ROMS run Slow

[LoRDDeVO]

I have been playing with my Cab for a while now.  I can play the classics fine but games like NBA Jam  and others play really choppy. or the sound sounds like it echos.  I am running a pentium3 733mz with 512 mb ram.

What are the little tricks you can do to actually get to play the games without all that choppiness

Thanks in Advance

[cw]

i would ask what kind of video card you are using in it......

[seibu]

With that spec. I don't think there's much you can really do. I used to have a P3 800 and my limit for full framerate emulation was ambitious 16-bit and low-end 32-bit games. I think NBA Jam is well known as a bit of a processor hog, like the later Mortal Kombat games.

You could try fastMAME, and make sure you're running the windows command line version of MAME with full D3D or DirectDraw accelleration and no visual effects or anything. Failing that - swith off sound?

[SirPeale]

What can you do?  Upgrade your PC.  Unfortunately NBA Jam, Mortal Kombat and the like use a lot of pony power to run.

You can try an older version of MAME, that might help a little.

[paigeoliver]

For the 90s Midway hardware games, just forget about Mame if your computer doesn't run them full speed. Either play the SNES ports, play another similar game, or shell out hundreds for a new faster computer simply so you can play a couple of non-original games that have near perfect SNES ports that WILL run on your computer.

Also, stop upgrading your Mame version, and consider rolling it back. .55 is roughly twice as fast as .70, and it just keeps getting slower the newer the version is.

[LoRDDeVO]

OK cool Thanks for the info.

[Tiger-Heli]

OK cool Thanks for the info.

One thing you can try (if you don't have an SNES version of the game, and don't want to upgrade the PC is overclocking/underclocking the game in MAME).

It's a pain on an arcade cab, but can give decent results and it's free.  Here's how -

Start MAME with the -cheat option:

mame.exe gamename -cheat

or

cheat    1
 
in mame.ini or gamename.ini

Once the game starts, hit F11 to view the FPS counter, and press the tilde key and use the up arrows until you see options like CPU1 overclock, CPU0 overclock.  Try REDUCING the CPU percentage (probably on both CPU's but you can experiment) until the framerates come up.

I am trying to get someone to set MAME up so this can be done automatically from the .ini files, but haven't had much luck so far - see these threads for more info.

http://www.arcadecontrols.org/yabbse/index.php?board=3;action=display;threadid=18170

http://www.mame.net/cgi-bin/wwwthreads/showpost.pl?Board=mamegeneral&Number=144086&page=0&view=expanded&mode=threaded&sb=7#Post144086
 
http://cheat.retrogames.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1526