Centipede and MAME .143

[boardjunkie]

Anyone noticed the lag when firing on Centipede in .143? Its bad enough to *really* make the game unplayable due to the precise timing needed to shoot fast moving objects. Millipede has *some* lag, but it seems like its not quit as bad.

Is this a known issue and something that can be patched?

[yotsuya]

Delete your nvram for Centipede. I did that when moving up in versions, and that seemed to fix things.

[boardjunkie]

Didn't do anything different after that. Guess I'll wait for the next stable update. Seems like I found alot of things that were "broken" in .143

[dzorbas]

Any luck with this? I'm running 0.141 and I'm seeing the same behaviour in both Centipede and Millipede. It's a little frustrating. Not that I was fantastic at this in the arcarde but I could easily get to 100K without much effort. I'm barely hitting 50K now. It's been a while since I've played on a real machine. Are you running the revision 3 ROM for Centipede?

Thanks,

Dino Z.

[mytymaus007]

Any luck with this? I'm running 0.141 and I'm seeing the same behaviour in both Centipede and Millipede. It's a little frustrating. Not that I was fantastic at this in the arcarde but I could easily get to 100K without much effort. I'm barely hitting 50K now. It's been a while since I've played on a real machine. Are you running the revision 3 ROM for Centipede?

Thanks,

Dino Z.

lol 100k pretty good 

[paigeoliver]

I have a real machine in my basement and I rarely get over 50K on it.

Any luck with this? I'm running 0.141 and I'm seeing the same behaviour in both Centipede and Millipede. It's a little frustrating. Not that I was fantastic at this in the arcarde but I could easily get to 100K without much effort. I'm barely hitting 50K now. It's been a while since I've played on a real machine. Are you running the revision 3 ROM for Centipede?

Thanks,

Dino Z.

[dzorbas]

Really? Then maybe my memory is failing me. its been a long time since i've played on real machine. My current high on my MAME cabinet is 86k. I guess I should be happy with that.

I'm sure I could do better if I could get rid of the lag in the firing button. I'm going to load up some older versions of MAME and see if it makes a difference. I played it on a multi-game cab yesterday at a local part supplier and there was no lag.

I will report back when I get a chance!

DZ.

[dzorbas]

Okay, so I tried Centipede on various MAME releases (0.055, 0.120, 0.130, 0.140, 0.141, 0.143, 0.146) on my cabinet and they all displayed the same behaviour with the lag in firing. I'm running 32-bit XP on that machine and have a 3" Happ trackball wired through an Ultimarc Mini-pac. I started wondering whether it was just that machine so I tried playing on my laptop running 32-bit Windows 7 using the built in mouse. Response seemed to be much better so I hooked up my control panel to my laptop. It seemed the more I played, the worse the response got. At one point I deleted the nvram file and response seemed to get better again but then worsened. Is that even possible?

So basically, I'm not sure where that leaves me other than still frustrated. This is all seat-of-the-pants testing but I know that I'm not imagining things.

Anyone else have any suggestions? Could it have something to do with the Mini-pac? Perhaps the drivers being used?

Thanks,

Dino Z.

[paigeoliver]

I actually can't tell the difference between the real machine in my basement and my mame cabinet (3" happ trackball). I have never noticed a firing lag.

[dzorbas]

I know that I'm not imagining things and it seems that I'm not the only one who is experiencing this. What setup do you have on your MAME cabinet? I understand that there are so many variables at play here but I'm willing to give anything a shot.

Boy would I love spend some time on an original machine!

Thanks,

DZ.

[paigeoliver]

The original  machine is a cabaret with a newer Happ trackball and a leaf switch fire button (just recently replaced the vertical microswitch button that was on it when it first arrived).

My setup has mame .55, mame .72, mame .106 and a really bleeding edge install that has nothing but robotron on it. The trackball is a 3" happ model with no wear. The buttons are normal happ microswitch buttons, the OS is windows xp and the PC would have passed as a fairly hot gaming PC 7 or 8 years ago.

[Gatt]

I'd be willing to bet your mini-pac or trackball is failing.  It's hardware related,  you isolated it to the control panel.  If I had to bet on a component,  I'd say it's the Mini-pac going bad.  If the trackball were going bad,  it would likely be mechanical failure and would be consistent.

The Mini-pac OTOH,  could initially appear to be ok,  but as it's used whatever component is failing slowly degrades performance.  I'm not familiar with that kind of board/processor design to comment more specifically on what might be failing in it,  on a PC that's behavior I'd expect to see with failing memory/cache memory.  Anyways,  each time you stopped using it as input,  or switched it to another system,  it initially works/improves but then degrades.  Replace the Mini-pac IMO.

Edit:  Actuallly,  double check me,  play marble madness for a bit.  If you see the same behavior,  replace the mini-pac.  Apologies...sleepy!

[boardjunkie]

Trackball has nothing to do with the fire switch. Its in the software...I can even hear the delay in the sound. If I smack the button hard enough to get a nice "crack" sound, you can hear the delay when the game produces its fire sound. Its somewhere around 60-80ms, which is quite noticable and *annoying* when play'n the game.

[boardjunkie]

I keep an old .37 version around just because. I just fired C-pede up in that and...same lag.

[Calamity]

Hi boardjunkie,

Are you using any sort of vsync (-syncrefresh, -triplebuffer, etc.)?

[boardjunkie]

3x buffer is on. I forget the rest of the settings. I'll have a look later and post them.

[Calamity]

Possibly you're using -multithreading too. I've seen severe input lag before with those settings and a mouse as input (similar to a trackball), specially with vertical games (+256 lines).

If you have the time, download a recent version of GroovyMAME and test it with the same game, enable these options: -triplebuffer, -multithreading. (The implementation of -triplebuffer in GroovyMAME eliminates that specific case of input lag.)

[dzorbas]

Calamity,

I've spent some time poking around in the GroovyMAME subforum to try to get a better understanding of what I need to do to set it up. I downloaded the 32bit Windows version of GroovyMAME and put it in it's own folder. I created a new mame.ini file using the -cc switch. I have set up my ROM path to point to a folder with only Centipede in it and have set triplebuffer to 1.0, multithreading to 1 and syncrefresh to 1.

When I run GroovyMAME from the command line the lag is mostly gone. There is definitely some still there and you notice it most when you are scrambling around trying to shoot all the individual pieces that have made it down to the bottom of the screen!  Should I try tweaking any other settings?

Also, one of the side effects is that my graphics look horrible running this from the command line. I have a Radeon 7000 graphics card with a 21-inch computer LCD attached to it. When I run MAME normally using MALA as the FE the graphics look fine even though some vertical games are stretched. I haven't installed any of the custom video drivers or anything like that. I'm less interested in authenticity and more interested in playability. I'd like to keep things as simple as possible.

I'd appreciate any input or guidance you could give me.

Thanks,

Dino Z.

[Wade007]

I've noticed lag in Centipede as well using my MAME ver .145 and Centipede version 3 rom. Windows 7-64bit on MAMEUI64_no nag AND MAME64. Multi-threading turned off (Last time I checked). Mala frontend.

Oftentimes it will play just fine and then all of a sudden both the movement and firing get "stuck" and will almost not move or fire at all. Like the player part is in slow motion while the rest of the game is full speed. If I wait a few seconds it will "catch up" and go back to normal, but by then I've either been killed or the game is much more against me. It seems to me that there is something about the game or the emulation that is causing the controls to get backed up or something. Then it has to catch up with the movements that are banked. Odd. I'm using an X-Arcade tankstick with trackball.