mame suddenly all stuttery

[happyfunball]

I give up, I dont' know what else to try. my main mame machine has been working fine for ages, and out of nowhere when I run it its sluggish and stuttery.

I rebooted, I turned off anti virus, I checked the resource monitor, and nothing explains why its doing it. I haven't changed a thing on that machine. not sure what else to try to toubleshoot.
its using he current version of mame, happens if I just load mame and not the front end.

the resource monitor doesn't show anything spiking when its running.

any ideas?

[adder]

try running a game and then press F11 so you can see the speed the game is running at (eg. 100%)

when the stuttering occurs, does the emulation speed drop from 100% ?

[happyfunball]

its reporting 28 percent, give or take a couple percent.

[yotsuya]

Try running a disk defragmentation of the hard drive.

[RandyT]

It's a long shot, but check the heatsink on your CPU.  Intel, and probably AMD processors by now, will drastically scale back processor power based on temperature, in order to protect the chip.  If your heatsink is clogged with dust, or not making good contact with the CPU, you're likely to see this kind of performance drop.

[happyfunball]

disks are set to defrag once a week, and i can't see how that could be an issue anyway. its consistently slow the entire time its running, and it only hits the disk when its loading the rom which should only take a quarter second.
in any case its 0 percent fragmented.

[happyfunball]

It's a long shot, but check the heat sink on your CPU.  Intel, and probably AMD processors by now, will drastically scale back processor power based on temperature, in order to protect the chip.  If your heat sink is clogged with dust, or not making good contact with the CPU, you're likely to see this kind of performance drop.

I'll have to pop it open and check, but everything else I've tried on that machine runs just fine. it seems to only be MAME. the computer is less than 2 years old and even with a reduced cpu capacity should more than handle the games I tried to run.
but I need to pop it open anyway to swap the video card. was hesitant to do it till I had this thing figured out.

[happyfunball]

something changed with the mame.ini

on a hunch I renamed it so it didn't load then ran half a dozen games and they are all running at 100 percent now.

soo.. something in there got modified and must be hogging all the cpu for some reason.

[BadMouth]

something changed with the mame.ini

on a hunch I renamed it so it didn't load then ran half a dozen games and they are all running at 100 percent now.

soo.. something in there got modified and must be hogging all the cpu for some reason.

hlsl enabled?
That coupled with a large prescale number under the hlsl settings can slow things quite a bit.

[happyfunball]

it was enabled, but working just fine that way. I hadn't made any changes to it.
that was my first thought, but if so, something got altered without me doing it.

I need to go through it and start commenting out things and see if anything changes. that ought to tell me where the problem is.

[ark_ader]

Have a look at Task manager when mame is running and see if there is anything else competing for CPU access.

Other than that I would suggest unseating your ram, clean the contacts and seating them again, ensuring that all contacts are free from dust.