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PC Hardware Specification
wcndave:
heh, that is ironic...
paigeoliver:
Just downgrade your mame version and all your problems will go away. Current mame may have a lot more titles, but decade old mame was a much better experience. The old versions still run fine on modern hardware.
Haze:
--- Quote from: paigeoliver on September 25, 2012, 02:49:11 pm ---Just downgrade your mame version and all your problems will go away. Current mame may have a lot more titles, but decade old mame was a much better experience. The old versions still run fine on modern hardware.
--- End quote ---
decade old mame gives a much better experience *IF YOUR CURRENT HARDWARE IS INADEQUATE*
I really wish people would stop recycling the same old crud because the qualifier I've added is very important.
Newer MAME will give a far better experience than older versions as long as your hardware is good enough. Literally millions of bugs have been fixed since your decade old versions, if you wish to run older versions complete with their bugs an inaccurate emulations of the hardware feel free to do so, but stop claiming it's somehow better than current versions, it really, really isn't.
This is why it depresses me that things like the Pi are so underpowered, because you're throwing away at least 10 years of hard work if you want to performance levels the feeble CPU can deal with.
Continually saying 'older versions are better, period' is borderline insulting to the people who have worked on the project improving each and every piece of it over the years. The cases which are worst affected by performance requirement increases tend to be the ones which the MOST work has been done on, to bring the emulation closer than ever to the real hardware.
MAME has always had higher requirements than other emulators, and thus always required a PC in the higher end of the 'current systems' bracket to run things well, so I'd go as far as saying the 'older MAME gave a better experience' isn't even factual from a historical point of view, the same applied, if you had inadequate hardware back in the day it ran badly even back in the day.
If anything due to CPU speeds only seeing marginal increases over the past few years it's cheaper than ever to get a good machine for MAME, it does however mean the 'top end' games have remained out of reach.
Yes this bugs me because I'm sick to death of people reporting bugs to me because they're running ancient versions. If I fixed a bug *10* years ago, I don't want people telling me that MAME is garbage because XX is broken simply because people keep trotting out that older versions are better and as a result people keep using them and finding the 'fixed 10 years ago' bugs. The GP2X versions were the worst when that was popular because to get anywhere near good performance they were not only using ancient versions, but hacking drivers resulting in improper music speed, worse priorities etc. It seems some people expect mamedev to apply every bugfix ever made to every version ever released *and* not have the performance change one tiny bit as a result, what else am I meant to think when people ask me when I'm going to fix things I fixed so long ago?
Having to use an old version is not a good thing, it's not something you should be proud of, it should be seen as a last resort, or makeshift solution to a problem of having inadequate hardware.
mcseforsale:
I'm running mame 1.63 on a pentium4 with 1GB of ram. So far, I haven't found anything that didn't run correctly. Mamewah is the best frontend I could run since things like Hyperspin need better graphics acceleration and I'm not really interested in it yet.
Games that surprisingly run on my box:
1.) Killer Instinct
2.) Killer Instinct 2
3.) Street Fighter 3
4.) Most NeoGeo games
5.) several versions of metal slug
6.) Daphne titles such as Dragon's Lair, Dragon's Lair II, and Space Ace.
I'm also emulating Atari 2600, Nintendo 64, Super NES.
Emulators requiring disc images, such as game cube, PS1,2,3 or others will not run on a P4. You'll need a dual core for that such as a Core Duo, i3, i5, etc. (or their AMD counterparts).
I'm also running Windows XP with Mamewah as the front end.
AJ
PL1:
--- Quote from: wcndave on September 25, 2012, 04:12:03 am ---
--- Quote from: PL1 on September 24, 2012, 05:56:15 pm ---1. MAME software - Earlier versions require less computing horsepower. As more games are supported and the emulation gets better, the hardware requirements increase.
--- End quote ---
You must be right, however it just surprises me, since 1997, CPU gone up from 133MHz to 2GHz 4core = 64 fold increase. RAM from 16MB to 4GB = 256 fold increase. Yet the ROMs are all the same... and ran on PCs from that age fine... hence my query really.
--- Quote from: PL1 on September 24, 2012, 05:56:15 pm ---
2. Computer hardware - The computer industry "arms race" of software vs. hardware race is constant. As each side adds features or speed improvements, it encourages the other to do the same to keep up with them. The good news is that this competition drives down the cost of getting relatively recent generation hardware.
--- End quote ---
Didn't think this would apply much to MAME as it has a specific purpose, the roots of which are fixed in time.
--- End quote ---
The part that you're focusing on is the ROMs instead of MAME advancements.
The ROMs are pretty much the same (some better dumps, etc.) but the software that simulates the original hardware (MAME) is increasingly complex and accurate.
The changes in MAME are like the changes in operating systems. Win 7 needs more CPU and memory than Win 95, even though they are different generations of the same Microsoft Operating System that perform the same basic functions and purpose, the roots of which are similarly fixed in time. ;D
Scott