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Ok, I got onboard audio working in DOS, but my load times are still slow.
krick:
--- Quote from: AlanS17 on July 25, 2005, 10:51:15 am ---Now does anybody know how to correct a slow load time in DOS? I've got brand new hardware (albeit slow by today's standards). Does AdvanceMAME share this same pitfall with regular MAME? Is it a MAME thing or a DOS thing? I haven't used DOS in 8 or 9 years. My DOS skills are shot.
--- End quote ---
It's a MAME thing.
In all recent versions of mame (v0.88 and up, I think) there's an option (skip_validitychecks) that is off by default that makes the games load *really* slow. You should add the following lines to your mame.ini to speed it up...
skip_disclaimer 1
skip_gameinfo 1
skip_validitychecks 1
RayB:
--- Quote from: AlanS17 on July 25, 2005, 10:51:15 am --- What would cause the difference in load time?
--- End quote ---
Well, filesize for one.
krick:
--- Quote from: RayB on July 25, 2005, 11:59:25 am ---
--- Quote from: AlanS17 on July 25, 2005, 10:51:15 am --- What would cause the difference in load time?
--- End quote ---
Well, filesize for one.
--- End quote ---
Besides the skip_validitychecks thing I mentioned above, on a DOS machine, you probably want to use a MAME exe that is not UPX compressed. Even though the exe is larger, the entire thing doesn't have to be loaded and uncompressed in memory (like it does when UPX compressed).
You get UPX here: http://upx.sourceforge.net/
You can uncompress the exe with: upx -d <filename>
AlanS17:
--- Quote from: RayB on July 25, 2005, 11:59:25 am ---
--- Quote from: AlanS17 on July 25, 2005, 10:51:15 am --- What would cause the difference in load time?
--- End quote ---
Well, filesize for one.
--- End quote ---
That's pretty much what I was figuring.
JoyMonkey:
Using an un-upx'd binary can sometimes increase load times though, particularly with the more recent versions of Mame where the binary is about 50megabytes uncompressed. With a Windows system I know it helps a lot to use the uncompressed binary, but performance seems to vary from one version of DOS to the next.
Best bet is to try it upx'd and un-upx'd and see which is faster at loading.