Cruis'N USA... I don't get it....

[Joystick Jerk]

Up until now I've read how Cruis'N USA will bring any machine to its knees, since it simply can't be emulated fast enough with todays hardware. People have said you'd need a 10ghz machine to run it properly.

So when messing around with my new full-set of Mame roms, I decided to try Cruis'N USA to see how slow it ran. To my suprise though, it's running just fine. It's not as smooth as it was in the arcades, but I'm getting at least 25-35 fps. I also tried Cruis'N The World with similar results. My machine has a 2.4ghz P4 processor with 2gigs of ram, which certainly isn't the 10ghz monster everyone says you would need.

The emulator port I'm using is Mame32FX. Does that port, and others, have some sort of tricks that let Cruis'N USA run at normal frame rates? What else could be making this game run well when everyone says that it can't run well on todays hardware?

[Veinman]

Let me preface this by saying I have no experience with that ROM or the Mame variant in question, but considering that Cruisin' USA, as well as others like Mace: The Dark Age ran on special 3DFX arcade boards (just Voodoo cards if I recall) then your Mame variant might be especially prepared to run them. Seems likely considering that it is called Mame32FX.

[Joystick Jerk]

That's just it though. Even if there were a mame port out there that had some sort of a glide wrapper, which none do, the game should still technically run very slow since the arcade hardware was using RISC based processors, which are way too fast for a standard CISC processor to emulate.

Or so I thought....

EDIT: Just tried it on the standard Mame32 port and runs equally as well with that, so I don't think it's just Mame32FX specifically.

[Chris]

The latest MAME has fixes to the Cruis'n driver that makes it playable with some of today's processors.

[lokki]

from the mame 94u5

midvunit.c:
* turned off debugging code in the hotspots, giving a HUGE speed improvement
to the V-unit games (d'oh!)

[AlanS17]

I never really cared about having a steering wheel, but all of a sudden...

[Joystick Jerk]

I never really cared about having a steering wheel, but all of a sudden...

Well, as I said, it does run. But since there's no 3D acceleration, it runs on software mode so the polygons are pretty rough. It certainly doesn't have the graphical "sheen" it did in the arcades.

[lokki]

3d Acceleration is not an issue for the game being slow. It is slow due to the emulation of the TMS32031 and the ADSP2105 CPUs.
The polygons are actually pretty accurate, Check it out at the local arcade that wsa the look of the game.  I Haven't seen crusnusa in a while, but there is a crusin world and it you can't tell the difference between a real machine an MAME, you could be thinking Cruis'n Exotica which runs in a totally different hardware and does look nicer

[AlanS17]

My favorite is Cruisin' World, anyways. I like using the Ram along the Great Wall. It's my speciality.

[IG-88]

Oh boy.....! What exactly were your comp specs? I'm tempted to try it on something a bit older.

[Scott84]

Turn the sound off and it will run even better.

[Joystick Jerk]

Oh boy.....! What exactly were your comp specs? I'm tempted to try it on something a bit older.

P 2.4ghz
2gb DDR Ram
Radeon X800 XT Platinum 256mb

Runs great on that, but the graphics look really rough to my eyes. Maybe it's just the precision of a PC monitor that's bringing out all the rough edges that an arcade monitor would hide.

[SirPeale]

Massive improvement over the last time I ran it!  It actually ran at the same framerate as the last time I ran it, BUT - and this is a big but - the last time I ran it was on an Athlon XP 2400+.  This time I ran it on a Duron 750!  If my CPU was faster, I believe I'd be getting 45/57 FPS rates.

[AlanS17]

You don't need to turn sound off to get better framerates in slow games. You can usually divide the audio sample rate by for 4 and get the same desired effect.

My new MAME project PC is a 2400+ so we'll have to see how it works out!

Could this be potentially good news for other games that run slow? Isn't this game one of the poster children for slow-running MAME games everywhere? I realize they don't all share a driver, but maybe similar issues could be found.

Speaking of which, what other games would benefit from this particular speed-up (besides other Cruisin' games).

[Tiger-Heli]

Speaking of which, what other games would benefit from this particular speed-up (besides other Cruisin' games).

http://www.system16.com/midway/hrdw_vunit.html

Looks like Off-Road Challenge and WarGods.

[Chris]

You don't need to turn sound off to get better framerates in slow games. You can usually divide the audio sample rate by for 4 and get the same desired effect.

My new MAME project PC is a 2400+ so we'll have to see how it works out!

Could this be potentially good news for other games that run slow? Isn't this game one of the poster children for slow-running MAME games everywhere? I realize they don't all share a driver, but maybe similar issues could be found.

Speaking of which, what other games would benefit from this particular speed-up (besides other Cruisin' games).

Note that I can't get Cruis'n full speed on my Athlon 64 2800 (1800 MHz).  I'm wondering if these improvements just work better on P4's...

[Tiger-Heli]

Note that I can't get Cruis'n full speed on my Athlon 64 2800 (1800 MHz).  I'm wondering if these improvements just work better on P4's...

Don't think so - the original poster said 25-35 FPS, which is nowhere near full speed.

BTW, I tested it and am now hitting about 59% FPS, as opposed to about 25% FPS in MAME 0.7x, but I didn't see much slowdown between 0.96 and 0.80 (Barton XP2600, I think) FWIW.

[Chris]

Note that I can't get Cruis'n full speed on my Athlon 64 2800 (1800 MHz).

[AlanS17]

Try turning off sound and see what that does to your frame rate.

Also, would fastMAME help in a situation like this? I know it has speed enhancements, but I don't know what they are or how helpful they would be here.

[Joystick Jerk]

I missed that... I can get that, too... just at the teasing edge of playability....

I was just estimating my fps at the time, but the game was quite playable.

Some of you have said you're getting x% of what the FPS should be. What was Cruis'N's FPS in the arcades?

[Chris]

I missed that... I can get that, too... just at the teasing edge of playability....

I was just estimating my fps at the time, but the game was quite playable.

Some of you have said you're getting x% of what the FPS should be. What was Cruis'N's FPS in the arcades?

Crus'n should be 57 FPS according  to MAME... I average about 38 FPS depending on the number of cars visible on Death Valley.  I get 100% speed during non-3D parts of the attract mode.  I haven't tried reducing the sound yet...

[Chris]

Okay, here's some testing results:

With MAME 0.95 on an Athlon 64 with 512MB RAM, with a sample rate of 11050, at 1800 MHz on the Arizona track, using the Italia (red) car, I got about 37 FPS in traffic at the beginning of the race.  I came to a dead stop, let all cars get out of sight, and then floored it, and I got up to about 48 FPS.

Using my motherboard's dynamic overclocking, I kicked the clock up to 2000 MHz (222 MHz FSB, up from 200).  I got about 44 FPS in traffic and 56-57 FPS when I had the road to myself.  I'm guessing an Athlon 64 3200 or a P4 3.2 would get close to 100%, at least on the simpler tracks.

[elvis]

I'm getting at least 25-35 fps.

Cruis'N USA ran at 60Hz (ie: 60FPS).  You are running it at half speed.

With a frameskip of 1 (ie: drop 1 out of every 2 frames - effectively cutting out half the rendering process) it could appear to the naked eye that it was running at full speed.

To ensure you are running at full speed, you need to make sure your MINIMUM (not AVERAGE) framerate is above 60 FPS.  I usually assume a 30% buffer for min/avg frame differences, and tell people to aim for 80 FPS or better in a proper MAME benchmark to be sure games are always running at full speed.  Like all good rules, there are notable exceptions to that.

[elvis]

Well, as I said, it does run. But since there's no 3D acceleration, it runs on software mode so the polygons are pretty rough. It certainly doesn't have the graphical "sheen" it did in the arcades.

I don't think you understand what's happening here.

MAME strives for 100% accuracy.  What you are seeing is exactly what the real arcade machines spat out.  Every piece of hardware in the real machine is being emulated by MAME.

Arcade machines used low resolution (in the case of Cruis'N) 24KHz 512x364 native monitors.  The tubes on these are roughly the same quality as standard TV tubes.  Thanks to the "blurriness" of these, there was much smoothing of the horrible "roughness" you so aptly describe above.

Your 31+ KHz PC monitor has a dot pitch a great deal better than those old monitors, which when displaying old games really shows off just how bloody awful the graphics where.  Just like when you see real life hollywood special effects with the naked eye, versus seeing them on the big screen after someone's smudged the camera with some vasaline.  Or how movie stars look so wonderful on TV, and rather crap in real life.

If you want to see the game closer to how you remember it, try plugging your PC into a standard CRT television set.  Better yet, use a real arcade monitor and an ArcadeVGA device to get arcade-perfect images.  You'll be blown away by the difference.

[Joystick Jerk]

If you want to see the game closer to how you remember it, try plugging your PC into a standard CRT television set.  Better yet, use a real arcade monitor and an ArcadeVGA device to get arcade-perfect images.  You'll be blown away by the difference.

That's what I plan to do, but it'll be aways off the way I am at saving money.

[Tiger-Heli]

I'm getting at least 25-35 fps.

With a frameskip of 1 (ie: drop 1 out of every 2 frames - effectively cutting out half the rendering process) it could appear to the naked eye that it was running at full speed.

I don't remember why, but Aaron Giles posted that because of the way Cruisin' works (real 3D as opposed to sprites), frameskipping doesn't gain anything and you should run it as FS 0 as skipping frames adds more work and doesn't gain a speed advantage.

Press F11 to see the current speed and F8 or F9 to change Frameskip.

[AlanS17]

Has anyone tested to see what speed advantages are gained by halving or quartering the sound sample rate?

I'd do it myself except I don't have that one.

[Lilwolf]

also note.  If you are getting 30-45 fps.  you can turn down the speed on one processor which makes the hardware do its own limit frame rate (that actually works).

so mame thinks its outputting 60fps but the board itself is only outputting 30.  And with this I was able to make it playable before.  I don't remember the processor you slow down though... 0 or 1

[IG-88]

also note.

[Tiger-Heli]

Launch with the cheat option -

mame crusnusa -cheat

Go to the Tilde (~) Menu.

[IG-88]

Never used cheats either, is that in an ini file somewheres??

[Tiger-Heli]

Never used cheats either, is that in an ini file somewheres??

You can download cheat.dat (maybe a couple of them) and put it in the main folder, but you don't need it just to underclock the processors.

[elvis]

I don't remember why, but Aaron Giles posted that because of the way Cruisin' works (real 3D as opposed to sprites), frameskipping doesn't gain anything and you should run it as FS 0 as skipping frames adds more work and doesn't gain a speed advantage.

Press F11 to see the current speed and F8 or F9 to change Frameskip.

*AUTO* frameskip is the killer.  For games like Cruis'N, any of the MK and NBA Jam games, or maxforce.

For all of these games you should set a manual frameskip.  Whether it be 0 or some other number.  The problem is the frameskip/framerate detection algorithms for these games that are generally pretty close to full speed (often borderline on average hardware) tends to act silly and make the games much slower than they already are.  Forcing a manual frameskip avoids that need, and makes the games run much nicer.

I personally force frameskip0 on everything.  If it doesn't play at full speed, then it gets deleted.  There aren't any post 1990 games worth playing, anyway. 

[Howard_Casto]

Cursin has ran for a while now on even farily modest pcs.  The problem is the horrible sound skipping.

To fix this use the following command line:

mame crusnusa -noautoframeskip -frameskip 1 -samplerate 22050

now go into the menu as lilwolf suggested and set cpu0 and ONLY cpu0 to 25%  or less (but setting it less than 25% will comprimize accuracy severely)

Now the sound is almost completely skip free and the game shows up at a playable rate

Also something of note is turning on the onscreen fps counter will slow down the game considerably as it uses similar methods as auto frameskip to calculate the framerate.


hope that helps some people

[AlanS17]

If you're already specifying a frameskip, do you really have to also tell it -noframeskip?

[Howard_Casto]

yes you do... it's not "-noframeskip" it's "-noautoframeskip"

Even if you set the frameskip number, mame ignores it if autoframeskip is turned on.   

[AlanS17]

yes you do... it's not "-noframeskip" it's "-noautoframeskip"

Even if you set the frameskip number, mame ignores it if autoframeskip is turned on.

[AlanS17]

Can someone explain the whole "set cpu0 to 25%" thing?

[Tiger-Heli]

Can someone explain the whole "set cpu0 to 25%" thing?

Reply #29 above - Tilde menu.

You can also specify this in the cheat dat file so it does this automatically:

Found a way to over or under clock the CPU without having to press ~ and messing with the CPU speeds every time the game loads.  I've tested it on Cruising usa and it seems to work.    Edit the cheat.dat file for Cruising usa to look something like this:
; [ Cruis'n USA (rev L2.1) ]
:crusnu21:65004000:00000000:00004500:00000000
:crusnu21:65004000:00000001:00004500:00000000
:crusnu21:65004000:00000002:00004500:00000000
crusnu21:0:003DDA4:0F:000:Infinite Time
crusnu21:0:003DDA5:27:500:Infinite Time (2/4)
crusnu21:0:003DDA6:00:500:Infinite Time (3/4)
crusnu21:0:003DDA7:00:500:Infinite Time (4/4)
These Three lines refer to CPU1,CP2 and CPU3
:crusnu21:65004000:00000000:00004500:00000000
:crusnu21:65004000:00000001:00004500:00000000
:crusnu21:65004000:00000002:00004500:00000000
you can edit "00004500"  to show  "00020000"
00004500  =  CPU clock % of around 27%
00020000  = CPU clock % of around 200%
you'll need to also enable the cheat option in your mame ini file.  Also, you can test different values to see what % works best. 
I've tested this with Crusing USA with a clock of around "00004500" or 27%.  I still get a little slow down, but it does seem to make a difference and it loads the cheat everytime.
Steve

Cheat formula   decimal percent * 65536, converted to hex.

25% would be 4000 hex.

[CD_Vision]

Oh yeah, right around 3.5 ghz is what Cruisn needs, the mame devs speculate somewhere between 4-6Ghz for Naomi stuff.  I dunno what would need 10Ghz, but I'm looking forward to it!