Question about MAME 0.59

[Alienreb]

Just curious,  does MAME emulate traditional games faster as new versions are released or do they slow them down?  I would like to think that as the code is improved upon, that emulation would be faster for the games, but I have never asked the question.  The reason I ask this is that I'm not sure if I should upgrade to 0.59 if all it does is bloat up my harddrive and add support for some "closet games" released in the early 80s.   Mortal Kombat 2 (3.1) ran normal in the past, but as I have upgraded versions of MAME, it has begun to slow down.  I am using 1.4GHZ AMD XP with 256MB of RAM and a GeForce 3 Ti-200 card so I know my hardware has more than enough to run it.  Hell, I've been running Killer Instict 2 on this machine for the longest time with no problems at all.  In fact, I've run it with all of the options set, and it has yet to stall on me.  Perhaps MAME is slowing its own games down as it ages?  

[Trenchbroom]

Not that I'm a programmer, but it's my understanding that one of the overall goals of the MAME project is to make the emulation as accurate as possible.  Most of the time that is a benefit because as they refine the code to support more games it often results in more efficient programming and more speed.

However, it can also mean that games slow down because there are more features being emulated then before.  About 4 years ago most 8 bit Capcom games had FM sound instead of emulated sound for the music because the emulation of the individual sound chips hadn't been perfected.  The games were playable but the music didn't sound quite right.  Later when they emulated the sound chips the sound was perfect, but the performance took a significant hit (my poor P150 could run FM sound full speed but got about 15-20 FPS with the emulated sound).

The samples that many games used to have is another example.  March of progress my boy--sometimes good, sometimes bad.  And as computers get faster and faster, what is bad now will be very very good a few years from now.

[Alienreb]

That was a well thought out response that you wrote, and you are right; computers are cheap these days so upgrading to keep up with MAME's latest games shouldn't be a problem.

[Lilwolf]

But the real answer is no...

without adding features... just adding additional games... same speed.

the way the emulator works, it only loads the code into memory that it uses.  So they can make mame bloated as all hell and it wont change pacman for speed since it will load the same code as it ever did.

[retrac]

That was a well thought out response that you wrote, and you are right; computers are cheap these days so upgrading to keep up with MAME's latest games shouldn't be a problem.

well good then, since it seems that you have extra cash lying around, care to upgrade my machine.