Build Your Own Arcade Controls Forum
Main => Software Forum => Topic started by: Chris on October 15, 2004, 10:04:42 am
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After upgrading my cabinet to XP, I'm trying 3D Arcade as a front-end. It looks wonderful, and it's certainly fun to explore the arcades... but the thing is an absolute beast for system resources! I have an Athlon XP2000+ with 256 MB of RAM, and I have another 256MB of RAM coming in, but looking at the swap file usage I don't even think that's going to help. And this is with the default 25-cabinet arcade!
Things were okay until I added some cabinet models.. once I added those, memory usage went through the roof and cylarcade performance went through the floor. And it takes 30 seconds of swapfile activity for any game to actually start.
Does anyone actually use the 3D interface as their primary front-end, or do you just use it to impress visitors and use the List view for general front-end use? Are there some sorts of tips or tricks to reducing memory usage? I resized all my marquees down to 256x64, that helped a little bit on memory... I reduced my screen resolution to 800x600 and that made cylarcade almost usable... can I get this under control or am I just asking for too much from this machine?
--Chris
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Those things (except for processor to a small degree) have absolutely nothing to do with the performance of 3d arcade. It's 3d, and like any 3d game, the video card is the most important element. If you don't have at least a radeon 8000 class video card (or nvidia equivelent) then you are going to have to use simplier environments.
)p( can fill you in with various things that can help performance if you turn them off.
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On the other hand, as a programmer, I know there are ways to programs things right. And often times programmers find ways of improving their code to use less memory and fix memory leaks.
An Athlon XP2000+ CPU is very strong. A good video card will help, and I recommend slapping another 256MB module in for about $25.
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I put in another memory module, and it helped some. I notice that certain arcades still bog down, notably one of the demo arcades (the one with the Moon Patrol sculpture in the lobby) and the Voodoo Science Lounge. Both bog down in specific areas, which leads me to believe it's only certain textures or lighting techniques causing the problem. That would support Howards post; my video card is the integrated NForce chipset which is equivalent to a GeForce 2, and shares memory with the system rather than having integrated memory.
Deniros' Dungeon of the Damned arcade works pretty well, and it has a ton of cabs.... there's one spot in the lower level near the driving cabs that gives me a similar problem (I think it's one of the textures around a door down there; it's not the driving cabinets themselves); when I hit that spot, I drop to a few frames per second until I push past it, and then it's fine. So I can use this arcade; most of the users of my cab are young girls, though, so I had to excise the scantily-clad women. :(
It still takes 3D Arcade several seconds to start to launch MAME, even with plenty of memory available. The DOS window opens up blank, the disk spins hard, and then about 5 seconds later the MAME startup kicks in. Returning to the arcade is fast, though.
I do notice that even with the extra memory, cylarcade will bog down and eventually crash to desktop; I'll solve that problem by setting up the control panel to use either list mode or fps mode only.
One last little issue is that one of my buttons (the one I want to use to swap between game lists) is mapped to the NumPad 5 key, which I can't read in 3D Arcade without turning Num Lock on, so I'll need to pull my keyboard hack out and rewire that key...
Otherwise, this is a pretty sharp piece of work!
--Chris
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-yup those two arcades are very heavy. especially the voodoo lounge its uses an almost insane number of very big textures...and sure needs to be optimised as is mentioned in the readme that comes with it.
-cylarcade i am not sure...i use it a lot on my cab and only have a 1 gig machine in it. i guess its the memory throughput of your onboard 3d solution that is a bottlekneck. what also works really well iis f you have not enough memory to keep the fe from paging a lot is to put the screenshots/videos etc on a different hd...because cylarcade loads that stuff dynamically it can help a lot...so does a fast hd.
-i really cant do much on the memory use of bigger environments...most of the memory use you see are all textures. more efficient models like the diet models and also more efficient arcades like the dungeon are the best way forward...and ofcourse cheaper ram :). setting preloadcab to false in fe.cfg can also help a bit so only needed models are loaded.
peter
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-yup those two arcades are very heavy. especially the voodoo lounge its uses an almost insane number of very big textures...and sure needs to be optimised as is mentioned in the readme that comes with it.
The worst area is the hallways with the big murals on either side and the Vegas pic at the end.. ouch!
-i really cant do much on the memory use of bigger environments...most of the memory use you see are all textures. more efficient models like the diet models and also more efficient arcades like the dungeon are the best way forward...and ofcourse cheaper ram :). setting preloadcab to false in fe.cfg can also help a bit so only needed models are loaded.
I'm using all the diet models I can, and I think I'm going to go back and remove the models I care about "less", or have a similar enough model to work with. I haven't tried the preload setting yet....
I really like the dungeon one... it reminds me vaguely of The Underground in Redondo Beach, which is long gone, although The Underground wasn't that extensive. It had iconography on the walls from the London Underground... I wish I had the tools to replace some of the graffiti textures in the dungeon with simpler walls and the occasional Underground logo... that arcade is one sweet piece of work...
Thanks for your help!
--Chris
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Chris, how easy was 3D Arcade to install? I've been using the old mamewah for a while now and since it's all setup perfect, it's time to take it all apart and try something new ;D
I want to try a few different frontends but 3D arcade seems difficult to configure.
I've got an XP2400+, 521M Ram and GF4 Ti4800 so I'm pretty sure it should run fine on my system.
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Chris, how easy was 3D Arcade to install? I've been using the old mamewah for a while now and since it's all setup perfect, it's time to take it all apart and try something new ;D
I want to try a few different frontends but 3D arcade seems difficult to configure.
I've got an XP2400+, 521M Ram and GF4 Ti4800 so I'm pretty sure it should run fine on my system.
I'm still installing it! It is a bear to configure, but that's because it has so many options. Every day I think about going to MAMEWah. It's also worth noting that the novelty of the 3D front end will probably wear off very quickly and you'll use it in List mode most of the time. I am, however, slowly beating it ito submission.
Here's an odd thing: It seems to work much better with Daphne than MAME. Daphne games start right up, whereas I get 5 or 6 seconds of delay before MAME games start to load...
--Chris
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Chris, how easy was 3D Arcade to install? I've been using the old mamewah for a while now and since it's all setup perfect, it's time to take it all apart and try something new ;D
I want to try a few different frontends but 3D arcade seems difficult to configure.
I've got an XP2400+, 521M Ram and GF4 Ti4800 so I'm pretty sure it should run fine on my system.
-to get a glimpse of it just unzip it a new folder and click on the quick setup link.
-if you only want to try some arcades on most pc's you dont have to even that...just get the arcade from the arcades section...nzip it in the fe folder...and follow the instructions in the included readme how to add it to the demos section.
peter
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The Deniros Damned Dungeon arcade is not to be missed....
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Thanks )p(, I'll try that.
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Here's an odd thing: It seems to work much better with Daphne than MAME. Daphne games start right up, whereas I get 5 or 6 seconds of delay before MAME games start to load...
If you're using the latest version there's a good reason for that.
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Here's an odd thing: It seems to work much better with Daphne than MAME. Daphne games start right up, whereas I get 5 or 6 seconds of delay before MAME games start to load...
If you're using the latest version there's a good reason for that.
And that is? i mainly use an old version of mame (.63 or so) never saw a delay when starting a small mame game. did anything change in mame recently causing a delay on startup?
peter