Build Your Own Arcade Controls Forum
Main => Software Forum => Topic started by: MiKman on April 09, 2008, 11:32:40 pm
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I recently updated to the latest version .124a and it appears my machine is no longer up to the task of playing donky kong lol the sound skips (like it's working too hard to play the game). Golden Tee's can no longer play with the sound at full speed. What do we need to play these nowadays? I have a P4 2.4Ghz with 512 megs Ram, PCI sound card, Geforce 6200 128meg video in my cabinet. Think more memory fix the problem?
crazy how much horsepower this thing is beginning to take... might have to downgrade back to when golden tee's were added, but I dread the thought of trying get everythign back to that version... yikes!
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Could be a config issue, I would think your PC should run Donkey Kong ok. Not sure exactly what it was but I had a similar problem with .123, IIRC it may have been the resolution, and also try using ddraw instead of d3d. Have a play around with some other settings too if that doesn't help.
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Could be a config issue, I would think your PC should run Donkey Kong ok. Not sure exactly what it was but I had a similar problem with .123, IIRC it may have been the resolution, and also try using ddraw instead of d3d. Have a play around with some other settings too if that doesn't help.
How do you enter the config menu? Thanks.
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edit mame.ini
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Donkey Kong actually takes a little horsepower to run now. Ever since they quit using samples for the sounds.
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Yeah, it's crazy, but DK takes a beast now, thanks to the sound changes.
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Yeah, it's crazy, but DK takes a beast now, thanks to the sound changes.
Not really. More often than not, the problems people have is because their monitor isn't able to run at a high enough refresh rate so the emulation skips and stutters due to that. I have a desktop running a P4 at 2.8 GHz and get insanely high frame rates if I unthrottle it.
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Using the term BEAST was an exaggeration on my part, but it takes more than what some people use in their cabs (like my 733 mhz in my cab vs my dual core 2 ghz)
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... More often than not, the problems people have is because their monitor isn't able to run at a high enough refresh rate so the emulation skips and stutters due to that.
Yup, games like donkey kong have a faster refresh rate than most LCD monitors (dkong has 60.606061Hz vs LCD standard 60 Hz), so there is a sound sync problem with the newish mame enforcing a tighter video/sound syncing. The -refreshspeed option is supposed to help here, but it's been broken for a few versions. I hear it's supposed to be fixed in 0.124u2, but ... :dunno
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Well thanks for the tips guys, I messed aroudn with a few of the settings, I turned off sync to monitor refresh (although my monitor runs at 100Hz) and it seems to have made a some of a difference.
Turning off throttle was not a good idea, some games run rediculously fast and not at normal speed.
I'll mess some more with the config and see what I can come up with...
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I'm not sure what it is, but a lot of LCD screens don't seem to actually run at the refresh rate they say they are. It's odd. It's almost as though they use some other type of video update method that doesn't sit right with MAME.
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Well thanks for the tips guys, I messed aroudn with a few of the settings, I turned off sync to monitor refresh (although my monitor runs at 100Hz) and it seems to have made a some of a difference.
Turning off throttle was not a good idea, some games run rediculously fast and not at normal speed.
I'll mess some more with the config and see what I can come up with...
I've seen people talk about unthrottling, but I've had the same experience. Maybe there's a ratio feature that isn't commonly known? DK sound emulation has gotten better this latest release - clearer and lighter load - but it still takes a high-end P4 to run it decently. It takes a high-end P4 to run any games after '81 since the re-write. I think at least DK will get even better, though.
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... More often than not, the problems people have is because their monitor isn't able to run at a high enough refresh rate so the emulation skips and stutters due to that.
Yup, games like donkey kong have a faster refresh rate than most LCD monitors (dkong has 60.606061Hz vs LCD standard 60 Hz), so there is a sound sync problem with the newish mame enforcing a tighter video/sound syncing. The -refreshspeed option is supposed to help here, but it's been broken for a few versions. I hear it's supposed to be fixed in 0.124u2, but ... :dunno
Is that why I can't run any game on my desktop without extremely annoying sound? Video looks fine but sound is awful. That would explain it! Thanks for the info. I'll have to try that option in 0.125 when it comes out then.
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odd that i read a lot of people of having problems with mame recently. i havnt had a problem for a really long time. i think the last problems i had was that my roms were incorrect. Im running a 2800xp, 1gig ram, 5600fx. my pc has many years i know, but the only games i have problems with is nfl blitz and gaunlet legends.
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odd that i read a lot of people of having problems with mame recently. i havnt had a problem for a really long time. i think the last problems i had was that my roms were incorrect. Im running a 2800xp, 1gig ram, 5600fx. my pc has many years i know, but the only games i have problems with is nfl blitz and gaunlet legends.
Killer instinct 2 runs ok on that? Thats not much better specs than my machine, and KI2 is craptastic.
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I only have .121 on my vertical cab, which is a measly little XP1800+, but it runs DK perfectly fine.
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surprising how many people regularly update mame. i guess they tend to be the younger crowd, hanging out for later games to be emulated. being an old timer (relatively speaking) im happy enough with .78, only that it doesnt have raiden 2 on it...
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I'll only update when (if) they get Radiant Silvergun running full speed ;D
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As one of the old guys, I updated to .120 for the improvements in the DK driver. That was way more important to me than new games added.
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Yeah, the improved DK sound is a definite plus.
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ahh! i hadnt realised DK had any major revision. im not a huge DK fan (although strangely i found myself playing it a lot more after seeing 'king of kong' ;D). funny it took so long for such an old classic to be tidied up...
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Same reason I upgraded my vertical cab. Donkey Kong. Unfortunately they went and jacked the colors of the girders...oh, and don't try to argue with them...they seem to think PINK is SOMEHOW right...I've played enough Donkey Kong in my day to know they are full of ---steaming pile of meadow muffin---. I don't care what the "code" says, PINK isn't the right color for the girders.
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thats an interesting point frizzle. what sort of monitor does your cab have? if its an arcade, i wonder if something is being lost 'in the translation'? the video card screwing something up whatever, not getting the RGB ratio right. not to say theres something wrong with the card, but that its done differently now to how it used to be?
then again, the in earlier version of mame, the girders arent pink...
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There is a thread about it over at MAMEWORLD. MAMEDev claims that the pink is the CORRECT color. I claim they are smoking rock....
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They are pink.
Then again, I'm hittin' the pipe right now, so what do I know?
Honestly, though, no version of Donkey Kong I ever played was pink. Not even lightish red. It was RED.
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Don't forget that the arcade cabinets had tinted glass put in front of the monitor. This, without a doubt, altered the color that we saw.
Last week I went to a pizza place during lunch and they had an old DK machine there. I went and played it and noticed that something was "off". What was "off" was that there was no glass covering the monitor screen. What color were the girders? The same color I see when I fire up MAME. I just wish I had my cell-phone with me as I would have taken a picture.
I still believe that when people submit color "bugs" or "complaints" to MAME they should include a positive test that their monitor is working without any flaws and that they are viewing the image without any filtering taking place due to overlays, glass, etc.
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I just watched part of king of kong to check on the colors since I do not have a dedicated machine. I think the devs got it right. Steve Weibe's screen looks exactly like mine in MAME. The scores are red and the girders are definitely lighter. In the film, the DK machine at funspot has redder looking girders, but still lighter than the scores. I'm guessing that the difference is due to tinted glass on the original machine.
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Lol I thought you guys were smoking somthing, then I realized that my cab still has the smoked glass over the monitor so that is why it looks fine to me.
Yarb
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I haven't found a compelling reason to upgrade past .99. It has the Golden Tee's in it, Robotron runs at the correct speed, and it still has hiscore.dat support.
I like DK, but the current colors and sound with samples are acceptable to me, even if they're not perfect.
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For those having sound problems, it looks like the -refreshspeed has been fixed in .114u2 as urebelscum predicted. Give it a spin and post your results.
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surprising how many people regularly update mame. i guess they tend to be the younger crowd, hanging out for later games to be emulated. being an old timer (relatively speaking) im happy enough with .78, only that it doesnt have raiden 2 on it...
I'm on 0.94 because I've had no compelling reason to upgrade (or wasn't aware of a reason). I came from 0.75 where I was for a long while, and before that, 0.35.
I don't like to upgrade unless I have to because it seems that for every fix I get a new problem or I have to learn new stuff and reconfigure stuff. I don't really play games from after 1992 or so.
But, is there an established happy stable release that is recommended? I don't want to stay on 0.94 if there's a reason not to but I don't see the need to jump to the newest either. My cabinet runs a 2.2GHz Athlon class machine with 1/2 or 1 gig of RAM.
TIA
-pmc
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well i tried 124u2, and while donkey kong seems too run better, there is still some audio skip/stutter issues and framerate issues intermittently.
my mame.ini:
#
# CORE PERFORMANCE OPTIONS
#
autoframeskip 1
frameskip 0
seconds_to_run 0
throttle 1
sleep 1
speed 1.0
refreshspeed 1
#
# CORE SOUND OPTIONS
#
sound 1
samplerate 44100
samples 1
volume 0
#
# WINDOWS PERFORMANCE OPTIONS
#
priority 0
multithreading 0
#
# WINDOWS VIDEO OPTIONS
#
video d3d
numscreens 1
window 0
maximize 1
keepaspect 1
prescale 1
effect none
waitvsync 0
syncrefresh 0
#
# DIRECTDRAW-SPECIFIC OPTIONS
#
hwstretch 1
#
# DIRECT3D-SPECIFIC OPTIONS
#
d3dversion 9
filter 1
#
# PER-WINDOW VIDEO OPTIONS
#
screen auto
aspect auto
resolution 640x480
view auto
screen0 auto
aspect0 auto
resolution0 auto
view0 auto
screen1 auto
aspect1 auto
resolution1 auto
view1 auto
screen2 auto
aspect2 auto
resolution2 auto
view2 auto
screen3 auto
aspect3 auto
resolution3 auto
view3 auto
#
# FULL SCREEN OPTIONS
#
triplebuffer 1
switchres 0
full_screen_brightness 1.0
full_screen_contrast 1.0
full_screen_gamma 1.0
#
# WINDOWS SOUND OPTIONS
#
audio_latency 2
as you can see I even tried to lower the audio samplerate to 44100.
my computer is a p4 2.0, geforce 6200 video card pretty sure I should be able to play this fine without too much tinkering.
any thoughts?
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Try removing Triplebuffer from your DK game. With it all being one screen, you shouldn't have to worry about tearing at all. In addition, change "priority 0" to "priority 1". What may be happening is that another process begins to run and momentarily takes away CPU cycles. I always run MAME with priority set at 1 to ensure that it is "in charge". Also, change "sleep" to 0. For some reason, MAME might be thinking that it can take a rest when it shouldn't be. Chances are that's not a problem, but why risk it?
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In addition to the above, set 'switchres 1' - maybe it is running at your desktop resolution rather than 640x480.
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Colors are vastly different on a real arcade monitor -vs- a pc or lcd monitor..
as the arcade monitors tend to blend and mix near colors.
I think also, that the older arcade monitors may have used thicker shadowmasks,
thus making the differences greater. Not sure.
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how much ram are you running in your cabinet? I upped from 512 MB to 1GB and any sound stuttering issues virtually disappeared.. (similar system specs to yours P4 2.4, 6200 Geforce).
Edit:
Unfortunately Donkey Kong still isn't 100% even with the upgrade to 124u2... :(
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as the arcade monitors tend to blend and mix near colors.
That is true, but I don't think the color arrangement of the girders lends itself to significant bleeding. Not enough to make pinkish girders turn a deep shade of red.
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as you can see I even tried to lower the audio samplerate to 44100.
my computer is a p4 2.0, geforce 6200 video card pretty sure I should be able to play this fine without too much tinkering.
any thoughts?
I doubt anything you can change will make a difference. With the new code Donkey Kong wouldn't run at full speed on my old Althon XP 2400+, and only just ran at full speed on this old 3000+.
The discrete sound stuff is complex and needs a lot of CPU time, and has a dramatic impact on framerate (frameskipping won't help as the audio has to be processed every frame regardless of frameskip)
Progress comes at a cost, and a plain old original P4 3.0ghz isn't going to be good enough.
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as you can see I even tried to lower the audio samplerate to 44100.
my computer is a p4 2.0, geforce 6200 video card pretty sure I should be able to play this fine without too much tinkering.
any thoughts?
I doubt anything you can change will make a difference. With the new code Donkey Kong wouldn't run at full speed on my old Althon XP 2400+, and only just ran at full speed on this old 3000+.
The discrete sound stuff is complex and needs a lot of CPU time, and has a dramatic impact on framerate (frameskipping won't help as the audio has to be processed every frame regardless of frameskip)
Progress comes at a cost, and a plain old original P4 3.0ghz isn't going to be good enough.
:o i'll definitely live with it being not perfect...
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I'm running .120 on an athlon 1800+ and Donkey Kong runs perfect. Did it slow down more after .120?
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I think Haze might have meant a 2.0 GHz Pentium 4 since my desktop is an earlier generation P4 running at 3.06 GHz and Donkey Kong runs well above 100% on my system.
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how much ram are you running in your cabinet? I upped from 512 MB to 1GB and any sound stuttering issues virtually disappeared.. (similar system specs to yours P4 2.4, 6200 Geforce).
Edit:
Unfortunately Donkey Kong still isn't 100% even with the upgrade to 124u2... :(
i have 768 mb of ram.
I guess i'm just going to settle on using an older version of mame for that game. Also for the record I checked my cpu and it is actually a p4 2.4 not 2.0.
I've pretty much exhausted every possibility, nothing works. Interestingly DK Jr. works perfectly.
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played a bit of donkey kong on my old centrino laptop the other night all worked fine... using the latest mame build...
Yea I do tend to update... new games are always nice.. but the fixes for the old games are just as equally welcomed to create a more arcade perfect experience.
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i guess you can have several builds of mame in a cab. one for most games and how ever many other emus for odd games that need a little something extra, or run better on an older build...
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i guess you can have several builds of mame in a cab. one for most games and how ever many other emus for odd games that need a little something extra, or run better on an older build...
That's not a bad idea either. Many front ends are able to handle multiple different emulators so you could just set up certain versions for games that will run best on said version.
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That's not a bad idea either. Many front ends are able to handle multiple different emulators so you could just set up certain versions for games that will run best on said version.
Yep...when I realised Buggy Boy is playable, I added Mame v0.123 just for that. I left my setup the same for all other games (v0.99) as I couldn't see much point updating everything.
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The Donkey Kong driver has two different board models it emulates- the original RadarScope conversion (TKG-02) and the later 2-board set (TKG-04). You can change which one is used in the "Driver Configuration" menu in MAME.
This changes the color mixing resistors. TKG-02 has more red-looking girders and TKG-04 has pink.
So they are both "right". :)
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Pete Rittwage
C64 Preservation Project
http://rittwage.com
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Yeah but the Donkey Kong girders in older versions of Mame (.116) seem much more red than the girders in newer versions of Mame even when you just change the Driver Configuration to the setting you suggest. So older versions of MAME are still wrong right?
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Yes. So many people forget that the glass which goes over the screen in Donkey Kong is NOT 100% clear glass. It is tinted in some manner which does alter our view of the game. Hell, even the monitor CRT itself may have been tinted/discolored in some manner. The only way to truly test it out is to get a working Donkey Kong cab, replace the board with a PC loaded with MAME, and see how it looks
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.121 here and my XP1800+ runs DK perfectly fine as well.
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Who cares about Donkey Kong? When the heck is Radiant Silvergun going to run at full speed?!?
</ ;) >
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Yeah but the Donkey Kong girders in older versions of Mame (.116) seem much more red than the girders in newer versions of Mame even when you just change the Driver Configuration to the setting you suggest. So older versions of MAME are still wrong right?
Too many factors involved. The original colors in MAME where just guesses, as most were. Recently, some devs have started actually computing the colors with the PAL/GAL code and the actual mixing resistors on the board.
Of course, this calculation stops being "accurate" at your VGA card and monitor. Every one is different, so who knows how yours is adjusted compared to that machine in the pizza parlor when you were a kid? :)
I have a PC with video out connected to a 20" TV via S-Video and the colors and saturation are much different than my LCD. I've lost the time to be concerned over such things.
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Yeah, I'm not concerned about it either, I just find it interesting. I thought you were saying originally that the old Mame Donkey Kong had the same color pallatte as the New Mame Donkey Kong when you switch to the other driver configuration which I didn't find when checking it out.
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Hell, when you think about the fact that we can even PLAY these games that we admired while growin up, I just marvel at the fact that we're complaining about something as petty as the girder colors!
MAME is truly amazing and I'm just thankful that we even have it. All the games I cherished as a kid are now playable, and I'm building my own cabinet to try and relive that experience. I'll never fully relive it since it's impossible, but I can get as close as possible.
:cheers:
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Radient Silvergun is full speed with great sound right now on my system (E6600 Core 2 Duo OC'd to 3.12 GHz, 4 GB RAM, 64-bit Linux, 64-bit SDLMAME). The "Core 2 Duo at >= 3 GHz" is the important part though, so don't sweat the rest if you're a Win-weenie ;-)
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the sound blows in any game from the 90's. I have up to date roms and everything. I have messed with so many settings, but I just can't figure it out.