Question on MAME.INI settings ROMS sluggish

[y2k600f4]

Using MAME .116 and trying to optimize setting. I am currently using a PIII 800 MHz 512MB Ram with ATI RAGE 128 GL AGP video (older PC I had laying around) and tried switching from d3d to ddraw as recommended in previous posts (benchmarks actually got worse e.g. spyhunter went from 50% to ~20%). Also tried such things in metalslug as decreasing screen resolution and sound sampling without any noticeable differences. Any suggestion ? Thanks.

[gonzo90017]

You should give fastmame 84 a try. http://files-upload.com/files/173598/fastmame084u3.zip Some cards work better with direct3d. Try turning hardware stretch on.

[y2k600f4]

does anybody use "auto" frame skipping ? Seems like it helps (slightly) in some games such as metalslug ? However games such as spyhunter is still unplayable.

[Kaytrim]

MAME has suffered from bloat over the years.  To run MAME and the games you mentioned on your machine I wold recommend using an older version of MAME pre .92 should do you fine.

[y2k600f4]

kaytrim thanks for the tip...i'll give that a try. i am guessing version of roms don't matter for the mame version ?seems like the roms are constantly being changed. right now i have .116u2 thanks.

[Kaytrim]

ROM versions do make a difference.  If there are changes in MAME that affect the older games then the ROM file is updated to match.  IIRC there were several changes in recent MAME that would effect some older ROM files.  You can use a program called CLRMAMEPro to reconvert most ROM files to a given MAME version.  You may also want to search for a set of rollback roms to augment CLRMAMEPro.

TTFN

[gonzo90017]

Auto frame skip does help if you're using an older machine. Me personally I just don't use it unless it's absolutely necessary. For NeoGeo games I recommend you use Nebula it'll run all games full speed with no frameskip. Personally I use winkawaks for Neogeo but to run it from a frontend it requires a wrapper. The only reason i'm using it instead of Nebula is that it saves decrypted c's after loading which on older hardware like mine means faster loading time. It uses the same roms as mame so you shouldn't have any problems. I'm using a 400mhz pc.

[u_rebelscum]

Auto frame skip does help if you're using an older machine.

Depends on the game.  The games it helps are able to skip emulating drawing the screen to the montior.  The games is doesn't help have to render the screen to emulate the game without crashing, whether or not the screen is shown or not; so when mame tries to speed up the game by skipping frames it doesn't work, so mame skips more screens, which doesn't work, and so on.

That said, autoframeskip helps most games.  More details and most of the relevant games can be found in the MameFAQ i08.

[paigeoliver]

.92 is way too bloated for that processor. Try .55 and you will get 100 percent speed on everything with only a few exceptions (and no version of mame will run those exceptions on your processor). Anything you want to play that your processor will actually run will be in .55.