System question...

[Gromet]

Got my Computer part in for my Mame Machiine, and set things up last night,

Configuration so far....

.  AMD 2400+ XP Processor
.  ASUS Athlon NVIDIA220D Motherboard
.  512 PC2100 Non-ECC DDR Ram Module
.  Antec 300W Power Supply
.  Plextor CD-RW/DVD-Rom Drive
.  10 Gig Maxtor HD (Used out of an old PC of mine)
.  15" Monitor (WG d9200 Being delivered today)

Waiting for:

.  WG D9200
.  ArcadeVGA Video Card.

Well set everything up last night, installed Win98SE, drivers, video, sound, ethernet, Etc... all set up easily.
Set up Mame, using GameLauncher as a FrontEnd.

The System just seems SLOW... I mean after playing for a little while scrolling through the list of games in GL, is starts getting jumpy slow etc...  Put My Dragon's Lair DVD in to check it out and it is extreamly jumpy and slow, audio skipping etc..

What is the problem, I thought this configuration should have been more than suitable to handle this setup...  This is my first experience with AMD processors, but I get much better responce off of my Dell Laptop with a Centrino 1.6mhz, and a gig ram under XP than this system...

anyone have any tips or suggestions???

Thanks

[SirPeale]

What exactly do you mean by slow?  Just a feel for it, or is there some serious frameskipping going on?

Play somegames with the framecounter turned on, and let me know how stuff goes.  Start simple, with Pac-Man, and go to Stun-Runner, then something like Killer Instinct or Area 51.

[Gromet]

How do you turn on the framecounter?  using Mame .71, Mamepp.exe is the executable?

Using GameLauncher as a fron end...

[SirPeale]

'F11' works in any version of MAME.

[hyiu]

I'm using AMD 1.1 (or 1.3) G CPU...
Gforce4 video card...
1G DDR ram...

and up to my knowledge... most games run fine...
(sorry... don't have laserdisc games
and dont have the roms for like killer instinct / maximum force... etc)...

what video card are you using in the meantime ??
(maybe that is the pblm...)

[Todd H]

Isn't mamepp the Pentium-Pro optimized version of mame?  Since you have an AMD processor try the regular version of mame and see if it helps.

[Tiger-Heli]

Isn't mamepp the Pentium-Pro optimized version of mame?  Since you have an AMD processor try the regular version of mame and see if it helps.

Well, the OP says the problems occur in dragon's lair and Gamelauncher, so it's not just a MAME problem, although I agree pp is prolly not the correct version.

Video is probably not the problem in MAME, as I am running a Duron 850 and 4M PCI vid card in MAME and it's okay.

Assume the OP is using the onboard video.  Nvidia 220 is not the greatest video solution (although should be aceptable) and it would run better with 2 matched sticks of 256M RAM, rather than a single 512M, but . . .

From the initial post, it sounds like the system starts ok and slows down, correct?  Or is it always slow?

If it slows down - what is running in the background - Anti-virus, yahoo?  

Also, I run a freeware app (Cacheman???) which restores system memory after it gets low and shows how much is available.  You might try this at least to check if that's the problem.

[SirPeale]

Ah, I forgot about the OS.  Running Win98SE, eh?  Did you shut off everything else unnecessary?

Is this a dedicated machine for emulation, or your main machine?

[radiator]

when you say that your HDD is from an old computer, how old exactly?

my dad's company bought him a new P4 1.8, and it was stupidly slow (50secs to load Autocad 2002 - my athlon 1.2 loads it in about 5) and it turned out the HDD was causing everything to run slow (even though it was a new Samsung 40Gb)

may be yer HDD, but don't take my word for it

[AlanS17]

You rcomputer will only be as fast as its slowest bottleneck. This could be processor, memory, FSB, OS, hard drive...

The hard drive may be a good place to start. The rest honestly sounds sufficient... If you're running Windows 98 for some reason it has a hard time handling massive amounts of memory. My MAME machine ran slow until I cut the memory back down to 128MB.

[Amra]

You could test if its the OS by running Mame in DOS, just to check...

Also, see if you can find the Part # for your Hard Drive, if its like ATA33 or older, or if its 5400 RPM then yeah, its prolly slowing you down...

Video honestly shouldnt make much of a difference because it is all software rendered, but if your video is sharing your Onboard memory then it could be slowing you down a little.

Win98SE is not good at handling anything over 256 Megs memory, it will actually slow the computer down...

Make sure your BIOS settings are set up optimaly, I got almost a 30% speed boost by manipulating my CMOS/BIOS Settings... Get someone to help you if you dont know what each setting does... you can render your computer inoperable if you are not careful.

Check your speed and framerate in Mame using F11, check games like Pac Man, Mortal Kombat, then Crusin' USA You should be getting 100% 60/60 in both pac man and mortal kombat... Crusin' you prolly wont get 100%, but if will give people an idea of how slow your computer is running... for example my 1.2 Ghz plays Crusin' at about 25% Speed and 2/57 FPS (during game).

Good Luck...

[Tiger-Heli]

You rcomputer will only be as fast as its slowest bottleneck. This could be processor, memory, FSB, OS, hard drive...

The hard drive may be a good place to start. The rest honestly sounds sufficient... If you're running Windows 98 for some reason it has a hard time handling massive amounts of memory. My MAME machine ran slow until I cut the memory back down to 128MB.

98SE and lots of RAM COULD be the problem.

HD is less likely.  Maxtor's don't like the PCI Bus to be faster the spec though, so don't try to overclock the FSB yet.

Again, does it start fine and gradually slow down (not HD then, but could be memory leakage, or background apps).

Or is it slow from the first boot-up?  (If so, does it have more problems with games that run from the HD (large files) or not, etc.)

[AlanS17]

Gromet if you're having trouble and are just tired of dealing with it I'll gladly trade you for my setup. It's guaranteed to play *virtually* anything except the CHD games at full speed.  

I'll even leave the OS and setting intact so you have less to mess with.

[lightspeed]

That system is plenty fast - it must have issues.


Some suggestions:

make sure DMA is enabled for all your drives

remove the MS Office App "FindFast" if you installed Office (it starts up automatically and indexes your HD in the background, but it eats resources)

update your video drivers

If it is a VIA chipset mobo, install the newest 4 in 1 drivers.  They will affect system performance considerably

Flash your BIOS to the latest version

Try less aggressive CAS memory settings in the BIOS

Look for IRQ conflicts in device manager

Remove your soundcard and try running everything then - if this improves performance signifcantly, its a driver issue most likely

[tritonarcade]

Gotta be the DMA in my opinion, turn it on for both the CD-ROM and the HD.  The Dragon's Lair skipping seems to point to this being your problem.

[Todd H]

Well, the OP says the problems occur in dragon's lair and Gamelauncher, so it's not just a MAME problem, although I agree pp is prolly not the correct version.

D'oh!  Didn't see the Dragon's Lair part.  Gotta stop reading so fast.  

Looking through all the posts, most everything looks to have been covered.  My guesses would be DMA turned off and backgound processes as well.

[AlanS17]

There are also problems with his GameLauncher, though. And he says it gets progressively worse... Hmmm...

Knowing wich OS would really help. I'm tempted to say memory leak, but that probably wouldn't affect direct DVD playback, either. How odd... perhaps it's a combination of problems.

[lightspeed]

Well, he did mention WIN98SE, which has memory management issues.  It should work fine w/ up to 512 MB RAM, though

Here's the kicker - something none of us noticed:

His HD is only 10 GB.  With a full Windows install and all of MAME and related files, he's probably very close to his HD capacity and running out of virtual memory (pagefile) space.  This would cause things to get progressively slower each time the system is booted.

Check your HD space and virtual memory settings.   If you have less than 1 Gb available, this is probably the issue.

[AlanS17]

Actually I would image that he wouldn't have any problems til he got down to around half a GB. Even then his problems wouldn't be debilitating unless they went lower than that.

[u_rebelscum]

Isn't mamepp the Pentium-Pro optimized version of mame?  Since you have an AMD processor try the regular version of mame and see if it helps.

Well, the OP says the problems occur in dragon's lair and Gamelauncher, so it's not just a MAME problem, although I agree pp is prolly not the correct version.

FWIW, a PP optimized compile runs faster on Athlons than a regular compile.  In fact, a PP optimized mame usually (ATM) runs faster than an athlon optimized mame on Athlons (because the gcc "athlon optimized" compile setting is not completely optimized for athlons).  So the the PP optimized it probably the fastest build for his system.   *shrug*

Not that it really matters, since the slow down is elsewhere too.  For which I couldn't think of anything that hasn't already been said.

[Vectoraster]

Hmmm. . .

I would check the bios to be sure that my CPU & DRAM frequencies are both set at 133 Mhz (some boards default to 100 Mhz which slows down that 2400+ considerably.)  BTW, why did you choose an ArcadeVGA to use with your D9200?

-VR-