Hi again,
Well, I have looked at the above comments, and I was not sure what to say, but I'll give it a shot.
For my emulator, all of the CPU code except for the 6809 in star wars is x86 assembly, so it's much faster then what's in mame. Less then 10% of the CPU usage in fact. The video requirements are due the large textures that I am creating, scaling and mixing in the system for display. With vector games, you can't cache anything in the background, everything must be drawn realtime unfortunately.
In order to get any acceptable speed at all in this worst case scenario, I'm using many newer video functions that help make these large texture transfers much faster. Unfortunately, only newer video card designs support these advanced features.
I have been strugging with peoples issues on this, because I really don't understand I guess.
Here in the US, cheap fast video cards go for about $50 (an up) at places like newegg. Any of these cheap cards, such as a low end 8600 can run my program with all options enabled and not break a sweat.
Admittedly, I have a decent job and am not affected by any economic downturn (yet) and I can afford to spend $50 on a video card. Actually right now I'm using a used 7600GT that I bought from a friend for $30 a year ago to write this program, and it runs everything with no problems either.
Even as a college student working at a fast food resturant, I could save my beer money and have $50 saved up in a few months.
So I honestly have a hard time worrying about trying to support really old, low end video cards when such fast new cards can run this and more.
I am not trying to flame anyone or such, I just can't spend hours trying to tweak the graphics system for low end support when I just spent the last three days getting analog input scaling to work so I could finally play major havoc with a mouse.
Let me know your opinions and I'll listen, and even try to make things better, but with everything else that I need to finish and the little time I have available to work on this it may not happen any time soon.
Thanks for all the support and input,
Tim