whats best mame setup for VERY slow cpus?

[kcorcoran]

ok so i finished this mini cabinet
http://www.arcadecontrols.org/yabbse/index.php?board=10;action=display;threadid=26939

but i only had a P166 / 96mb ram / rage II+ / SB vibra 16 / dos

i ONLY want to emulate the vertical classics like mr do, pacman, ms pac, galaxian, centipede, gorf, carnival, roc n rope, etc.

i've got mame .88 and gamelauncher frontend running somewhat ok.. but there's still frame skipping even with scanlines off and sound sample rate down to 11025. i'd think these games would run fine on this machine but guess i'm mistaken.


anyone been mameing a while when hardware wasn't what it is today? what's the oldest dos mame i can use for these games?

please post your setup including command line switches etc. i'm sure i'm not the only one with these dinosaur machines laying around waiting to be ressurrected.

thanks.

[maraxle]

.36

[kcorcoran]

sorry.. i jumped the gun and didnt see the FAQs.. i've been lurking a while too and didnt think to look there. DUH!

http://www.arcadecontrols.org/yabbse/index.php?board=1;action=display;threadid=14155


what they dont seem to mention is OS but i'm not done reading yet.

[zaphod]

ArcadeOS and Vantage.  Runs great on my P75.

[sac01]

I can't say enough good stuff bout Vantage for that type of setup and emulation needs...Yesterday I bought a vertical jamma cab (Thanks Ed  for my work... This morning I grabbed a j-pac i had and my laptop (an old NEC 133mhz) which has vantage and all its supported games on it.  It took me like 1 minute to unplug the jamma harness, plug in the j-pac and hook it up to the laptop.  I was playing Donkey Kong and MsPacman all morning.
Full FPS to boot


sac

[kcorcoran]

please post versions you guys are using and any known working config files.. autoexec.. config.. etc

i'd REALLY appreciate it.. i'm going to try these progs tonight if i could get a little more info.

thanks in advance.

[sac01]

that was just running win98se, not dos

you'd save alittle overhead going with dos, but win98 isn't too bad... and like i said, this is just a 133 i was running on.  

[sac01]

Oh and yeah, if you need to go with mame, your gonna have to go back, way back to like version 36.. 88 just won't run much of anything full fps on that system.

[paigeoliver]

go earlier than that. Try experimenting with stuff around .20

But really, you might as well just use vantage at that point, as it IS going to run full speed, and it pretty much has the same games that mame had back then.

[sac01]

It also uses the same keys as mame, and while it was really designed for use in an arcade cab with a cga monitor, it has a nice scanline effect for svga monitors that looks quite accurate.

sac

[maraxle]

go earlier than that. Try experimenting with stuff around .20

On a 166?  Nah.  I've setup machines running classics using .36 on P100's and P133's, and they get 100% full speed.  That's using FreeDOS, not Win98 though.

[zaphod]

please post versions you guys are using and any known working config files.. autoexec.. config.. etc

I tried to copy them but it appears the diskette drive in there has decided to be read-only.  Was likely that way since installation but this was the first need to write to it.  Sorry.

[kcorcoran]

tried installing vantage last night.
got mr do to play once.. got about 50 fps but the colors really seemed off on it.

going to have to trial and error with settigs tonight probably. no centiped on vantage though.  

wonder if i can run vantage with gamelauncher. arcadeOS seems too complicated to set up.


something happened last night though.. got it running decent and put it in the cabinet. about a minute into playing mr do.. the whole machine locked up.. had to cycle power.

now.. any game i play in mame.. any version... win98 or pure dos.. locks up the machine right at about 30 seconds into play like clockwork.

going to check the computer case and make sure everything is seated and secure then do a fresh win98 install.

arrrg. so close but so far.. i thought i was done.  grr.

[sac01]

Hmmm, odd, sounds like it's locking after a certain number of frames 60fps x 30 seconds.  

The colors should all look correct in vantage, true, there is no centipede (no analog support that i know of for the trackball atm)

I just spent the entire afternoon at work playing stuff on vantage, so i can vouch for it running for hours with no lockup.


sac

[MonitorGuru]

For low CPU power make sure you're doing NOTHING to the video image other than outputting it at 1:1 scale.

E.g. a vga card, AdvanceMame and a fixed frequency CGA monitor.

Any time you start scaling the video image, either integer wise (320x240 blown to 640x480) or advanced logic (the same blow up but with softening of the pixels) or floating point (320x240 blown up to fit a 800x600 screen) you will have almost no processing power left for Mame to run.

See a recent post of mine, I was even able to take mame .87, in AdvanceMame form, which of course is a huge hog compared to .36, and a 1997  4 meg PCI video card and a Celeron 366 cpu get over 200% performance on most classic games when unthrottling.  A 166 would barely hit 100%, but with older AdvanceMame you should do well.

[kcorcoran]

unfortunately i'm using a pc monitor.
i have a line on a faster machine so I and going to try an upgrade tonight. we'll see. thanks to all for the help so far.

[sac01]

The only bogdown with vantage i've seen on my laptop today (133mhz 1 meg videocard...lol) was playing 1943 with 2 players at the same time (2 planes on the screen at once), it pretty much was unplayable.  

sac

[kcorcoran]

sac.. you're taunting me man with your smooth running setup! haha.
i'm calling on you tonight to set this up for real!  

it's feeling like vantage would be PERFECT for this setup.. i just gotta get it to freeking work.

[sac01]

Lol, sorry  

But seriously, after messing around with vantage, I decided my next cab will be a simple 2 player oldschool cocktail cab running vantage... Since it also supports cocktail flipping for everygame, something mame lacks on alot of the classics.


I can't figure out why your having trouble setting up for an svga.. make sure the vantage.cfg file is configured not to output to an arcade monitor (arcade=no) and toggle the vesamode option vesa=yes/no

see if that makes a diff.  The only problem i had with vantage was trying to run out of winxp.. it didn't seem to like that

win98 and dos was fine

sac

[SirPeale]

That setup is *perfect* for a VAntAGE box.  It'd be absolutely perfect if you were using an arcade monitor, but even with a VGA, it'll do fine.

Make sure that you have rotated the games.

You won't be able to get all the games at full speed.  I've got a 486 I run VAntAGE on, and it does 90% at full speed.  Has a little trouble with Galaga (slows down when there's a lot of action) and won't run GunSmoke hardly at all.

The rest run great.

You will want to do this from pure DOS, if you're not already.  Windows will hog a bunch of resources.

[paigeoliver]

You might also simply have something wrong with your motherboard and it is quickly locking up from heat after about 30 seconds of 100 percent processor usage (which is what emulators use).

[kcorcoran]

i dunno. but that's a good point. none of these slower machines seem to have fans on the cpus. not really sure what it could be. if this machine is jacked, I have about 3 more of the same ones. might as well get to work. too tired to do anythign last night.

[SirPeale]

On older machines like that, a CPU cooler isn't totally necessary when it's *idle*.  But when you use an emulator on it, it uses 100% of the CPU the entire time, so you may want to try some cooling.

To see if it's really thermal related, find a fan.  Could be a box fan for a window, fan for a power supply, whatever, as long as it moves air.  Aim the airflow towards the CPU and start playing.  If it does the same thing, likely heat is your culprit, and find yourself a CPU heatsink.

[kcorcoran]

ok arcadeOS and vantage pros...

help me out here PLEASE. i scored a celeron k6 500 mini atx yesterday. 64 mb ram and vatage is running great BUT.

might be a simple answer but i'm racking my brain here.

in arcadeOS and vantage.. i am runing this monitor rotated 90 degrees clockwise

if i run arcadeOS horizontally.. it shows all my vantage roms.

if i hit space and rotate it 90' clockwise.. they all go away
except for frogger and zaxxon which played upside-down when i ran them from the horizontal list.

all the games showing in the horizontal menu have a -H next to them thought they probably shouldnt.

the 2 that show in vertical have a -R next to them

i'm assumign they need to all have a -L next to them to show in my list oriented correctly?

wierd thing is.. if i run mr do .. ms pac.. or donkey kong..(havent tried others yet) from the horizontal list..  they play in the correct orientation. (90' clockwise)


someone HELP!!!!! this thing is ALMOST done and i want to give it to my brother tomorrow afternoon!

thx.

[SirPeale]

You'll have to change each games orientation.  PITA, I know.

IIRC you hit alt on each game to change the values from 'H' to 'R' etc.

[bloodyviking77]

i scored a celeron k6 500 mini atx yesterday.

With that set up, I'd give raine a try too. My cab's currently a turdy pii 400, but raine manages to churn out donpachi at playable speeds!!

Worth a look, also for others running low-spec machines with an arcade monitor - raine has an arcade monitor mode (not as nice as advmame, but looks OK to me).

Is anyone else using raine like this?