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Ok, I got onboard audio working in DOS, but my load times are still slow.

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AlanS17:


--- Quote from: JoyMonkey on July 25, 2005, 07:34:06 am ---I'm not sure what way regular DOS Mame's sound is configured anymore, but I've found that Advance Mame's built-in allegro sound driver works with most onboard sound systems. If it's AC97 sound, the vsync/ac97 driver should work fine.

--- End quote ---
I have no objection to AdvanceMAME, but where can I find an older version? I need something that will load quickly like .36 or something around there. I got .98 to load in DOS last night without any trouble at all, but ittook a couple of minutes to do it. At least with regular MAME I can get their older versions directly off their website.

JoyMonkey:


--- Quote from: AlanS17 on July 25, 2005, 10:20:20 am ---I have no objection to AdvanceMAME, but where can I find an older version? I need something that will load quickly like .36 or something around there. I got .98 to load in DOS last night without any trouble at all, but ittook a couple of minutes to do it. At least with regular MAME I can get their older versions directly off their website.

--- End quote ---

There is no .98 release of AdvMame, maybe you meant .97?
You can get older versions from the AdvanceMAME SourceForge files section. AC97 sound was added in 61.3


AlanS17:

When I said .98 I was refering to regular MAME. Sorry for the confusion. Well I noticed that MAME .36 loaded lightning fast on my machine last night, but MAME .37 loaded at a snail's pace. What would cause the difference in load time? I'll upgrade to .63 and not think twice about it. The hardware can handle it. It's just slow load times that I'm battling with here.

I don't know what memory contraints I need to work around in DOS. I'm using the latest version of FreeDOS on decent hardware. I didn't even have to use anything special to get MAME .98 working. It just ran last night at least for classic games. I just don't know what I need to do to make it load faster now. Once the game loads it's all good. It's getting it loaded that takes forever.

I'll give the AdvanceMAME a shot when I get home tonight. Thanks for the tip, JM.

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.

JoyMonkey:


--- Quote from: AlanS17 on July 25, 2005, 10:51:15 am ---When I said .98 I was refering to regular MAME. Sorry for the confusion. Well I noticed that MAME .36 loaded lightning fast on my machine last night, but MAME .37 loaded at a snail's pace. What would cause the difference in load time? I'll upgrade to .63 and not think twice about it. The hardware can handle it. It's just slow load times that I'm battling with here.

I don't know what memory contraints I need to work around in DOS. I'm using the latest version of FreeDOS on decent hardware. I didn't even have to use anything special to get MAME .98 working. It just ran last night at least for classic games. I just don't know what I need to do to make it load faster now. Once the game loads it's all good. It's getting it loaded that takes forever.

I'll give the AdvanceMAME a shot when I get home tonight. Thanks for the tip, JM.

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 ---

There is a thread about DOS load times in the Software forum. AdvMame loads a lot faster than regular DOS Mame, there are a few things you can add to your autoexec and config.sys that will make a huge difference too. I use AdvMame 92.1 on an old PIII 550Mhz machine and it loads in about 2 seconds (running from a ramdisk).

Things to try:

* Download a recent version of UDMA.SYS (an IDE driver)and add it to your config.sys
* Download a recent version of SmartDrive (a disk caching program) and add it to your autoexec.bat
* Try using XMSdsk to create a virtual drive in your extended memory and run Mame from there.

AlanS17:

Muchas gracias.

I'm running a Via processor @ 1Ghz, 128MB of RAM, and a 128MB CompactFlash card for a hard drive.

I didn't want to run some 5yr old piece of hardware and have it break down on me, even if the specs were good enough. So I bought the cheapest, slowest thing I could find by today's standards. It won't run most of the games in AdvanceMAME .96, but it'll run all the games I want it to run (which are all classics).

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