Asteroids and other vectors unplayable in MAME

[blkdog7]

I have an Intel Celeron 2.4, 1.5 gb of ram, MALA front end, MAME 1.29, J-PAC in a Ms. Pac-Man cabinet with vertical monitor.

I am unable to play any of the Asteroid games at all on my machine. They are unplayable. Sound goes very slow and so does the gameplay. Everything is in slow motion. All my other games work great, just these vectors. Any settings I am missing?

[Thenasty]

Lowering down the samplerate will improve slowdown. You don't need 44100 samplerate for Asteroid IMO.

[NIVO]

could also try the AAE emulator for vector games. Its atleast worth a shot to get it going  http://pages.suddenlink.net/aae/

[isucamper]

I can remember on one system I was using, there was a big difference between using:

-video d3d

and

-video ddraw

One of them was real slow and unplayable, and the other was lightning fast (can't remember which was which).  Do you have an integrated video card? 

[blkdog7]

I can remember on one system I was using, there was a big difference between using:

-video d3d

and

-video ddraw

One of them was real slow and unplayable, and the other was lightning fast (can't remember which was which).  Do you have an integrated video card? 

I have  a PCI GeForce FX5200. I am using DDRAW which (I think) is what you're supposed to use with the J-PAC and Soft15k in all my readings.

[blkdog7]

could also try the AAE emulator for vector games. Its atleast worth a shot to get it going  http://pages.suddenlink.net/aae/

Thanks! I'm gonna give that a shot unless someone knows why MAME isn't doing it for me.

[Ummon]

Because your system is underpowered. Old, old, old, old story. Your card may be underpowered for AAE, too.

[blkdog7]

Because your system is underpowered. Old, old, old, old story. Your card may be underpowered for AAE, too.

How can my computer be underpowered to play one of the oldest games around? I just don't see how that is possible. My video card too? A GEFORCE FX with a good chunk of RAM?? Really?

[Minwah]

I have  a PCI GeForce FX5200. I am using DDRAW which (I think) is what you're supposed to use with the J-PAC and Soft15k in all my readings.

FYI, vectors look shite (particularly) on low-res monitors since the last major Mame video re-write (v0.123 IIRC?). It has less vector options than previous versions. I use an older version (v0.99) for this reason, and it will also be faster...

[blkdog7]

I have  a PCI GeForce FX5200. I am using DDRAW which (I think) is what you're supposed to use with the J-PAC and Soft15k in all my readings.

FYI, vectors look shite (particularly) on low-res monitors since the last major Mame video re-write (v0.123 IIRC?). It has less vector options than previous versions. I use an older version (v0.99) for this reason, and it will also be faster...

Ok, thanks for the info! Do you think V0.99 is better in general for a setup like mine? I encounter a few classic that don't seem to be running as well as they should.

[nuka1195]

did you say what os your running? i may have missed it.

on Windows 7 64bit, vector games are unplayable for me.  on windows xp they're fine.

[blkdog7]

I am running Windows XP with SP3.

I tried MAME .78 today. I couldn't even get MALA to launch the game. Nothing would happen. It just sat there.

[cmoses]

Not sure if this is a similar issue or not, but wanted to tell you about a recent experience.  I was having problems with a few "higher" end games, Shuffleshot and World Class Bowling Deluxe.  I was getting some slow down and some sound stuttering.  I posted a topic and did some searching.  Well it seems that DDRAW is the preferred choice as far as graphics are concerned.  So I changed that in my mame.ini file.  I think it might have helped a little but not a lot.  So I was playing other games to see if it made any difference.  I didn't really see any differences in the games until I tried Asteroids.  Suddenly my Asteroids was unplayable.  Pausing, slowness, sound issues, etc.  I also tried Asteroids Deluxe and the same thing.  I went in and changed their ini settings to be D3D and they worked perfectly again.

[Ummon]

Because your system is underpowered. Old, old, old, old story. Your card may be underpowered for AAE, too.

How can my computer be underpowered to play one of the oldest games around? I just don't see how that is possible. My video card too? A GEFORCE FX with a good chunk of RAM?? Really?

Ram isn't really the issue, but the clock values of your card. I'm using an Nvidia 6200, and it doesn't have enough oomph for AAE. My 6800 does, though. Similar with mame in that it's processor-based. The 'that game is so old!' exclamation is really old, too. I've seen it several times at Mameworld. You have to understand how emulation works, but very grossly it's a matter of exponential resource usage of a general purpose device vs the original hardware operating in machine language.

[blkdog7]

Because your system is underpowered. Old, old, old, old story. Your card may be underpowered for AAE, too.

How can my computer be underpowered to play one of the oldest games around? I just don't see how that is possible. My video card too? A GEFORCE FX with a good chunk of RAM?? Really?

Ram isn't really the issue, but the clock values of your card. I'm using an Nvidia 6200, and it doesn't have enough oomph for AAE. My 6800 does, though. Similar with mame in that it's processor-based. The 'that game is so old!' exclamation is really old, too. I've seen it several times at Mameworld. You have to understand how emulation works, but very grossly it's a matter of exponential resource usage of a general purpose device vs the original hardware operating in machine language.

I really don't know much about how MAME works but it's my understanding that it doesn't really need a good video card at all, it's more about the horsepower of the CPU and the GPU.

[zorrobandito]

I have  a PCI GeForce FX5200. I am using DDRAW which (I think) is what you're supposed to use with the J-PAC and Soft15k in all my readings.

FYI, vectors look shite (particularly) on low-res monitors since the last major Mame video re-write (v0.123 IIRC?). It has less vector options than previous versions. I use an older version (v0.99) for this reason, and it will also be faster...

Ok, thanks for the info! Do you think V0.99 is better in general for a setup like mine? I encounter a few classic that don't seem to be running as well as they should.

I also run MAME 0.99, it loads relatively quickly and is missing very few games of note. Also Asteroids is the bomb!

Try it and see.

[Space Fractal]

if I remember the slowless of this game in a newer mame might been a sound issue, because it now emulator the sound rather than using the sound samples? Not sure it was for this game or a other game I was thinking? emulating the sound is very cpu hungry in these games using analog circus rather than a sound cpu. But here I do can take wrong?

AAE use the graphicscard a much more than you even think and use a loits of shader effects to show a nice image.

[GAJoe]

if I remember the slowless of this game in a newer mame might been a sound issue, because it now emulator the sound rather than using the sound samples? Not sure it was for this game or a other game I was thinking? emulating the sound is very cpu hungry in these games using analog circus rather than a sound cpu. But here I do can take wrong?

AAE use the graphicscard a much more than you even think and use a loits of shader effects to show a nice image.

I was thinking this was the right answer, since it was the cause of my problems with Donkey Kong, but I just tested with my own system and Asteroids seems to run at full speed with clear sound and no slowdowns.  That's on a Celeron 2.6GHz, 2GB of RAM, GeForce4 MX420.  I used MAME .114, .119, and .127.  They all seemed fine.  None are using samples.

You can look at what's been changed about the Asteroids driver between different versions of MAME here:

http://www.arcadehits.net/datObase/rom.php?zip=asteroi1&s=VIEW

EDIT:  When I switched from D3D to DirectDraw with no hardware stretching, Asteroids did slowdown and experienced weird jittering sound.  So it appears that could be part of the problem.

[Robbbert]

I just tried ddraw in mame 0.131 and it went the same speed as d3d..

In case you are interested, you can create "vector.ini" in your ini folder.
It will take precedence for all vector games.
So, for example, you can set the brightness to be more like a real asteroids

brightness 1.0
contrast 2.0
gamma 3.0

and it will apply automatically to all vector games.

[cmoses]

If you create that vector.ini will it only be for those settings?  Will it pull the other settings from your mame.ini or from the game specific .ini for everything else?

[Robbbert]

Hmm, I wasn't very clear...

Copy asteroid.ini to vector.ini

Then edit vector.ini, and change any lines you wish.
The 3 lines I listed are what I changed in my vector.ini

[u_rebelscum]

Mame reads ini files in a certain order (assuming readconfig is left at default enabled).

First mame reads mame.ini, then vector.ini if a vector game, then sourcefile.ini, then parent.ini then game.ini, and finally the commonline options, each overriding the prior settings.

(Actually, even the above is simplified for easier understanding and less typing  .)

Each of the ini files can be blank, have a few options, or all the options that are in mame.ini.  Personally, I like keeping the specific ini files as small as possible; I only put the options I know are different than mame.ini or that I don't want mame.ini to change.  This way, if I want to make a global change, I only have to edit mame.ini (assuming the option I'm changing isn't set in any of the specific ini files).


FWIW, if you have mame.ini, vector.ini, and asteroid.ini, and all are "complete ini files" with all the options, mame will act as if only the asteroid.ini file existed for asteroid, and as if only vector.ini existed for other vector games.