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  • xtrn/syncarcade/README.md

    From Rob Swindell (on Windows 11)@VERT to Git commit to main/sbbs/master on Tue Jul 21 01:41:46 2026
    https://gitlab.synchro.net/main/sbbs/-/commit/e81fb58e5d5e2b5b2cbb3f9c
    Modified Files:
    xtrn/syncarcade/README.md
    Log Message:
    xtrn/syncarcade: warn that pruning a parent romset breaks its clones

    Hiding a romset by moving it out of roms/ looks like housekeeping and is a trap: a clone loads its graphics ROMs and PROMs out of its PARENT's zip, and the parent is frequently the entry that looks most redundant. Moving puckman.zip aside -- "Pac-Man (Japan)" and "Pac-Man" being obviously the same game -- silently breaks pacman.zip, which is the Midway clone of it. MAME does not search sub-directories of the ROM path either, so relegating one to a sub-directory is exactly as fatal as deleting it.

    Nothing can warn about this at run time: the parent/clone relationship is in MAME's driver tables, invisible to both the lobby and the door, so the game stays in the picker and the player is told only that the content is wrong for this core.

    Document [roms] exclude as the way to drop a menu entry while leaving the file where MAME can still reach it, and cross-reference it from the romsets section.

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  • From Rob Swindell (on Windows 11)@VERT to Git commit to main/sbbs/master on Tue Jul 21 01:41:46 2026
    https://gitlab.synchro.net/main/sbbs/-/commit/2c2f8a8b29bac2702a96b8fa
    Modified Files:
    xtrn/syncarcade/README.md
    Log Message:
    xtrn/syncarcade: record the measured dirty-rect hit rate

    Measured in active play over SyncTERM: 80-90% of frames patched rather than repainted on Pac-Man and Frogger, 20-30% on Galaga. The spread is the games and not a defect -- a static maze with a few sprites crossing it is the best case, while Galaga moves an entire formation at once and most of its frames correctly fall back to a whole frame.

    Worth having written down: "it depends on the game" is unfalsifiable, and these two numbers give the next person a range to sanity-check a change against.

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  • From Rob Swindell (on Debian Linux)@VERT to Git commit to main/sbbs/master on Tue Jul 28 21:54:12 2026
    https://gitlab.synchro.net/main/sbbs/-/commit/9690b2ac37355a6b8e5d4a7f
    Modified Files:
    xtrn/syncarcade/README.md
    Log Message:
    syncarcade: the README named keys the second stick no longer uses

    A twin-stick cabinet's second stick moved from I / K to P / ; when player 2
    was given a panel of his own, because I J K L became his joystick. The
    README still told a player to reach for I and K, which now move a second
    player nobody is playing.

    Pause moved off Space in the same change and the README still named it
    there, which is worse than stale: Space is now player 1's button, so a
    player following the door keys line shoots instead of pausing. Say why, so
    the next reader does not put it back.

    Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

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