Hmm...my games run sluggish..if started from frontend

[AE35]

Hey all!

Here we go again.

I wanted to have Tank Force on the the 900MHz arcade machine, but it
runs really sluggish if I start it through the frontend. If I start it through
MAME32 it runs nicely. I could install it on the other arcade, but that has
8-way joysticks and that sucks for Tank Force.

That makes me wonder how much CPU power a frontend takes? (not
that there's any choice)

Any magic I can do?

[cdbrown]

My first reaction is - are you using the exact same settings with the FE and mame32?  Have you tried running it purely from the command prompt to see the results?  Using the same version of mame32 and mame?

[AE35]

"are you using the exact same settings with the FE and mame32"

Please explain

I just point the FE to MAME32...

[Havok]

Don't use Mame32 with a frontend - I would grab the command line version of Mame and point the front end to that. (No use wasting cpu cycles on two front ends) Since you have a slow computer (sorry, no offense) every little bit of processing power should be conserved.

Each front end will be different, but to check what kind of processing power the front end takes, fire it up and look at your task manager (if this is a Windows machine). Depending on your O/S, this can be accessed by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Delete, and then selecting Task Manager. Look at your memory usage and CPU to see what kind of "load" the FE is using.

I would also look at Mame32 and then run Mame command line version, and compare the results...

[cdbrown]

Ahh - I made the fatal assumption that you were running an FE with plain mame and not an FE with mame32 (which is a FE itself).  If you are going to use an FE then couple it with mame, or use mame32 all by itself.  You *should* find that by using just mame you will get slightly better performance than mame32.

[Havok]

Once you get just Mame on there, make sure to run Mame -cc to generate an ini file...