Killer Instinct, Almost there....

[Sylentwulf]

Killer Instinct is one of my "most needed games to play" on my cab. I'm ALMOST there, but not quite.
Currently, I only have a P4 1.8ghz with 1gb of ram, 40gb 7200 rpm HD (I believe nothing else matter with mame for hardware?) I'm running Mame v.88 I think, off of mamewah through windows XP.

It's ALMOST playable right now. I'd say at about 80% framerate/audio. It's playable, but not QUITE enjoyable. Is there anything I can do to get this one going better? (Setting in mame, windows xp, etc... theres not much more I can currently do on the hardware end of things at the moment.)

On the bright side, Mortal Kombat 1, 2, 3, ultimate are all fully playable now, and I DO own the PCB's of those

[testicle187]

You need the U64Emu program which can be downloaded from this site:

http://www.sys2064.com/u64.htm

You can run Killer Instinct 1 and 2 on a system with half your power with this program.  Give it a go.

[Q*Bert_OP]

I'm running it flawlessly in Mame with a Pentium 4 computer with a 3.2ghz. processor...

[AlanS17]

Cut the audio sample rate down to a quarter of default. Turn autoframerate off. Add a frameskip of 1.

[paigeoliver]

Cut the audio sample rate down to a quarter of default. Turn autoframerate off. Add a frameskip of 1.

Frameskip of even 1 kills it for me, I can notice it and it makes it seem not fun.

[elvis]

P4 1.8ghz with 1gb of ram, 40gb 7200 rpm HD

It's ALMOST playable right now. I'd say at about 80% framerate/audio.

Have you tried overclocking?

Before I continue, I must stress that this is not for the faint hearted.  There is a good possibility you can break something if you don't know what you are doing.  When overclocking, ALWAYS keep a close eye on CPU temperatures, and don't do silly things with your voltages.  Even +/- 0.05V in the wrong hands can destory hardware.

With that said, you might be able to squeeze a few hundred MHz out of your system with a little effort.  According to the overclockers.com CPU database ( http://www.cpudatabase.com/index.cfm?action=search ) The average overclock for a 1.8GHz P4 is 2.18GHz.  That might just squeeze you into full frame rate.

Other than that, ensure that all of your motherboard and chipset drivers are up to date.  Good hardware is nothing without good drivers to let it run at an optimal rate with the operating system.

Unfortunately with MAME there is very little tweaking you can do to a system to make it run faster, other than getting those CPU MHz up.

[Taborious]

Elvis, I wouldn't say there is nothing in MAME that you can change. I am just at the point that I am tweaking my MAME installation and reading through the MAME option settings. There is a hign priority setting a throttle setting; though I think these would apply to ALL games and not particular game runs???

Sylentwulf, other things you can do is to ensure that you don't have any background process running in windows, Instant Messengers, spyware, anti-virus (disable your NIC when you disable this, help prevent anything coming in when it's down) or any other background processes. If non of that worked I have heard good things about AdvancedCD which is a bootable CD version of MAME and runs independant of windows so MAME gets ALL the resources of the machine.

[divemaster127]

I have a AMD 64 3000+ with a gig of ram & killer instinct runs perfect so my guess is a 1.8 just does not have power if you want to run it that bad, i would get a new cpu
thanks
divemaster

[AlanS17]

My 2.8GHz machine handled it fine when I tested last night. The same couldn't be said for KI2, though. I got a little bit of frameskip there.

[AceTKK]

As suggested if I were you I would give U64EMU a try.  You'll need a different version of the .chd files but I believe there's a tool to convert between them. 

-Ace-

[AlanS17]

Using U64EMU, I got KI working full speed on a P3 866MHz machine. My only objection is the GUI. It's not exactly conducive to arcade machines. However, if HC has a wrapper, then I guess that's not an issue. I haven't bothered to see if he does or not, though.

[stevodevo]

I uh, third (or is it fourth?) that... Use U64Emu.  I'm running both KI1 and KI2 on my AMD 1800+ fullspeed no probs. And I have it running under MAMEWah so the frontend is no problem either...

[AlanS17]

Is there a way to execute it completely through command lines or are you using a wrapper?

[SOAPboy]

I uh, third (or is it fourth?) that... Use U64Emu.

[Lilwolf]

btw, you can also just run an older version of mame.  KI and KI2 requirements almost doubled a while ago.   I think it was on a machine around that level I used to run no problem...  I really played mame on a 450, about a 1ghz.  2ghz and now 2.4ghz.  I can't remember then one I was using when I was first able to play it... but I think it was the old 1ghz.  (the 450 -> 1ghz a TON of games started being playable)

[SOAPboy]

btw, you can also just run an older version of mame.

[SOAPboy]

K well i found a older version that supports it.. but it keeps telling me that the chd file is missing.. ive put it in the roms folder, in its own folder in the roms folder, hell i have a copy in EVERY folder in my mame dir.. now, in mame32 it works fine with itself in just a folder for itself in the roms folder...

any idea why it wouldnt find it?

[Sylentwulf]

I've though about U64e and older versions of mame, but I don't want to install ANYTHING extra on my cab. everything is set up and working great, and I have less than 1gb of space left on my hard drive. I have NO other programs installed at all (just whatever crap windows XP put on there to begin with of course)

Suppose I'll just wait until all the cpu's in my house go through the upgrade cycle again. My MAME cab gets a 2.8ghz next time I upgrade everything.

[AlanS17]

K well i found a older version that supports it.. but it keeps telling me that the chd file is missing.. ive put it in the roms folder, in its own folder in the roms folder, hell i have a copy in EVERY folder in my mame dir.. now, in mame32 it works fine with itself in just a folder for itself in the roms folder...

any idea why it wouldnt find it?

Make sure the CHD is in its own subdirectory using the ROM name. Also, make sure it's unzipped in that directory. Just dropping a zipped CHD into its own subdirectory won't do it.

[AlanS17]

What's your current framerate? Is it tweakable or hopeless? (Let's see a number.)

[SOAPboy]

K well i found a older version that supports it.. but it keeps telling me that the chd file is missing.. ive put it in the roms folder, in its own folder in the roms folder, hell i have a copy in EVERY folder in my mame dir.. now, in mame32 it works fine with itself in just a folder for itself in the roms folder...

any idea why it wouldnt find it?

Make sure the CHD is in its own subdirectory using the ROM name. Also, make sure it's unzipped in that directory. Just dropping a zipped CHD into its own subdirectory won't do it.

Well, got it to RUN in command line mame for the newest version.. i think its the chd file.. it just dont RUN in 0.68

just like to get the Chds set to Img files and move on with life.. ffs

And with the newest mame, depending on stage 20fps - 45fps.. ALWAYS with stuttering sound..

[Sylentwulf]

Cut the audio sample rate down to a quarter of default. Turn autoframerate off. Add a frameskip of 1.

Is there a way I can make these changes to apply only to KI or do I have to edit my mame.ini file? Does each game have an ini file I can edit?
Yes, it's been THIS LONG since I've tried changing settings in mame. I just upgraded my cpu from a 866mhz to a 1.8ghz

[elvis]

Elvis, I wouldn't say there is nothing in MAME that you can change. I am just at the point that I am tweaking my MAME installation and reading through the MAME option settings. There is a high priority setting a throttle setting; though I think these would apply to ALL games and not particular game runs???

Granted, there is *SOME* tweaking that can be done.  But you're not going to see a 20% boost in framerates as the OP has said that he needs.   Tweaking settings and whatnot might gain you 5%.  A CPU-optimised build another 1%.  That will push you over the line for borderline setups where you might frameskip once in a while.

I have a AthlonXP 1500+ (1.33GHz) in my vertical cab that is borderline for games like DoDonPachi and Gunbird2.  A recompile of MAME for AthlonXP optimisations (and likewise for my kernel and user tools),  plus a few other tweaks got me running at 100%.  However when I originally tested the same machine with a Duron 1200 (half the cache, 133MHz slower clock, 33MHz slower bus) there was NOTHING I could do to get it up to 100%.  I needed to get the clock up the 11-odd percent before I could get the framerates I needed.

For the most case (and there are notable exceptions) MAME scales fairly linearly with clockspeed on like architectures.  Due to the nature of emulation (and in particular, the MAME philosophy of emulation), faster does mean better.

[SirPeale]

any idea why it wouldnt find it?

The CHD format went thru a change a while back.  You should be able to convert what you've got to the old format.

Uncompress the CHD to a raw image, then use the old version of the CHD program to recompress it.