Certain MAME games have sound/gameplay stuttering

[TomatoCherry]

Hi everyone,

I'm actually pretty much new to the whole arcade cabinet curating scene. I just recently bought a second-hand cabinet that I fixed up a bit.  I'm pretty unfamiliar with the software, so I just left what was on the unit already when I bought it. It appears to be running version 0.145 of MAME, with a healthy supply of ROMs on it, only a fraction of which were being displayed on the front-end originally which I have since edited and gotten the majority to work.

Most games run flawlessly on the cabinet. However, certain games (and unfortunately, my favorite games in particular) experience gameplay and sound stuttering to varying degrees, with the best case being simply annoying and the worst making them virtually unplayable.  Basically, by this I mean sounds loop/slow down, etc, and some games seem to skip a lot of frames, making it very choppy and difficult to play for the more precision oriented games.

These are all ROMs from the Nintendo Super System in particular that are experiencing this issue.  In my experience, usually stuttering like this in any PC gaming situation is the result of inadequate amounts of RAM or a faulty drive.  However, this unit is running an SSD, which pretty much eliminates the latter possibility. Then again, I know nothing about MAME cabinets so it could be something else, which in this case, I'm hoping, because I'd rather not have to invest in more RAM and drag out some of the parts to install it.

I'm hoping the solution can maybe be found in the mame config file.  In particular, I've heard suggestions about changing the frame skips, throttling, buffering, etc.  If there's any settings I can tweak to fix these apparently interconnected issues, I would greatly appreciate it.

Best regards

[javeryh]

MAME .145 came out in February 2012 - almost a decade ago.  You need to update to current version of MAME, find a corresponding romset and reinstall.  If your PC has an SSD maybe it is new enough to run everything but if it is as old as your version of MAME, you might want to look into getting something a little newer.  In my experience, something with an i5 runs just about everything you would want in MAME.

[TomatoCherry]

Yeah, I would like to do that, but unfortunately the cabinet is running some Games Family xxx-in-1/Multicade front end. That thing seems very finicky, and I have no idea how it even fetches the emulator to run the games.  I've tried looking at the cfg files on the drive; it appears to be a typical unit from a Chinese vendor; very poorly organized. I feel I was lucky to even find the version of MAME the front end was using. Doing a clean install I suppose would be ideal, but I really have no idea where to even begin with that, and I'm not sure if I have the know-how either, so I was hoping there'd be a way to fix this without having to get so deep into it.

On the bright side, the SSD is indeed relatively new. The version of MAME does run the game on PC with no stuttering issues, so I'm thinking it's something with the hardware, maybe the CPU, so I was hoping I could tweak some config settings to make it more friendly to the cabinet.

[javeryh]

Yeah, I would like to do that, but unfortunately the cabinet is running some Games Family xxx-in-1/Multicade front end. That thing seems very finicky, and I have no idea how it even fetches the emulator to run the games.  I've tried looking at the cfg files on the drive; it appears to be a typical unit from a Chinese vendor; very poorly organized. I feel I was lucky to even find the version of MAME the front end was using. Doing a clean install I suppose would be ideal, but I really have no idea where to even begin with that, and I'm not sure if I have the know-how either, so I was hoping there'd be a way to fix this without having to get so deep into it.

On the bright side, the SSD is indeed relatively new. The version of MAME does run the game on PC with no stuttering issues, so I'm thinking it's something with the hardware, maybe the CPU, so I was hoping I could tweak some config settings to make it more friendly to the cabinet.

If you already have a PC, find another front end and install MAME .239.  Wouldn't that be the easiest solution instead of trying to get some weird Chinese software to behave like you want?