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

[AlanS17]

I think it's pretty self-explanatory.

How do I get onboard audio working in DOS? I'm sure it depends on the particular onboard audio, right? Is it that hard to get going? I guess I could find a PCI sound card and use that, but I'd rather not.

*Edit* The first few posts pertaining to audio can now be ignored. The important stuff now is the load time issue.

[krick]

Only certain onboard sound chips will work in DOS.
Check out this page...

http://vsynchmame.mameworld.net/

[SirPeale]

And finding DOS sound drivers can be a real pain.  But it can be worth it, IF they exist.

What's the chipset?

[JoyMonkey]

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.

[AlanS17]

It should be AC97. I believe it's a Via chipset, but I'll have to find out which one. I've got the box for the board at home.

[AlanS17]

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.

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]

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.

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]

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.

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).

[krick]

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.

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]

What would cause the difference in load time?

Well, filesize for one.

[krick]

What would cause the difference in load time?

Well, filesize for one.

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]

What would cause the difference in load time?

Well, filesize for one.

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.

[AlanS17]

I'll do whatever it takes to get load time under 5 seconds. That's pretty much my target, though 2 seconds would be ideal. I'll try it all out tonight.

[RayB]

Use the oldest version of MAME that you can. You should notice that .69 is about half as big as .97. I would imagine .55 is even smaller, and .36 much more so.

[AlanS17]

Oh I'm sure bloating and sheer executable size have a lot ot do with it. I just don't have much of a choice. I have newer ROMs that won't work on older versions of MAME. I found this out last night. I didn't have time to try everything, though. That'll have to happen tonight.

[AlanS17]

Ok, I've got AC97 sound working in DOS through AdvanceMAME and I'm down to just under 15 seconds load time. Still wanna get that better, though.

I'm using xmsdsk to create a ram drive (X:). Then i'm copying over the C:\ADVMAME directory over to X:\ADVMAME and referencing the rom directory back on the C:\ drive.

I've never used Advance MAME before, though. How do I disable the OK screen in AdvanceMAME? And how do I disable the quit confirmation?

[AlanS17]

Ok, nevermind the exit confirmation. I got that one figured out. And if disabling the "OK" screen involves recompiling, I'm gonna worry about it. I'm too lazy for that.

I'm still working on that load time, though.

[AlanS17]

Oh, and apparently Game Launcher on the C: drive doesn't like referencing AdvanceMAME on the X: drive. I can run it from the X: just fine manually, but I can't make it run through Game Launcher. Changing the path to run the exact copy I have on the C: works like a charnm, though. Too bad it's crazy slow. 

[AlanS17]

Well here I go negating my own posts left and right...

I'm loading under 3 seconds now and I couldn't be happier!

However... Game Launcher is still being a thorn in my side. 

[AlanS17]

JM, I've got most things fixed, but I'm still having problem here and there. Do you think you can still send me that CF drive image? It would be much appreciated.

[AlanS17]

Ok, I've got games loading through Game Launcher, but I had to sacrifice 6 or 7 seconds to make it work. So I have games loading through game launcher in about 12 seconds. That's till higher than I'd like to see, but i can live with it for now.

[slicer_d]

Wow this thread is like Deja-vu 

I see Joymonkey Linked that older thread I had started since then I have gone through all the same stuff you have Alan.  I found out that for whatever reason GL and Advmame dont mix well on the x drive.  Then I was going to use an older version of Mame but a lot of roms have since been rename/removed so that screwed that idea all up.  I'm using .92 mame and GL on a virtual drive with all my uncompresed roms in folders on my hard drive.  This is on a slot 1 p3 550 with 128megs of ram.  My load time is about 20 seconds which is longer than I would like it but I dont fell like messing around with to much more.  I would rather have it complete and out in the living room for people to play.

Also I found that as far as the mame.exe being upx'd or not its almost the same.  This is especially so if you are running it from the memory the load times for that file after it is in the memory is so quick any difference is less than a second.  Loading from the hard drive on the other hand the un upx'd file takes a few extra seconds to load into the memory because it is so large 40+ megs instead of ~7 upx'd.

The only way I can think of getting faster load times at this point is either getting advmame to work or finding a complete older set of mame roms to run with the older version of mame.  I have no idea where to find this though so I'm stuck with the new version.  I will play around with advmame again if anybody figures out more ways to shave off some time please post it.

[AlanS17]

Well I was having trouble using JoyMonkey's method of leaving the FE on the C drive and copying the AdvanceMAME over to the X drive. I couldn't get it to run properly for some reason. On a hunch, I increased the size of the virtual drive and moved over the FE at startup as well. That actually fixed it, and now I can use AdvanceMAME with Game Launcher!

I still reference all my ROMS and support files back to the C drive, though. This gives me 2 advantages. One, by leaving AdvanceMAME's support files on the C drive, I can make changes in-game and they'll stick when I reboot. Second, it also means I can save game high scores for most games in the c:\advmame\hi directory. I also leave the ROMS on the C drive to reduce the virtual drive size. I've found my load times are better when the virtual drive size is kept smaller and ever KB counts.

I haven't unzipped my individual ROMs yet cuz I'm a lazy bum, but I'll do that today. I'm expecting it to shave off anywhere between 1 and 2 seconds of load time. That'll put me under 10 seconds. I have the space to do. I just haven't done it.

By the way, since I'm a lazy bum, I just copied the whole AdvMAME directory (without subdirectories) and the whole Game Launcher directory over to the virtual drive at startup. I didn't want to have to worry about what files I needed and which ones I didn't. I might be able to shave off a couple more seconds by thinning down the copy and decreasing the virtual drive size, but i'll get to that later. I noticed JoyMonkey was only copying over a couple of things.

One more note about virtual drive size. It's not good enough to just barely fit everything that needs copying over. I noticed you need a few more MB on top of that or you'll get funky in-game results. I'd suggest making the drive size just big enough to fit everything and then start incrementing it up 1MB at a time until you get proper performance.

[Thenasty]

Oh, and apparently Game Launcher on the C: drive doesn't like referencing AdvanceMAME on the X: drive. I can run it from the X: just fine manually, but I can't make it run through Game Launcher.

Read this....

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=36287.0


the fix was at the lat comment by JoyMonkey. Somthing about the xmsdisk.

[AlanS17]

I got it all working in my own way, anyways. Thanks, though. If for some reason I'm not satisfied with the current configuration, I'll give it a shot.