Williams driver speed update?

[SirPeale]

I was using Mame .36 on a cabinet.  One of my favorite games to play is Robotron.

It would slow down heavily when there was a lot of action on screen, predictably.  I mean, it's only running on a 450 MHz processor.  It's actually 550, but I can't clock it any higher on the board it's on.

So for giggles I put .84 on, because I'm looking to test for some other games (like Uo Poko).  Uo Poko is slow, but I figured it would be.

For fun, I launch Robotron, expecting it to be slow.  Instead, not only is it mirror smooth, but has *none* of the slowdown in the busy parts like it used to.  It's actually a *pleasure* to play.

When did this driver get optimized?

[krick]

Actually, there was a thread on the MAME forum where people were complaining about them removing the slowdown.

Supposedly, the real arcade machine had a certain amount of slowdown on the later levels that you could exploit to give you a little more time to react.

With that gone, the game is much harder at later levels and people are having trouble getting the same high scores.

I'll try to find the thread.

[krick]

Found it on mameworld's mametesters forum:

http://www.mameworld.info/ubbthreads/showthreaded.php?Number=2793

[paigeoliver]

Hmmm, this is GOOD NEWS! This means that I must actually be a true Robotron master, if I can get a half million on mame or on my JAMMA multi-williams board (which is certainly mame as well), then that means I could probably go forever on a real machine!  

[Minwah]

Found it on mameworld's mametesters forum:

http://www.mameworld.info/ubbthreads/showthreaded.php?Number=2793

At least Aaron showed some interest...I wonder if he ever got round to looking at it?

[SirPeale]

Yeah, I remember that.

The slowdown I was referring to was in FPS, where is would go from 60 FPS to 45 when there were a lot of moving objects on screen.  That was for .36.  It's not doing it for .84.

[2600]

According to Maws, the driver hasn't been touched for a while, .24. You may be experiencing benefits of a newer mame core, how things are displayed, directdraw, and/or compiler optimizations

[SirPeale]

Def. not DirectDraw, it's a DOS setup.

MAWS is a little off I think, I submitted (and was accepted) a couple of revisions for this driver back a few versions.  It didn't have anything to do with gameplay, though.

[JoyMonkey]

Didn't Aaron or someone optimize all the CPU cores recently? I think it happened around 0.78. Maybe the M6808 code has been cleaned up too much?

[Minwah]

Didn't Aaron or someone optimize all the CPU cores recently? I think it happened around 0.78. Maybe the M6808 code has been cleaned up too much?

Maybe something to do with the 'watchdogs' I read about a while ago...IIRC it caused problems for some other games too.

[SirPeale]

I certainly wouldn't call this a problem!

[Minwah]

I certainly wouldn't call this a problem!

Right, I meant the 'removal of slowdown that was present in the original' (bad emulation) problem.  Thinking about it that probably occurred before the major watchdog stuff tho...