How much power do you need?

[Gunstar Hero]

Seriously tho, how much power do you need to run the newer MAME roms?

My original PC was a crap HP Athlon 1.2 GHZ, Radeon 7200, 512 of RAM. Ran the older stuff beautifully, but MK2 ran like hell and forget about NFL Blitz, KI, Hangtime, STUN Runner and anything else recent.

It perished. UPGRADE TIME!

So I got a Athlon XP 2000, 256 megs of DDR, slapped a WAY overkill video card in (9600 XT), nforce 2 mobo and tossed my SB Live in just for giggles. MK2 (and most everything else) runs like a dream now, but NFL Blitz still is unbearably slow and choppy.  Even KI and KI2 hitch up now and again.

Do I really need a 3GHZ machine to run NFL Blitz?

I'm running a fresh install of XP, all upgrades needed in place, all unneeded crap gone. It's just games and OS on the HD. I'm using MAME .83 with matching rom set.

I seek answers. Humble gratitude for any assistance I am given. =)

[Jakobud]

That's odd, my Mame cabinet is a 1.2ghz athlon and all the MK games run flawlessly...as in victory

[Wizard of DelRay]

As others have said from time to time, you won't be running NFL Blitz at a decent speed now or in the near future (they make jokes about needing a 10GHz processor and such).  But if you're gonna upgrade just for Blitz, don't.

[Gunstar Hero]

(laughs) I UPGRADED for Blitz aready! Looks like I better track down that old PC-CDrom version.

As for the MK games on a 1.2, it was a really crappy HP mobo on it's last legs, so I imagine that that was a big part of the issue. I cobbled that processor, an old mobo of a friends and some parts into a spare PC for a future project, so I'm sure it will get it's chance to "test it's might!"

[Wizard of DelRay]

(laughs) I UPGRADED for Blitz aready!

Are you talking about the XP 2000 or the 3GHz (I was talking about the 3GHz, anyhow).  You might want to upgrade to 512MB, though that's just my personal preference for a minimum amount of memory.

[Gunstar Hero]

I figured the XP2000 would be overkill for MAME and grabbed it for a song. Maybe a 3GHZ someday, bot for now this is my beast! As for more RAM, it couldn't hurt!

Are there any tips on improving MAME performance you can give? I still get alot of chop on KI2, and frameskip doesn't seem to help much!

[paigeoliver]

How can a motherboard be on its last legs?

Also, I was playing the mortal kombat games full speed before Ghz processors even existed. It is called using an older mame version. Sheesh!

[Gunstar Hero]

LOL. Well, when it went bad, I assumed that it was "on it's last legs." =)

Truth be told, it may have been several other things that killed the old beast, but I assumed that it was the crappy old HP mobo, since all the other stuff I yanked out worked upon reinstallation into another box. Maybe a power surge? I don't really know, I'm a bit of a novice at this stuff. =)

Any MAME performance tips you can give me paigeoliver? I'm just starting to mess with settings and whatnot, so any help you cann offer would make my day!

[Wizard of DelRay]

Killer Instinct 2 runs kinda so-so for me also, so for now I don't even list it in my frontend.  Now newer games will 'probably' run like crap for quite some time.  Then again War Gods is not so new and it runs pitifully, so who knows?

[paigeoliver]

LOL. Well, when it went bad, I assumed that it was "on it's last legs." =)

Truth be told, it may have been several other things that killed the old beast, but I assumed that it was the crappy old HP mobo, since all the other stuff I yanked out worked upon reinstallation into another box. Maybe a power surge? I don't really know, I'm a bit of a novice at this stuff. =)

Any MAME performance tips you can give me paigeoliver? I'm just starting to mess with settings and whatnot, so any help you cann offer would make my day!

Well you are already using a really fast computer. Use older versions of Mame for the stuff on mortal kombat hardware. I could care less about the hard drive games, so I have nothing to say about them.

[Gunstar Hero]

Thanks DelRay, that makes me feel a bit better. =)

I hate to think that I have a good system just configured badly, although I AM sure I can make several improvments.

It would kill me to find out that I missed the setting (or combination of settings) that stands between myself and sweet, sweet nirvana.

[xcalibur]

I'm running a P4 2.66ghz processor w/1GB of DDR RAM and I don't even install the CHD files. I did manage to play a FULL game of Blitz. I turned off the frame skipping and it crawled like a slug.

All other games run fine though.

[RayB]

Gunstar Hero:

Are you using MAME or MAME32?

Most people assume they are the same thing, but MAME32 has all these extra graphics options that really slow things down.

[etumor]

Gunstar Hero:

Are you using MAME or MAME32?

Most people assume they are the same thing, but MAME32 has all these extra graphics options that really slow things down.

Um, correct me if I'm wrong, RayB, but aren't all of the "extra" graphic options in Mame32 available in command line Mame as well?  

I'm thinking you are referring to the Direct3D options, which can slow things down considerably in many cases, but all of the Direct3D options are available from the command line version as well (although I suspect more people use them with Mame32 than with Mame, since they may go on an "option spree" and try everything in the interface).

Or are you talking about something else?  I'm not aware of any options in the Mame32 interface that I haven't been able to enable in the command line version.

-Jeff "etumor"

[fastredpacman]

If all you wanted to play was blitz, why not get a dreamcast? You can pick them up for close to nothing and the game too. I have a dreamcast and it runs blitz exceptionally.

[Gunstar Hero]

I'm using MAME .83, none of that MAME32 for me thank-you-very-much (says the underinformed noob.) Guess I shoulda mentioned that. =)

As for the playing of Blitz on a DC/PS2/console, sure I could do that, but I built the damn arcade machine for a reason! And that reason... is NBA Jam!! I mean... well... I do like NBA Jam.... mmmmmm.... jam.... uhm... I mean, I just think it's gonna be cool to be able to throw down some Blitz with my buddies on the MAME machine, ya know? Super High Impact just doesn't quite do the trick... and Tecmo Bow is too small since it's thatgot the double wide screen going on.

So for now, we play alot of NBA Jam.

And I have a real weakness for Shinobi. =)

And... well... LOTS of games. Not that it really matters.

I just wanna make sure I have my MAME set up right. In my mind, the better the games play, the better I did.

Now I just wait for the emulation to catch on up I guess.

And tweak tweak tweak that config file!

[Gunstar Hero]

(looks at last post)

What the hell am I on??

=)

[RayB]

Um, correct me if I'm wrong, RayB, but aren't all of the "extra" graphic options in Mame32 available in command line Mame as well?  

Tumor-Man:
You may be right. I don't know enough about the command line MAME to know for sure, but all I know is I used to use DOS MAME back in the day and there was none of this "aperture grill" effects, etc (the only effect back then was a simple scanline mode). Then I got into MAME32 years later and here they had all this resource-heavy effects to mimic the look of an arcade monitor. I assumed they were MAME32 specific...

So to reiterate what I meant in a more useful way: Turn off anything and everything that adds effects to the game's graphics. Set it so it uses a low native resolution and no special effects. Eventually you should get a much better frame-rate.

~Ray B