Major speed improvements in 0121u1?

[Avrus]

Optimized the hyperstone core, gaining ~50% speed improvement in most
games. Implemented clock prescaling and corrected interrupt priority
handling. Then fixed the clock speeds on the most of the games and
killed most of the speed gains in quite a number of them. (Sorry!)
[Aaron Giles]

http://mamedev.org/updates/whatsnew_0121u1.txt

50%.  Holy crap.  That's a lot.  Imagine if 50% of your living room was filled with arcade cabinets...

 

[fjl]

I'd like to see the list of all these games.

[Hoopz]

Then fixed the clock speeds on the most of the games and
killed most of the speed gains in quite a number of them. (Sorry!)
[Aaron Giles]

Since most of the speed gains were eliminated, it may not matter. 

You can search for the games on Maws, efjayel, by searching by the CPU.  We know you won't, but you can. 

From what I found, I think these are the CPU's affected:
E1-16T
E1-16XT
E1-32N
E1-32T
E1-32XN
E1-32XT

http://www.mameworld.net/maws/

[Haze]

Then fixed the clock speeds on the most of the games and
killed most of the speed gains in quite a number of them. (Sorry!)
[Aaron Giles]

Since most of the speed gains were eliminated, it may not matter. 

I don't really know why Aaron apologizes for killing the speed gains to be honest, they *are* significantly faster in u1.

the games are mostly korean games, a lot of them still don't have sound tho because they use weird / undocumented sound chips.

The majority of the eolith titles (crazywar, raccoon world, klondike plus, land breaker, hidden catch 1/2, puzzle king dance and puzzle) as well as a couple of others ( (se)x-files, king of dynast gear) are much faster now, and all now run at >100% speed on my 3.5ghz C2D.

The other hyperstone games, such as vamphalf, coolmini, lup lup puzzle, mission craft, wyvern wing etc. are also faster, so may now run better on a lower spec machine.

it's a good speedup for what was one of the slowest CPU cores in MAME however you look at it.  The only game that's actually slower in u1 is mosaicf2 (fun game actually..) but that will be fixed in u2.

The limenko games (super bubble 2003, legend of heroes etc.) and g-stream still have some problems with the games running at half speed, even if the framerate is displaying 100%, those are still being looked at, they're easy to hack right (double the interrupt rate), but it would be good to find a proper solution.

[Hoopz]

I wasn't trying to imply that it wasn't faster.  I simply don't know how they will do so thats why I had the shrugging emoticon.

Thanks for the info Haze.

[taz-nz]

I did a quick bench of all the ROMs that appear to use these processors:

All benchmarks done on E6850 @4ghz in Vista 64bit using MAMEUI 64bit 0.121u1

coolmini 882.25%
dquizgo2 749.33%
dynabomb 2967.16%
finalgdr 2478.57%
fmaniac3 140.33%
fort2b   317.02%
fort2ba  307.80%
gstream  816.36%
hidctch2 301.28%
hidctch3 271.31%
hidnctch 423.25%
kdynastg 194.90%
klondkp  289.23%
landbrk  210.42%
landbrka 201.52%
legendoh 1888.57%
luplup29 757.35%
luplup   814.10%
mosaicf2 100.50%  (you can see what Haze means by it's the only one that got slower)
nhidctch 415.23%
pasha2   264.21%
puzlbang 816.78%
puzzlekg 156.55%     
raccoon  152.45%
sb2003   2261.19%
sb2003a  2252.42%
suplup   809.71%
vamphalf 920.92%
wyvernwg 1016.17%
xfiles   163.49%

Puzzlekg had a score of 109.00% in MAME 0.120u2 so there is almost a 50% boost in proformance right there.

The scores show that most of these ROMs are very playable, with only a few needing a very fast system to be playable, presuming there is no emulation speed bugs that don't show up in the benchmark results that is.

If I get a chance I may benchmark all of these again under 0.120 just to compare the preformance difference.