Advmame vs Mame in 15Khz cab - please help!

[hooperjaws]

Hi everyone, and apologies in advance if this has been answered (kinda) in other posts, but I've had a look and cant find what I am looking for..

THE STORY SO FAR..

I am converting a jamma-wired cab into a mame cab. It had a limited amount of controls, so new control panel is wired and working.. ;-). I am using ultimarc JPAC which (when I realised it needed the PS/2 cable to supply +5 v power) is working well. Stable image.

I want an arcade-like experience as much as possible, so from switch on to power off, I want to see no trace of the underlying operating system.

I also want a front-end that looks good. I want games to run smoothly.

My PC spec isnt amazing, unfortunately. My first project-path was "right, I am going to use DOS, to maximise the amount of CPU power/resources, and since I don't want to pay out for ultimarcs arcadeVGA (the Jpac stretched my budget to the limit as it is), I thought I would go down the advancemame route. (My original "donor" PC was a P4 1.6. The machine used an ATI rage 128 pro card.)

However, none of the dos-based front ends looked good enough in my opinion. (not compared to mala or hyperspin). And I wanted a machine I was happy with.. so I abandoned my DOS attempts. Having then decided to use MALA because hyperspin needs a beefy PC to run (whereas MALA seems to run ok on lower-spec machines), I realised that MALA is not a DOS program, and therefore I was thinking that WIN98 SE would not use too many more resources than DOS, and would probably still allow mame / advance mame to run well. I got mala working, and using advancemame games ran well, however soft15kz didnt work on my ati rage pro 128. Therefore although I might be able to get advancemame to output to my machine, the menu wouldnt be viewable.. So back to ebay to buy an agp card that IS compatible with sailorsat's soft15khz.

(At this point I DID read that it might have been possible to use advanceCAB vga drivers to launch windows 'inside' but couldnt figure out how this might have to be set up. Any time win98 dos launched windows, the windows video drivers kicked in and replaced the advancemame drivers).

ANYWAY at this point I hit ANOTHER annoying issue. The flipping task bar in windows 98. It flashes on screen, as does the mouse pointer. Kinda ruining the "arcade" experience a bit. What to do? People in the forums generally seem to be using XP, but on my low-spec pc, will XP not hog too many resources in for games to work well? Apparently in XP it is possible to hide taskbar, icons, etc and there exists a software called "instant sheller" to achieve this.. all sounds good. Then I hear about TINYXP. An xp hack-version that runs cut-down and on low amounts of memory! Sounds ideal!

SO now I have installed tinyXP, and have inserted my new AGP card (Radeon 9250), so soft15khz DOES work, and I expect (when I get to it) MALA will run on tinyXP, and I am hoping that instant sheller will hide the operating system, so where am I at now? I have a faster donor PC (that I bought for £5 in a car-boot sale, an amd athelon 2600+), but now I have a problem that I am 'stuck' on and need help with. Im quite proud that all my reading and researching has got me this far though!

In MAME, games 'stagger' a bit. For instance, when I run bubble bobble, there is a "pause" or long-note stagger in the sound while the screen freezes for a split second. NOT GOOD. However, I CAN get mame to display original resolutions using command line options "-video ddraw -nohwstretch -switchres" So MAME0137 looks good, but doesnt play properly. DOH!! Another issue is that in mame, you get a copyright warning. I think if i had a 'C' compiler I might somehow be able to re-compile mame to not include this arcade-image-crushing issue. Im not keen on re-learning C programming at this point though.

In advancemame, (which I think is version 0.106 since advancemame hasnt been kept up to date for a while now), the games play nicely, but don't use their native resolutions. There is stretching/fitting going on. This is because advancemame is using the not-recommended windows sdl library, and not programming the video card directly in "generate" modes. The advancemame config setup program, advcfg.exe won't run, it returns with an error. I think it expects some text-based video display driver to be installed, and maybe my radeon card doesnt have the goods? Either way, I am about to give up getting advancemame to configure properly in XP on my system. However games in advancemame do seem to be running well on my system, and the copyright flash-message is easily deactivated in advancemame.. so close.. so close..!

SO ANY ADVICE GLADLY RECEIVED!!

Has anyone had mame glitches "mini-freezes" that they know how easily fix? Is there a better version of mame I could be using? Has anyone pursued advancemame to get it working properly? Some resolution-purists out there maybe?

[ahofle]

Try backing down your MAME version to 0.136 and see if that helps. 

[hooperjaws]

is 0.136 reportedly better behaved than .0137? I expected someone to suggest a specific earlier "smoother running" mame version, but didnt expect that id missed "a good mame" by just one version number..?

[ahofle]

I've seen huge decreases in performance between 136 and 137.  I haven't found anyone else report it though.

[Tafoid]

I've seen huge decreases in performance between 136 and 137.  I haven't found anyone else report it though.

Are there any hard numbers to go by, any particular sets or drivers which have degraded performance?

The only performance drop I saw was for any game using the sn76/94 family audio.  There was a great increase in accuracy for this emulation which fixed lingering bugs.  I'd say about it hit overall emulation speed for those games by maybe 25% at the most (based from some unthrottled, skip 0 tests for select games from 0.136 to 0.137).  Not really a problem unless you are still running on pentium 2's or 3's, in which case that might bring some of those games under 100% without frameskip.

[ahofle]

NeoGeo went from about 250% with 136 to under 100%/frameskipping with 137 on a P4 3.0 Ghz.  Not sure if it was a configuration issue or something though.

[Tafoid]

NeoGeo went from about 250% with 136 to under 100%/frameskipping with 137 on a P4 3.0 Ghz.  Not sure if it was a configuration issue or something though.

I'm not seeing any degradation from 0.136 to 0.137 here for random neogeo sets.  All tests are essentially the same within a  ~5% margin of error.  Tested:  crsword, mslugx, kof2001, kof2003, uopoko, nitd.   Not sure what else to suggest other than checking your MAME settings or investigate any possible OS changes/background tasks.