what makes a game run faster?

[berlincam86]

I have ultimate mortal kombat 3 on a old dell with mame32fx ver 104. It skips and runs slow. I was wondering could i fix this with more memory or do i have to have a faster processor?

[krick]

I have ultimate mortal kombat 3 on a old dell with mame32fx ver 104. It skips and runs slow. I was wondering could i fix this with more memory or do i have to have a faster processor?

Depending on how slow the CPU is, it's not likely to work with mame 104.  You should probably have at least 128MB of memory for windows 98/ME, and 256MB or more for windows 2000/XP.   Depending on the machine, onboard sound and/or onboard video can hurt the speed a lot too, but if you don't have at least a CPU near 2GHz, I don't think it will make a lot of difference.

Don't even think about upgrading to mame 108.  For slower computers, go back to mame 92 as a starting point (the last version before Aaron's big sound re-write), then try older versions if it's still too slow.  I don't know what version it was but at some point, the sound in the MK series was rewritten, making it more accurate but much slower.

You should make sure that you have triple buffering turned off too.

I used to have a P4 2.8GHz CPU in my mame machine and UMK3 would often stutter and skip when I had triple buffer turned on and there was a lot of sounds going on at once.

[berlincam86]

The dell i have has a pentium 3 800 mhz with 192 mb of ram with the built in sound and video running windows xp. i tryed 108 and everything runs slow but the game fills up the whole screen but has black bars on the top and bottom with 104.

[krick]

The dell i have has a pentium 3 800 mhz with 192 mb of ram with the built in sound and video running windows xp. i tryed 108 and everything runs slow but the game fills up the whole screen but has black bars on the top and bottom with 104.

I don't recommend running MAME 108 (or XP for that matter) on that hardware, but if you want to attempt it, you should realize that MAME 108 uses your video card to scale the game image to your desktop resolution.  So, the first thing you should do is set your desktop res to 640x480 and see if it helps at all.  Also make sure that it's set to 32-bit color.

Honestly though, I seriously doubt onboard video that old will be able to handle it.

You know how the mame mantra that only CPU matters?  Well, with 107+, that's not really true anymore.  D3D is the default renderer and you have to have a reasonably capable video card.  If you want to use any of the new hi-res artwork, then you REALLY need a non-ghetto video card (DX 8.1 compliant?) with at least 64MB of memory.


You should try running MAME 92 like I suggested...
http://www.mame.net/zips/mame092b_i686.zip

If the game you're interested in runs at an acceptable framerate, then we'll worry about making it fill the screen.

[Howard_Casto]

Video cards have always mattered ever since mame was ported to dx 7 (which was some time ago).  You don't have to have the most fantastic video card ever, but it needs to have some on-board memory (not shared system memory) and it needs to support hardware stretching. 

The only time you can get away with a crappy video card is if you are only going to run native arcade resolutions on an arcade monitor.  Even then you still need a card with dedicated video memory or else things are going to slow down. 

[berlincam86]

that link you gave me i cant find 92 anywhere. where is it? I'm currently running Mame 32FXpp version 103 and it seems to work fine but i cant figure out the full screen thing I'm running my computer at 800 X 600 24 bit. Should i change it I really want to see the game full screen it currently leaves black edges all around. Thanks guys for your help. I really appreciate it.

[Turnarcades]

Try this link:

http://www.mameromlinks.com/modules.php?name=Downloads&d_op=viewdownload&cid=1&min=0&orderby=dateD&show=10

They have MAME and MAME32 versions going way back. Take your pick and find one that suits your needs. As my complete rom-set is older (0.78b) I decided to roll-back to this version. Although the drivers were better for newer games (Killer Instinct etc.) on recent versions, the rom changes meant many didn't work and some ran slower. Until I get a new complete set, this will have to do as it's too much effort to update from 30 versions ago! Plus, I hate that 'listxml' necessity that creates some MAMEWAH problems with newer MAME versions....

[krick]

that link you gave me i cant find 92 anywhere. where is it? I'm currently running Mame 32FXpp version 103 and it seems to work fine but i cant figure out the full screen thing I'm running my computer at 800 X 600 24 bit. Should i change it I really want to see the game full screen it currently leaves black edges all around. Thanks guys for your help. I really appreciate it.

My bad, they prevent off-site linking.  Just copy the URL and paste it into your address bar when you get to mame.net.  It's a direct link to zip file.  It also happens to be the pentium pro optimized version that should provide a little more speed on your CPU.

I think you want to turn on hwstretch in your ini file to get rid of the borders.  I'm not really sure since I use mame on an arcade monitor.  I'm sure someone else will chime in.