Mame runs glitchy and slow... what could be the problem?

[Doom bucket]

My computer is fairly fast with a pentium 4 and a 6800 Nvidia graphics card, and a gig of ram. But Mame seems to struggle to play roms...

I like to play recent fighter/shmup games, not 3d games mame games since I know that I'd have to have an even better computer to run those well, but it's frustrating that nearly every game I throw at it has glitchy sound, slowdown and bad framerate. Very frustrating.   What could be the problem?

[The Chugnut]

Hi mate,

I went to my mate's house the other night and tried to introduce him to MAME - we had a similar problem. It was playing like there was another program running in the background.

We were using MAME 0.118, and ruled out everything from anti-virus programs to overheating. We ran a couple of demanding games like Half Life 2 with not a stutter in sight. We were pulling our hair out at this point.

We then updated his graphics card drivers (ATI) and sound card (Creative Labs), rebooted, and it worked a charm.

So yeah, if you're running a new(ish) version of MAME, try updating your drivers.

[spystyle]

MAME is not meant to be lean and optimized.** Windows is not meant to be lean and optimized. Put the two "newest versions" together and you can expect slow performance.

Want to speed up your MAME? Download some older versions and romsets*. Start with version 60 - all games will run at full speed. "upgrade" by 10 versions until you hit the sweet spot between "new" and "fast"

Also try a leaner version of Windows. Google up TinyXP "Beast" or read the latter half the "Nlite" thread that is sticked in this forum.

Cheers,
Craig


*
Google these words:
[romsite name redacted] mame

also:
Utorrent

Want to take it a step further? Download some optimized video card drivers. Google up Dhzer0point

**
Ask the MAME dev's what their mission is - it is not to get 90 FPS on every game.

[Zebidee]

You should make sure that you have triplebuffer unchecked by default in mame32.  Some games have improved video performance with this, but it causes glitchy / stuttering problems in other games (especially earlier games, up to late 80's).  In your ini file, it would look like this:

triplebuffer 0

Other options to uncheck by default are "sleep if possible", "sync to monitor refresh" and "wait for vertical sync". Also, make sure that you get the "multithreaded" option right.  Some p4's support multithreaded rendering, some don't.

[Doom bucket]

Ah... I had updated mame for the whole CPS-3 emulation thing, that might be the root cause... didn't even think about that, really.

I'll try out all the triple-buffer stuff first, see if that helps.