Vector game help needed

[mclaught]

I'm running mame32 v37b5 on a p266 with 80mb of RAM. Quite a machine, I know. I'm only interested in the old school games and most of them work just fine with the old version of mame. However, my vector games like Asteroids are herky jerky to no end and just not playable at all. I've messed around with frame skipping and that really wasn't much better. Anyone have any display settings I should know about to run these games, or will it just not work on a slow machine? Thanks in advance.

[pmc]

Might want to move this to the s/w forum.

I used to run MAME on a P133 and later upgraded to a K6-2 400MHz on the same Socket-7 mobo. 128MB RAM under Windows98-SE. I discovered that different versions of MAME ran different games with varying performance -- it's not always a function of newer=slower. But I always got those old vector games playing OK under the 133 or the 400.

Try to boot to command prompt and run a DOS version of MAME instead of MAME32. Try some newer versions of MAME. It should run. You'll have to find the right combination that works for you.

Also, try all the versions of Asteroids. I found that while one ran poorly with a certain version of MAME, another ran OK. Interestingly, I used to suffer from games running too fast instead of too slow -- despite how I set speed throttling.

Good luck!

[Tiger-Heli]

I'm running mame32 v37b5 on a p266 with 80mb of RAM. Quite a machine, I know. I'm only interested in the old school games and most of them work just fine with the old version of mame. However, my vector games like Asteroids are herky jerky to no end and just not playable at all. I've messed around with frame skipping and that really wasn't much better. Anyone have any display settings I should know about to run these games, or will it just not work on a slow machine? Thanks in advance.

You just didn't go back far enough.  Go back before MAME R36B13 and everything should be -frameskip 0.  (Before MAME added alpha-blending).  Worked for me on a Pentium 200 MMX with 64M of Ram.

[pmc]

Now that you mention it, I think I was mostly running 0.35 (DOS) on my P133 and it was fine for Asteroids.

[Tiger-Heli]

Now that you mention it, I think I was mostly running 0.35 (DOS) on my P133 and it was fine for Asteroids.

Yep, vector games slowed to a crawl with R36B13.  Makes much more difference than MAME32 vs. MAME (DOS).

[mclaught]

Appreciate the replies, I'll dig up an older version and see how that goes. Thanks again to all.