In terms of Beat 'em Ups..
Not to hijack severdheds question thread, but are there recommended processor speeds recommended for each version of Mame?
The general advice is always 'the best intel you can afford'
different versions of MAME don't really have different exact 'requirements', there are only a few points where there is a noticeable overall speed-up or slow-down across the whole project. Individual drivers tend to slow down when we improve the emulation, that's gradual and ongoing, and of course actual requirements vary greatly across the project.
There are points in time where basic things have changed, eg. current versions aren't going to run in Win 9x at all, and if we go multi-channel sound (which needs to happen at some point) that requirement might jump to Win 7 because it's an absolute hardware specific mess on XP thanks to Microsoft, likewise you're not going to want to run anything from the last few years using low-end intel graphics because their drivers are typically so buggy they fail to even render the UI properly!
but questions like this have been answered thousands of times.
Let's try and make this more specific to the topic.. the Toaplan game Knuckle Bash (a beat 'em up) has higher requirements in modern versions than old versions.
In very old versions there was no sound at all, no sound chips even emulated and the video chip emulation was sketchy in places.
Slightly newer versions had some crude sample playing hack to play some of the game sounds (slightly slower)
More recently (definitely after 0.124) the video emulation was improved, much tidier code, trusted mixing / priorities (slightly slower again)
Then more recently still we added proper sound emulation, this involved emulating the V25+ encrypted sound CPU (running at 16mhz, just like the main CPU) and hooking up the YM2151 sound chips (again, slower)
Here is a video I made of that one 2 years ago when we fixed the sound
Over the course of the years the performance requirement for that driver have probably gone up 3-4 times due to the improvements made. It should still be well within reach of any half-decent system by today's standard and is of course now emulated much, much better than it used to be. Of course improving the emulation of this game has no massive effect on anything outside the driver aside from maybe a nearly unmeasurable slowdown from better emulating previously missing V25 CPU features.
Some changes (eg. cycle accurate CPU cores) tend to have a wider impact, but typically that's only been done for a handful of older 8-bit CPUs anyway so again typically nothing that will make a decent system sweat due to the changes.
Every driver IS going to be slower than much older versions, because practically every driver has seen or been affected by one or more improvements over the years, but that's the unavoidable cost of progress.
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Topic: any awesome games i'm missing out on by running an old version of mame? (Read 3283 times)
