VOGONS


First post, by Buck_Rogers

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I am an avid fan of old fixed shooters, and I have been having a tremendous amount of fun with the 1979 Universal title Cosmic Guerilla. Silly name, fantastic game.

However, when I run the Cosmic Guerilla ROM in MAME there is no sound. Also, the game freezes fairly often. I've tried both older and newer versions of MAME.

Here's a video of someone playing Cosmic Guerilla on MAME with the sound effects intact. So clearly it works for some people.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4b2vzqVWgY

Sound was enabled for Cosmic Guerilla all the way back in MAME 0.35b3 in 1999. MAME 0.35B3 added DAC and Samples sound (cg_m0 - cg_m7, cg_att, cg_chnc, cg_ext, cg_dest, cg_gun and cg_gotm.wav).

However, whenever I load the ROM from a command line it tells me I'm missing all of those samples, and the game plays without audio.

I was wondering if someone could see if the game works for them? I got my ROM from [SOMEWHERE], but every copy of this ROM on the internet seems to be identical.

I find these old Space Invaders clones fascinating because the game designers were probably told "Space Invaders is making a killing! Do something like that!" and they had to make a game that was both appealing to Space Invaders fans, but also its own thing. Cosmic Guerilla absolutely knocks it out of the park in that regard. It's got very unique addictive gameplay despite clearly being a "Space Invaders Clone".

Last edited by Stiletto on 2019-01-04, 08:44. Edited 1 time in total.
Reason: removed website mention

Reply 1 of 5, by Stiletto

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Are you missing the samples? You can get them at (from among other places) the "Current Samples" page at http://samples.mameworld.info/ or the Samples page at ProgettoSnaps: http://www.progettosnaps.net/samples/

We won't discuss sourcing ROM sets here but they should match the checksums seen in MAME source, etc.. Or see the checksums online at http://adb.arcadeitalia.net/?mame=cosmicg

"I see a little silhouette-o of a man, Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you
do the Fandango!" - Queen

Stiletto

Reply 2 of 5, by Buck_Rogers

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Thank you!

That fixed my issue! Greatly appreciated! Normally if MAME tells me I'm missing a file, I just go search for that file and find it. In this case searching for the sample files led me nowhere so I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong.

I guess I should have searched for "cosmic guerilla samples" instead of the specific sample files MAME was telling me I was missing...

Thank you again!

Reply 3 of 5, by Buck_Rogers

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So I got the sound working, but the game was still freezing. I was testing the game using MAME .147, .162, and .205. This freeze is very reproducible. Start Cosmic Guerilla and get hit 4 times (lose 4 lives, which requires losing 3 lives on your first game, 1 life on your second game). On the 4th hit the game freezes. Seemingly every time.

Someone told me Cosmic Guerilla was stable in their version of MAME, version .122, so I downloaded that and tried it. It seems to be stable in .122. I let myself get hit 20 times in a row and the game didn't freeze.

This could just be me doing something wrong, but I don't see how. My conclusion is I don't think Cosmic Guerilla is stable on newer versions of MAME but does seem stable on MAME .122

Reply 4 of 5, by Keade

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You are not doing anything wrong, it is broken (since it is an easy repro I gave it a try, had it crash with 0.205 too, just like you).

This is a very old known bug: https://mametesters.org/view.php?id=5237 unfortunately not fixed to this day.
The bug report does mention 0.122u8 as the point where it broke, so you were well-advised to pick 0.122 for this game.