Interview with Alex Judd
Last Friday, MAME Parallel alpha 6 was released to the Internet, providing for the first time full sound in Bubble Bobble through samples (I would highly suggest downloading this if you haven't already. see the MAME page for the download.) I have had a chance to interview alex Judd, of the MAME Parallel project. My questions will be in light blue, and Alex's responses will be in yellow.

First of all, thanks for consenting to and taking the time for this interview. Here are a few questions to chew on... I'll try not to make this too long.

Thanks! '-)

When and how did you discover MAME?

I've been a big fan of Phoenix since playing it as a kid, and during a bored ten seconds at work one day decided to go hunting for information on it. The first emulator I came across was the original Windows Phoenix emulator which was great, but a little slow and lacking in any sound. Finally I ended up with Mame which was compact, fast, and due to its design was amazingly expandable.

When did you decide to start working on a parallel version of MAME?

I guess about 6 weeks ago now. I'd just bought a Street Fighter II Alpha Zero machine (great toy) and was looking for some side decals for it on rec.games.arcade.collecting when I starting reading a thread about control mechanisms in Mame, and whether they could rig up real arcade joysticks to Mame.

Well this sounded pretty cool as I had this 26" screen arcade machine that would just run Mame great, so I offered to help and it all kind of begun from there.

I know that Brad Oliver gave you the green light on the MAME Parallel project (It's amazing what you can learn from a README file<g>), but what kind of reaction have you recieved from Mirko, Nicola and the |rest of the MAME team?

I've spoken via email with Brad Oliver and Bernd Wiebelt from the Mame project who got in contact after the release of Mame/P Alpha-5. Before that, I don't really think anyone took us that seriously (there are lots of people out there claiming to write modifications for emulators) but they could see that we were trying to do something for the good of the project, and wanted to discuss a couple of things with me.

Brad (as I guess you know) writes the Mac version so was unable to play Mame/P for himself but wanted to discuss some of the source modifications to see if he could put them into Mac Mame. Bernd and I discussed control mechanisms.

In the end, we decided that our goals (extended control mechanisms) weren't quite the same as the Mame team themselves, so rather than stopping work on our project, I spoke with Brad and he said that Nicola was happy for us to continue in our own. This is why we're now releasing unofficially official releases !

Why Bubble Bobble and Phoenix?

I love Phoenix. It really just reminds me a lot of my youth, and nobody had ever implemented the music for it in any emulator. Kind of a nice challenge!

Bubble Bobble was funny, because I always remember the sound in this being great, so the first chance I had to put any sound into the game I did. The Alpha5 release of Mame/P caused such a lot of argument over whether any music was better than no music etc etc, that Tormod got in touch and said that he'd been working on a driver for Bubble Bobble to implement -all- the sound and thus Alpha6 was a complete release. (Oh BTW Super BobbleBobble works too!)

What other plans do you have for future versions of MAME Parallel?

Lots and lots ;) On the control mechanism side, I have a 32 input parallel interface that should be in for the next release which will allow multi player games. Also a serial interface is on the way to the UK so I'm going to be busy! We're still arguing whether it should allow four joysticks with say 2 buttons, or 2 joysticks with 8 buttons.

On the game side there are lots of requests for sound in DonkeyKong Jr. and other games, so once I see what comes out in Mame 3.0 we will continue with our improvements. Also I hear Pleides has music, so if anyone has an original board and can sample for me then I'll implement that too.

Basically, I plan to implement sound samples and control mechanisms into whatever ganes everybody out there wants as long as they are reasonable requests!

BTW We've just release Alpha6b today which should allow all other Mame versions to use the Bubble Bobble and Phoenix sound, and the source code! New samples for Phoenix and a quick bug fix!

What are some of your favorite arcade games?

1. Phoenix (am I boring yet?)
2. Bubble Bobble
3. I, Robot
4. StarWars
5. Double Dragon.

I'd love to implement an I, Robot driver (I hear this is in progress but has missing roms) but I guess I have to work too!

Again, thanks for your time.

Pleasure, and thanks for the support,

&8v)

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