Advice on running soul calbur - skipping

[UncleMame]

My CPU has 3 GB or ram with a quad processor, and would figure that SC should run fine(running .140), but it skips(audio/game stutters).  I read about untrottling and have used framesip and the throttle button with no improvement at all.  Any advice ?

[BadMouth]

You said you had quad core, but didn't mention the speed.
MAME is only capable of using 2 of the cores.

Try one of the clones instead of the parent.
On a couple of the 3D fighting games, I was able to find a clone that ran full speed when the parent wouldn't.
I think Soul Caliber was one of them, but I'm not 100% sure.
(The other was either Tekken 3 or Tekken Tag)

[Thenasty]

taking down the samplerate to 22khz might help too... try it...

[Donkbaca]

Look on MAWS, imperfect driver, imperfect sound emulation.

[UncleMame]

Thanks, I'll try it. 

The thing that surprises be is this:  The machines in the arcade back then I would imagine were less powerful than what most folks at home are running now.  Although emulation may slow things a bit, I would Imagine most 3d fighting games would be unhindered.  But then again, I'm certainly no expert.

[Donkbaca]

Yeah, that's what a lot of people think, they see this 100 mhz processors and figure their modern machine can run things no problem.  What they fail to realize is that MAME is trying to emulate the hardware.  So that means that the program is trying to cram all the stuff running on the machine and have it run through the processor.  A lot of games had a processor to run the game, and then a separate gpu for video and a third processor for sound.  On MAME, all of these tasks are being run by your CPU, the problem is that with these old games you could have the sound, graphics and game processors all running simultaneously, on MAME you really can't.  Even though modern computers have multiple core cpus, Mame only takes advantage of the first two cores, and even then its not true parallel processing.  Anyhow, that's why you need so much more processing power with MAME, its trying to replicate a bunch of different things all at once.  Its also why a lot of older games took so long to emulate.  A lot of the older games utilized analog sound, MAME is a purely digital system and emulating analog in a digital environment is really hard, that's why MAME has sample files, it cheats and uses the sounds instead of reproducing them, and its why some older games still don't sound right.

Another thing is the drivers.  There are different systems and platforms that different arcade manufacturers used. The more modern ones were encrypted, and can get pretty complicated.  So, there is a challenge there in creating the drivers to run these old systems like they were in the arcade.  That's the problem with Soul Calibur.  The drivers aren't perfect, so no matter how powerful your machine is, it wouldn't run right because the software isn't at the point where they have worked all the bugs out.

[Vigo]

That's why you will also find a lot of dreamcast emulation around here. Often, a few of these era games were play pretty well on the Dreamcast. Rather than trying to get the arcade version working 100% on mame, it is often just easier to break down and get the dreamcast version running.