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| epetti:
I have an older machine (Pentium 4 3.4GHz), but most of the MAME games I have run fine on it. However, I notice that launching MAME the first time takes much longer than all subsequent launches. I assume this is because Windows caches it the first time you launch. This does take away from the frontend experience, though, when you press start for the first game and have to wait about 15 seconds or so for anything to happen the first time. Is there any good way to automatically pre-cache MAME so that the first-time startup cost happens at machine startup rather than when you try to launch the first time? |
| NOP:
Could you do something like "MAME -? > null" as a batch file in your startup? That would at least launch the .exe once at load time, perhaps it'll still in the cache by the time your FE loads up and you try launching a game. |
| Acids:
--- Quote from: epetti on July 15, 2013, 08:01:01 pm ---I have an older machine (Pentium 4 3.4GHz), but most of the MAME games I have run fine on it. However, I notice that launching MAME the first time takes much longer than all subsequent launches. I assume this is because Windows caches it the first time you launch. This does take away from the frontend experience, though, when you press start for the first game and have to wait about 15 seconds or so for anything to happen the first time. Is there any good way to automatically pre-cache MAME so that the first-time startup cost happens at machine startup rather than when you try to launch the first time? --- End quote --- what os are you running? how much memory? what version of mame are you using? are you using a front end? To help we are going to need more detail. |
| epetti:
Windows XP SP3, MAME 0.148, Hyperspin, 2GB. But it starts slow the very first time whether I launch from Hyperspin or standalone. All the games themselves run at full speed and after first launch, subsequent times it launches in about 1-2 seconds. Tried the batch file. Good idea, but it didn't seem to make a noticeable difference. |
| Haze:
never noticed this myself, and WinXP should only be loading what it needs. Unless you've done something stupid like compress the drive / exe? or the drive is failing and has dropped down to PIO mode and is therefore just plain slow? or some really bad anti-virus that wants to load the whole file into ram the first time? or you're letting one or more drives in the system spin down, and they need to spin up from that state the 'first' time you launch it? (could be a drive referenced in the rom path or whatever if you have multiple drives) |
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