CHD files

[sstwistoffate]

Does anyone know which games are playable and actually worth it to download?  Killer Instinct 1 and 2 work pretty good.  Blitz was SOO SLOW.  I need to know which games are actually playable and which ones are worth the download.  Playable doesn't mean it just turns on, playable means it runs the way the game is supposed to.

[rooter]

I'm adding a ROM review section to my site which will cover that.

Unfortunately, I won't be able to write any more reviews until Ponyboy finally ships me my control panel parts.

If anyone wants to add reviews in the mean time, I can make them an account.  I don't care if it is a review copied and pasted from somewhere else as long as the original writer gives permission to post.  I always have a tough time finding a good place for ROM reviews, they always seem to be scattered everywhere.  I want to have a central location for them where everyone can vote on their favorites.

http://shaunroot.net/arcade

[tommy]

If i'm not mistaken Area 51 works well.

[ahofle]

http://www.stickfreaks.com/benchmark/

[genesim]

I have good luck with wargods and of course Street Fighter III and Jo Jo.

The new tweaks to Multithread applications have made Dual core play all of these at full speed.   I have seen quite a bit of speed up through the last few diffs.

[fjl]

What tweaks? Link me please.

[taz-nz]

What tweaks? Link me please.

Head over to MAME Dev and have a read of thats been done to mame lately. http://mamedev.org/releases/whatsnew_0120.txt  Aaron (holder of the slowest mame driver crown) has been working his butt off, making all sorts of changes to some of the slowest drivers in MAME, including adding  multi-threading support, 64bit compatiblity and other standard optimizations. That not to say the other developers haven't been doing great work just Aaron's work sticks out the most right now. 

It's a myth that all CHD games are slow, it's the hardware most of them ran on that's the problem not their size, many ran 3DFX graphics, or multiply CPUs, or evil little CPUs like the R5000.

MAME ran into a preformance wall with many of these games for a while there  , MAME has now pushed though that wall with the release of the Core 2 Duo, and what's left of the wall has been falling to monster overclocking E6x50 G0 stepping Core 2 Duo's, 64 bit Windows, and now multi-threading.

Does anyone know which games are playable and actually worth it to download? 

So to answer you question, Yes and No. No if you PC is running a Athlon or a Pentium (anything) they just don't cut it when it comes to emulating the really tuff stuff, on the other hand if you have a Core 2 Duo or even better an overclocked Core 2 Duo (these CPUs beg to be overclocked) then many of these games are playable to very playable depending how hard you make your CPU sweat.

So don't listen to those who say it will take a 10ghz cpu  Get thee to a computer store, pick up anything in the Core 2 Duo E6x50 range, something to give it a case of the chills @ stock clockspeeds, get a good P35 chipset motherboard, and a couple of GB of DDR2-800 or better ram, Overclock that CPU to within an inch of it's life  , install Win XP x64 or Vista 64 grab a copy of the latest optimized 64bit MAME build enable Multi-threading and have some fun.

[genesim]

yeah what he said!

[ahofle]

So don't listen to those who say it will take a 10ghz cpu  Get thee to a computer store, pick up anything in the Core 2 Duo E6x50 range, something to give it a case of the chills @ stock clockspeeds, get a good P35 chipset motherboard, and a couple of GB of DDR2-800 or better ram, Overclock that CPU to within an inch of it's life  , install Win XP x64 or Vista 64 grab a copy of the latest optimized 64bit MAME build enable Multi-threading and have some fun.

How about showing us some benchmarks of your PC playing prop cycle or gauntlet legends?

[u_rebelscum]

No video, no sound, but only 32 bit, normal build vs PM optimized:

http://mame32qa.classicgaming.gamespy.com/Bench.htm

(Notice many of the slowest of the slow games are not CHD games.)



Aaron's quick run of a few games, 32 bit vs 64 bit, & multithread vs single thread:

http://aarongiles.com/?p=217