I'm not a programmer, (I wan't to be and currently working on it) but I just got to ask this question. Why is the MameCE executable is 2mb and the Extra Large build is 8mb? How come some other program on the PocketPC is sometimes 1.5mb or less. Is there a way to make it smaller and compress? The reason I ask this is that even the most recent Mame (for Dos/Windows) only about 3mb?

I'm going to ignore the first couple of questions and take the last one; comparing the exe size to desktop MAME:

DOS MAME uses an executable compression program (called UPX) which uncompresses the exetutable at runtime. It's a little like a self-extracting zip, except different, and much faster, and likely less efficient. Anyhow, that's why the exetuable is smaller. Without using them, the DOS MAME exe is huge also. And it still takes the same amount of memory after it decompresses itself. Such exe compressing programs don't exist for CE and wouldn't really make much sense, if you think about it; except for saving a little bit of Storage memory. The same amount (or a little more) Program memory would still be required to run it.

Darren

> I'm not a programmer, (I wan't to be and currently working on it) but I just got
> to ask this question. Why is the MameCE executable is 2mb and the Extra Large
> build is 8mb? How come some other program on the PocketPC is sometimes 1.5mb or
> less. Is there a way to make it smaller and compress? The reason I ask this is
> that even the most recent Mame (for Dos/Windows) only about 3mb?
>

One more thing:

You are mistaken about the size of the EXE for most recent MAME for Windows (MAME32); it is well over 10MB, I just downloaded it. Either the MAME32 guys realize that the EXE packer is a bit silly, or a good one doesn't exist for Win32 either.

Darren

> I'm going to ignore the first couple of questions and take the last one;
> comparing the exe size to desktop MAME:
>
> DOS MAME uses an executable compression program (called UPX) which uncompresses
> the exetutable at runtime. It's a little like a self-extracting zip, except
> different, and much faster, and likely less efficient. Anyhow, that's why the
> exetuable is smaller. Without using them, the DOS MAME exe is huge also. And
> it still takes the same amount of memory after it decompresses itself. Such exe
> compressing programs don't exist for CE and wouldn't really make much sense, if
> you think about it; except for saving a little bit of Storage memory. The same
> amount (or a little more) Program memory would still be required to run it.
>
> Darren
>
> > I'm not a programmer, (I wan't to be and currently working on it) but I just
> got
> > to ask this question. Why is the MameCE executable is 2mb and the Extra Large
> > build is 8mb? How come some other program on the PocketPC is sometimes 1.5mb
> or
> > less. Is there a way to make it smaller and compress? The reason I ask this
> is
> > that even the most recent Mame (for Dos/Windows) only about 3mb?
> >
>

> I'm not a programmer, (I wan't to be and currently working on it) but I just got
> to ask this question. Why is the MameCE executable is 2mb and the Extra Large
> build is 8mb? How come some other program on the PocketPC is sometimes 1.5mb or
> less. Is there a way to make it smaller and compress? The reason I ask this is
> that even the most recent Mame (for Dos/Windows) only about 3mb?
>
The Extra large build is larger than the basic build becuase the size increases as you add game drivers. The basic build only has a small subset of the 2000 games avialable in Mame. As for the size of the Exe versus the Mame.exe, when you compile for a different architecture (MIPS vs ARM etc) the size will vary according to the instructions needed for the architecture.
Hope that clears it up.

Cheers,
-Techmaster