MAME 107 problems on P3-800

[Animeka]

One of my friends has a p3-800 system and he has problems playing bubble bobble for example. Sound gets choppy and game slows down.

He runs on Windows XP, with 784 megs RAM.

Anybody has seen this before?

Thanks for the help!

Marc

[jjd]

One of my friends has a p3-800 system...

Yep.  There's your problem.

An older version of MAME might be useful.

[krick]

A P3-800 is seriously "ghetto hardware" as far as the MAME devs are concerned.  MAME 107 targets about a 3GHz Intel processor (or the AMD equivalent).  To get decent performance on a P3-800, you can try going back a bunch of versions to one where the emulation was less accurate and faster.  Try MAME 90 and see how that performs.

Also, note that MAME 107 and up use D3D as the default renderer.  This doesn't mean that they use 3D acceleration, but it does mean that you now need a somewhat decent video card.  You can force it to use direct draw by using the "-video ddraw" command line switch, or by putting "video ddraw" in your mame.ini.  I can't say whether this will help performance for you or not.

[Animeka]

I can certainly understand that it's not a very powerful machine, but we're not talking King of Fighters here... small games lag...

I'll have him try the ddraw parameter...

I'm running my cab on a celeron 2ghz and everything runs A1. Oh and he corrected me, it's a P3-1ghz

Marc

[krick]

I can certainly understand that it's not a very powerful machine, but we're not talking King of Fighters here... small games lag...

The game's size and age have nothing to do with how CPU intensive it is to emulate.

Yes, generally, newer games like use more complex chips that are a ---smurfette--- to emulate.  However, some of the classics have discreet audio emulation that really eats up CPU cycles.

When comparing games on different computers, you have to compare the exact same game on the exact same version of MAME with the exact same ini settings.

[bleemus]

I'm using a P3-866 with 384MB, using a custom 107u2 build, and most of the games that I have tried to play are fine.  Only games I haven't been able to play so far (I'm sure there are more, but these are just the ones I tried) are MK2 and Double Dragon.  Just as long as it can play mario bros, pengo, robotron, and street fighter 2, it is just fine by me.