New To Linux - general questions

[dgrams2000]

Hey guys.. just some questions out of curiosity....

When running linux, since its less demanding than windows...
do emulators run better generally on linux?
... or ... are there emulators on linux like mame or others?

Dont really need specifics.. just wondering if my P4 would run linux and emulators faster than on windows....

Thanks guys

[Pinball Wizard]

Mame is better on linux, but it is hard to speak for other emulators as it all depends on how well the coder wrote the emulator.

[Silas (son of Silas)]

I have various arcade emulators running on different platforms in my house. My daughter runs MameUI on her Windows Vista laptop. Its exactly the same spec machine as my personal Ubuntu Jaunty laptop running SDLMAME with Wah!Cade. Side by side SDLMAME out performs MameUI on Vista everytime.

I also have a duel boot Ubuntu Hardy / Stripped Windows XP laptop. Thats more interesting. Completely 'naked' Windows XP is pretty lean and is pretty much on a par with Linux performance wise. The problem is that you can only run XP 'naked' if you never plan to put it on your network or never let it touch the Internet or ever share media with other machines. Thats pretty unrealistic so you get stuck in the trap of service packs, hotfixes and virus software. Suddenly XP isn't naked any more and your MAME performance begins to dwindle.

Given that there is no virus software overhead in Linux you potentially alway will have more CPU cycles available for your emulator. 

[smalltownguy]

Just installed Ubuntu 9.04 on my old PIII 450 with 256mb RAM. Runs faster than any version of 'doze I've ever had.

WHY DID I WAIT SO LONG???/


 

[Silas (son of Silas)]

Since my last post on this thread I had my laptop stolen, so when the replacement turned up I installed Ubuntu 9.10 'Karmic Koala'

If you think 9.04 is fast, when 9.10 Karmic comes out of Beta status next month open up a terminal and type 'sudo update-manager -d' (without the quotes) to upgrade from 9.04 to 9.10.

Karmic's boot time is nothing short of BRUTAL. 

[ninjazx71]

They definitely run faster on Linux. There is a ton less overhead on Linux compared to Windows and you have so much more flexibility to tune the OS to run specific to what application/s you are planning to run. Not to mention the increased stability of Linux over the BSOD that is Windows... LOL!