily and had all the features you would expect.

Come into the program and check it out when you can. But don't expect everything (including UMK) to be up and running immediately. There are still a LOT of things to work out.

It's a long way off GGPO quality as far as fighting games go, but it's heading in the right direction.

What this needs is a lot of us to get on board, and find bugs, tell the developer (who was in chat with us all night) about the problems and to keep the feedback coming.

This guy is very knowledgeable about what he's doing, and he seems like he will be able to help us out in getting it working well with UMK.

 

[RoGE]

mamehub.exe won't even run for me, it tells me to goto the log file and I get this

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "MAMEHub.py", line 510, in <module>
File "MAMEHub.py", line 500, in main
File "wx\_core.pyo", line 7978, in __init__
File "wx\_core.pyo", line 7552, in _BootstrapApp
File "MAMEHub.py", line 41, in OnInit
socket.gaierror: [Errno 11001] getaddrinfo failed

 

[Lucky Day]

Submit that to his blog, he should get back to you and tell you what's wrong.

 

[Lucky Day]

are you running the mamehub.exe that's in the DIST folder?

 

[isamu]

Ok, upon some further investigation, I can get MameHub to boot and a game to load, but vmame itself(the modified version of mame that client/server mame is built off of) is very difficult to configure. I'm not completely lost when modifying the ini file but most people will be.

In order for this to be popular, there simply must be some kind of frontend to configure mame or buttons. The beautiful thing about GGPO and 2df is its ease of use.

People who are not the most computer savvy are not going to use this because of it's relatively difficult entry level for basic setup and they will go back to playing on kaillera.

What can we do to help with this and see progress with it?

Hello everyone,

I have to apologize for what some may consider slightly misleading comments in my original post. I get very hyped up over new software that shows promise, and so I went a bit too far off the deep end with my excitement

Fact of the matter is, what 9.5 said above is true. The program isn't by any means perfect and still needs some work, but I'll be damned if it doesn't have a shitload of potential!

Yes, it is not as straightforward to get running as far as configuring the MAME program. But here's a suggestion: Go grab a MAME front end, such as Emu Loader, then use it to configure the mame.exe to whatever you want. This way, no command line or ini editing is necessary.

But you are right 9.5, it would really really behoove DG to incorporate the ability to configure MAME itself, from within the MAME HUB GUI Client. I have a feeling however, that this could already be something on his to do list

Posted from TYM so I dont have to re-write:

Ok guys (sorry THTB I dropped connection, but I'm coming back).

We tried this out for a while tonight.

UMK 1.2 was successfully played by a few with mixed results, but keep in mind this is still a work in progress.

I didn't personally play UMK, but I played NBA Jam (which has a smaller rom size, which helped it connect easier for us), but I can say the promise is very good with this software. NBA Jam ran pretty much flawless when our connection was good. And booted up easily and had all the features you would expect.

Come into the program and check it out when you can. But don't expect everything (including UMK) to be up and running immediately. There are still a LOT of things to work out.

It's a long way off GGPO quality as far as fighting games go, but it's heading in the right direction.

What this needs is a lot of us to get on board, and find bugs, tell the developer (who was in chat with us all night) about the problems and to keep the feedback coming.

This guy is very knowledgeable about what he's doing, and he seems like he will be able to help us out in getting it working well with UMK.

Excellent EXCELLENT post Lucky.

Guys, Lucky hit the nail on the head. What will make MAME HUB successful is US!! *We* need to be in as much communication with Digital Ghost as possible. Meaning you should have his Blog's website as a tab in Firefox or IE open AT ALL times, ready to give him feedback! He is begging for it! He wants as much feedback as possible.

Never have I seen any emulation author/programmer with this much support and the desire to get as much feedback from the community as DG.

Let's keep testing it folks and telling him how to make it better! We can make this program flourish!

Lucky and 9.5... I trust you guys have many associates and friends within the MK community between these various MK messageboards, so I am excited to know you will be doing your best to spread the word about MAME Hub and CS MAME.

The future's bright, gentlemen

 

[9.95]

I contacted DG last night via his blog as well as by email in hopes of speaking to him directly about helping in further develop this program into something huge. If he really does this right, it will be far better than kaillera. I'm not a coder or programmer, I'm an idea man, and I think that with the right ideas from this community and the right coder/programmer MameHub will be extremely successful.

 

[isamu]

If he really does this right, it will be far better than kaillera. I'm not a coder or programmer, I'm an idea man, and I think that with the right ideas from this community and the right coder/programmer MameHub will be extremely successful.

I can drink to that! A toast to CS MAME and MAME HUB! A toast to the future of online gaming in the Mortal Kombat community and the whole emu community in general!

 

[isamu]

Just a heads up, a new version came out a couple weeks ago and since I posted this thread the program has seen a SIGNIFICANT amount of improvements to both the UI and the netcode! Can't tell you how much better it is, and how many great games I've had in MameHUB over the last few months. MK games play great and in my opinion is the better alternative to playing that shitty Arcade Kollection on Steam. Go check it out...

http://blog.mamehub.info/p/download.html

http://forum.mamehub.info/index.php?sid=410d882e4671a68eb1c726d4abc529e0