LONG Pause loading games in dos.

[HagHore]

Joymonkey, can you provide me with a link to where you got your Compact Flash IDE adaptor?

[JoyMonkey]

Joymonkey, can you provide me with a link to where you got your Compact Flash IDE adaptor?

Logic Supply sells them:
http://www.logicsupply.com/default.php/cPath/47

I've got two of the ones with a floppy style connector and they work great.

[slicer_d]

You mean 28 seconds with regualr dMame right? 28 seconds sounds painfull to me, I wasn't aware of these huge waits since the last time I used dMame was .37something.
What problems is everyone having with AdvMame? Last I checked, it worked fine straight out of the box with a regular PC monitor.
I realize it can be a little tricky configuring the arcade monitor resolutions at first, but once you get used to it, it's easy to get every game displaying perfectly.
To set it up for use on a TV, you just set it to use a standard PC mode like 800x600 (or whatever your TV-out outputs) for every game.

I'm using a regular pc monitor and games looked different than they looked in dmame.

[HagHore]

Logic Supply sells them:
http://www.logicsupply.com/default.php/cPath/47

I've got two of the ones with a floppy style connector and they work great.

Thanks!  I've tried a cheapie off eBay and it didn't work so good.  I've got som 16MB CF cards and they would be perfect for a classic arcade set-up.

[Witchboard]

Oh and to Witchboard if you use winrar (free from download.com) you can just select all the roms right click and there is an option to unzip them into a folder with the same name as the zip file.

[iwillfearnoevil]

are you guys serious in this thread or just joking around? if you're using an old machine, you need to go back versions of mame not increase them. if peale is serious with that p100, it needs like .36 or whatever. are you guys limited by your FE on what versions of mame you can use? am i missing something basic here?

[SirPeale]

are you guys serious in this thread or just joking around? if you're using an old machine, you need to go back versions of mame not increase them. if peale is serious with that p100, it needs like .36 or whatever. are you guys limited by your FE on what versions of mame you can use? am i missing something basic here?

Well, partially it's because I'm testing older hardware to see exactly how horked the games are.  I'm not looking to play SF2 on a P133, but I thought Galaga would be cool for my vertical cab, esp. since it has the origial discrete sound now.  It plays from 50-75%, so I'm guessing that a 300MHz will be fine for this.

[slicer_d]

are you guys serious in this thread or just joking around? if you're using an old machine, you need to go back versions of mame not increase them. if peale is serious with that p100, it needs like .36 or whatever. are you guys limited by your FE on what versions of mame you can use? am i missing something basic here?

I'm running a cocktail cab so all I have are vertical games 98% run at full speed on a p3 550.  If I'm running in windows it slows down after a couple of games have been loaded but thats the reason I'm using dos now so there aren't any backgroud stuff taking up processing cycles.

Regardless of what version of mame you are running there is a lot of good stuff in this thread about optimizing dos to run and load quicker. 

My entire purpose of running in dos was to get the most out of my system for the newer games.  Rather than just throwing more money and speed at the problem I chose to optimize my current setup.  I realize I could run older versions of mame but that would limit my slection of games and I want to be able to play everthing possible. 

Also the knowledge that I'm gaining from tweaking this system out is great and worth my time.  I know I could have just stuck mame .36 in there and been done with it but I would rather push the envelope and run the newest stuff I can.  To me that is what is this hobby is about getting in the trenches and fiddleing with stuff you have never messed with before and getting to know it inside and out.

[JoyMonkey]

are you guys serious in this thread or just joking around? if you're using an old machine, you need to go back versions of mame not increase them. if peale is serious with that p100, it needs like .36 or whatever. are you guys limited by your FE on what versions of mame you can use? am i missing something basic here?

Not sure if you realize that we're talking about optimizing the speed that Mame loads from DOS, not the speed that it runs at.

[iwillfearnoevil]

Not sure if you realize that we're talking about optimizing the speed that Mame loads from DOS, not the speed that it runs at.

i knew i was missing something i think i got thrown off by the fps mentions ...
but i'd still think the new mame executables would be more bloated with more and/or bigger dlls etc and thus take longer to load for that fact.

[marcus.]

Sorry if this was mentioned already, I briefly skipped over this thread...

I use advmame 60something and games like mslug3 / garou and others took forever to load...several minutes (celeron 1.7g 40gighdd 256mb)
the most effective way i found to cut load times was to use UDMA.SYS
Just load in config.sys
Device=c:\udma.sys

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/dos/udma/devel/

MK3 went from 60+seconds to 16 sec.
give it a try

[slicer_d]

Sorry if this was mentioned already, I briefly skipped over this thread...

I use advmame 60something and games like mslug3 / garou and others took forever to load...several minutes (celeron 1.7g 40gighdd 256mb)
the most effective way i found to cut load times was to use UDMA.SYS
Just load in config.sys
Device=c:\udma.sys

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/dos/udma/devel/

MK3 went from 60+seconds to 16 sec.
give it a try

Sounds like something I will have to add I'm still having issues with the damn soundcard and just bought Donkey Konga so might not get to it for a little while.

[lokki]

Hi,
Saw this at the mame Forums. Seems relevant to this. Has anyone tried this?
Note I believe SMF is the developer in charge of

[JoyMonkey]

I was thinking about this today. I'm going to try re-compiling the version of AdvMame that I've been using and removing all the drivers that I don't want (this is for a vertical cocktail cab, so there's a lot of redundant games there).
I'm thinking that slimming down the exe this way will make it load a little faster. I've never tried it before, but it seems to make sense.
Now to learn how to compile AdvMame...

[Witchboard]

Now that my semester is over, I was going to start fiddling with this as well.  I never did get ADVMAME to run right on a computer monitor yet, so I just gave up a while back.  Time to get back on track!