okay, windows or DOS?

[jammadave]

the guy building my general-purpose MAME machine (not the star wars emu) is telling me the following:

-the PCs he's looking at dont have ISA slots for soundcards supported by DOS.

so, i have the choice of going windows with it, or *maybe* having to fork out a little extra dosh for a PC configured correctly.  i trust this guy so i'm not asking if he's blowing smoke, i just want to know how much windows slows MAME down?  (1.2ghz processor in question here.)

if i go with DOS i'll use GL as a frontend, but i'm starting to really like some of the raging dragon skins and would use that if the machine goes windows.

whaddya think

thx!
dave

[ErikRuud]

As far as I know, the only reason to use DOS is for slower machines like mine. (200 mhz).  

I also have MAME setup on my 1.3 ghz laptop at work, and I have not noticed any real performance problems.  

For an actual MAMe cab running windows it sounds like you should stick with 95 or 98SE and stay away from XP and 2000.

[u_rebelscum]

i just want to know how much windows slows MAME down?  (1.2ghz processor in question here.)

Depends on the game, amount of RAM, speed of CPU, and other stuff, but ... with 1.2 ghz and >=256 MB ram, you shouldn't notice any slowdown using windows vs using dos (unless you run something in the background).  In fact, I think people have reported that windows runs the huge NeoGeo games faster, or at least loads them faster.

[Lilwolf]

Windows is MUCH faster if you need stretching btw (since it can be done in hardware).

With real hardware, you shouldn't worry about it.  But saying that... I still have 3 isa SB cards for all my computers.  They do a fine job for me and I've never cared to upgrade them.  

[big10p]

All you ppl using Windows versions of MAME, doesn't the lack of truly smooth scrolling (using -vsync) in games really bug you? Or is it just me?   If it wasn't for the hiccuping scrolling, I think I'd use Windows MAME, too... or is there a way to get smooth scrolling in Windows that I don't know about?

[Howard_Casto]

the "tearing" effect varies frommachine to machine depending upon your hardware configuration.   If you have a good, beefy, machine then you won't notice it.  If you have a middle of the line pc then you might notice it a little.  Also depending upon your video card it might not show up at alll, once again ati seems to handle this problem the best, particularly the 128 and radeon series chipsets.  

[Jason_]

I have a slowish PC (350mhz) and I find the DOS version of MAME is significantly faster and has far better sound.

I'm using a cheap no-name PCI sound card that I bought a couple of years ago. It came with a DOS driver and works brilliantly with MAME.

It is worrying that an increasingly large number of sound and graphics cards only come with windows drivers.  I think people should vote with their feet and boycott cards that don't come with DOS and Linux support as standard.

DOS may be a deeply flawed operating system. However I think it works well as a launcher for emulators and therefore deserves to be supported.