Groovy Mame/Arcade slow

[0Vincent0]

Hi guys!

It has been a lot of time since I have this problem with groovy mame/arcade.
I have the following machine:

Pentium 4 1,5 GHz socket 478, RAM 512 MB

with an ATI Radeon 9000 128 MB Socket AGP

as a graphic card. When I run some old game (for example galeco rally
which is a pretty old game coming from 1993) the game, every once in a
while, slows down. For three seconds the scrolling is not fluid and then it returns
good. With that machine it shouldn't happen. It is sufficiently powerful to
smoothly run games like galeco rally. Initially I thought it was an issue
related with the video card. I tried (without success) to install proprietary
drivers. I tried to configure as well as possible the open drivers but it
didn't change anything. I tried to use a different (but more or less with the
same characteristics) video card. Everything without luck. I can't surrender
to the fact that very old games run slowly on a machine which is, at least,
ten years newer than them. Now I'm trying to configure groovy mame in a
different way. I heard that maybe setting v-sync and triple buffering could
help but I'm not able to find out where these things could be set. Do you have
any suggestion on how to solve this issue? Could you help me to configure groovy
mame or, more in general, to find a way to overcome this problem? Thank you!

P.s. this problem is not related with a cab, my machine is running independently as
a normal desktop computer

[Calamity]

I can't surrender to the fact that very old games run slowly on a machine which is, at least, ten years newer than them.

It's better to get used to the idea that modern MAME requires A LOT of CPU power, so your assumption is not correct, unfortunately.

V-sync, by its own nature, requires even more CPU power because the processor needs to enter iddle state each frame for syncing purposes.

The best you can do is enabling -triplebuffer, that will allow full usage of your CPU while avoiding tearing. If that doesn't help consider getting a newer machine or an older MAME version (v0.106 should be fine).

[0Vincent0]

Thank you very much Calamity for your precious advice. I will try
to enable triple buffering but, sorry for the maybe stupid question, how
can I enable it? I've searched in the options that you have when, running
a game, you press shift (in practice the mame menu) but I didn't find
anything helpful. Furthermore in my groovy arcade I've looked at the
file which is called "mame.ini" but, once again, didn't find anything
related with that. Thanks!

[Calamity]

Thank you very much Calamity for your precious advice. I will try
to enable triple buffering but, sorry for the maybe stupid question, how
can I enable it? I've searched in the options that you have when, running
a game, you press shift (in practice the mame menu) but I didn't find
anything helpful. Furthermore in my groovy arcade I've looked at the
file which is called "mame.ini" but, once again, didn't find anything
related with that. Thanks!

Oh then you're using the Linux version, for some reason I thought you using Windows. There's no -triplebuffer option for Linux, I'm afraid

[0Vincent0]

oooohh bad luck! Are you sure? Does anyone know whether is it possible or not to enable triple buffer on groovy arcade (i.e. linux)? By the way thank you again Calamity

[0Vincent0]

Hi guys, I didn't find a solution to my problem. I have another question: do you think that
if I boost my ram from 512 MB to 1 GB my issue (not smooth scrolling every once in a while
on pretty old games) could be fixed? Or it is a matter of cpu therefore I cannot do anything with
that computer? Because if boosting the ram could solve my problem I would spend some money
to buy main memory (but I want to avoid waste of money, if that's not the way).

I still haven't solved also the other issue that I have: tearing. Not all the games but especially the
oldest one (like donkey kong) are not synchronized and the monitor tears. Do you know how to
solve it? Thank you!

[dmarcum99]

you're cpu bottlenecked....

I tried a similar setup with both a socket 478 2.6ghz celeron and a 3.0ghz P4.  While the P4 did improve things, the newer games still weren't running 100%.  Heck, my Phenom II X4 840 won't run MK4 at 100%...