Donkey Kong (us set 1) slow on mame 147

[gman314]

Has anyone else observed this? It runs fine on 127, but seems slightly jerky on 147.

[gman314]

Anybody...?

I recently thought that the problem had fixed itself when I compiled 147u2 (even though I'm not at all sure how or why this would help).  However, I have noticed the slowdown again.

This simple fact (along with the fact that there are tons and tons of totally useless pinball, mahjong, fruit machine, etc roms in 147) has caused me to revert back to 127.  Other than Lethal Enforcers not working, I've never had any problems with 127.

I would really like to give 147 another chance, but DK was the final straw.  Any ideas? 

[XtraSmiley]

Just report it to MAME bugs, not like anyone here can do anything about it.

http://www.mametesters.org/

[BadMouth]

Just report it to MAME bugs, not like anyone here can do anything about it.

http://www.mametesters.org/

DON'T EVER REPORT ANYTHING IF YOU AREN'T USING THE GENUINE MAME.EXE FROM MAMEDEV. 

(and a game not running full speed on your computer is not a bug)

[XtraSmiley]

Just report it to MAME bugs, not like anyone here can do anything about it.

http://www.mametesters.org/

DON'T EVER REPORT ANYTHING IF YOU AREN'T USING THE GENUINE MAME.EXE FROM MAMEDEV. 

(and a game not running full speed on your computer is not a bug)

True enough, but I disagree about the slowness. DK should not be running slow on a modern computer, it's prob a bug, if all other things are done correctly by the OP.

[MaxVolume]

DK should not be running slow on a modern computer, it's prob a bug, if all other things are done correctly by the OP.

I gotta agree with Smiley here... will I ever be able to play CarnEvil at full speed if I don't upgrade my outdated hardware? No.  Should I expect to be able to play an ancient game like Donkey Kong full-speed on any PC build within the past decade?  Hell to the freakin' yeah.  This is why I think MAME has reached its peak, and trying to morph it into a pinball/gambling machine emulator isn't helping.  I love MESS, so why not another offshoot rather than screwing up a good thing?  Call it PinMAME, FruitMAME, whatever you want... just don't dick with the main program unless you're gonna add something useful.  We're already to the point where the hardware some of the newer games ran on originally was actually a PC motherboard, so we're kind of crossing the line from emulation into software piracy.

[Hoopz]

Use a previous version of Mame.  It's common knowledge that as Mame develops some games slow down.  Either use an older version, don't upgrade, or edit the code to make it faster. 

[dgame]

When you say slow do you mean that the counter is less than 100%, or that it says 100% but the game moves slower?

[Haze]

DK should not be running slow on a modern computer, it's prob a bug, if all other things are done correctly by the OP.

I gotta agree with Smiley here... will I ever be able to play CarnEvil at full speed if I don't upgrade my outdated hardware? No.  Should I expect to be able to play an ancient game like Donkey Kong full-speed on any PC build within the past decade?  Hell to the freakin' yeah.  This is why I think MAME has reached its peak, and trying to morph it into a pinball/gambling machine emulator isn't helping.  I love MESS, so why not another offshoot rather than screwing up a good thing?  Call it PinMAME, FruitMAME, whatever you want... just don't dick with the main program unless you're gonna add something useful.  We're already to the point where the hardware some of the newer games ran on originally was actually a PC motherboard, so we're kind of crossing the line from emulation into software piracy.

Uh, none of the Fruit Machine / Gambling work is going to have the remotest effect on Donkey Kong performance.

Splitting the emulator up makes absolutely no difference to anything.

I wish people wouldn't come up with BS reasons to try and get things they *personally* don't like removed from the emulator.

Improvements to things like the discrete circuit emulation are the only thing likely to slow it down, ie actual improvements to the Donkey Kong emulation.

That said, it's not even remotely slow, I can unthrottle it to 700% and I'm not on what you'd call cutting edge hardware by any means.

Also MAME isn't doing the whole 'loader' thing, just because people on this board are branding around loaders for the latest arcade games (which yes, is really more in the software piracy territory) doesn't mean MAME will take that approach, if MAME is going to emulate them it will emulate them like anything else, and you'll probably need a personal power station and 300ghz machine to run them at full speed which is hardly software piracy at all.  Remember many older games ran on x86 hardware too, Qbert, Raiden Fighters, some even old DOS PCs nothing about them being 'PC hardware' makes them special to MAME.

*goes back to working on improving the Fruit Machines, been doing that for 20 hours solid now, and no, I don't even like them.

[gman314]

When you say slow do you mean that the counter is less than 100%, or that it says 100% but the game moves slower?

Where do I go to check the counter?

The game is not consistently slow ( as a Zinc rom would be running on MAME).  It just seems to hiccup during certain parts in each stage.  For instance, Jumpman will be walking in a straight line and it will seems as if the framerate will drop for about a second.  The same thing sometimes happens in the middle of a jump.

[BadMouth]

Where do I go to check the counter?

I think the default is F10 (if not, it's F11)
It will show a % of how fast the game is running at the top of your screen.
It should stay at 100% if the game is running full speed.

[TGov]

I am running .147 and it is running smooth as silk for me.  I play DK more than any other game and haven't noticed anything.

[rCadeGaming]

Haze, you say that you don't like fruit/gambling machines.  Who does?

These things don't technically detract from the existing traditional games in MAME, but tell me this:  Were new personnel brought on to work on this stuff, or are the existing devs now diverting their time away from improving/adding new traditional games?

I understand that you guys do this entirely out of the goodness of your heart.  I owe you a huge debt of gratitude for the great gift of MAME.  Of course we have no right to tell you what to do.  We're just voicing an opinion about where we, the users, wish the project was headed (I am at least).

A think feedback is always a good thing (respectful feedback at least).  We're not paying customers, so it's totally up to you how much you want to consider our feedback.  Just thinking out loud here.

If it were up to me, I would want to devote more resources to removing input lag from existing games, rather than adding new ones.

-

Back on topic, how about posting your PC specs and your mame.ini.

[gman314]

I am running xp pro on an ASUS board, with 4 gb ram, and a 256 gb SSD. Also, I didn't make any significant changes to the mame.ini. I just changed options to enable lightgun support and stuff like that. I can almost run Crusin USA at full speed, so I don't think that the specs are at fault. I, however, will check out the percentage speed when I get a chance later.

[rCadeGaming]

What's your processor?

[gman314]

Stupid me!  How could I leave that out?  It's an AMD 64 dual core.

By the way, I just checked the speed.  It's at 100% for most of the time, but when it hiccups, it goes down to about 97% and then quickly shoots up to 103% before going back to 100%.

I know that this is a subjective question, but what is the general consensus for the minimum percentage that a game is still playable?  At what percentage is slowdown even detectable?  I was running Crusin' USA from 80 - 90% (and even at 100% for a while).  It did seem slightly slow, but still playable. 

[rCadeGaming]

Stupid me!  How could I leave that out?  It's an AMD 64 dual core.

Still don't know the processor speed.  Don't need to now though...

By the way, I just checked the speed.  It's at 100% for most of the time, but when it hiccups, it goes down to about 97% and then quickly shoots up to 103% before going back to 100%.

Ok, I think I know what your problem is now.  The actual output refresh rate of the graphics card is slightly off from the native refresh rate of the game.  The easiest fix will be to set frameskip to auto.  This will also help with games that have trouble running at 100%, like Cruis'n.

Really, you need to read up about what all of the video settings do.  One little change can be very significant.  For example, using some of the wrong settings can add input lag.

I know that this is a subjective question, but what is the general consensus for the minimum percentage that a game is still playable?  At what percentage is slowdown even detectable?  I was running Crusin' USA from 80 - 90% (and even at 100% for a while).  It did seem slightly slow, but still playable.

Everything should be running at about 100%, or you're going to feel it, and hear some audio stuttering.

[rCadeGaming]

http://strategywiki.org/wiki/MAME/Configure

some more detailed info, especially on video settings here:

http://mamedev.org/source/docs/windows.txt.html

[Haze]

Haze, you say that you don't like fruit/gambling machines.  Who does?

Quite a lot of people, at least in the UK.  They're just a different genre really, some people hate fighters, some people hate gambling games.

These things don't technically detract from the existing traditional games in MAME, but tell me this:  Were new personnel brought on to work on this stuff, or are the existing devs now diverting their time away from improving/adding new traditional games?

Well there aren't really many people working on it, you've got me mostly looking at the non-video ones, J.Wallace who did AgeMAME (which was the old gambling build) providing assistance, and Robbie doing a lot of the Video Gamblers (I did some of those in the past)  Robbie has never really worked on anything else either, so no loss to the team there.

I still do other work on MAME / MESS too, as you can see from my page, the gambling games just form part of the cycle of things to look at, they've also helped iron out some general bugs in chip implementations and helped pave the way for things like the non-video synths MESS is starting to emulate.  Really they're just another piece of the Jigsaw.

I understand that you guys do this entirely out of the goodness of your heart.  I owe you a huge debt of gratitude for the great gift of MAME.  Of course we have no right to tell you what to do.  We're just voicing an opinion about where we, the users, wish the project was headed (I am at least).

A think feedback is always a good thing (respectful feedback at least).  We're not paying customers, so it's totally up to you how much you want to consider our feedback.  Just thinking out loud here.

Right, but some of it is just spreading misinformation / giving people a false view on things.  Putting extra things in MAME isn't determinate to MAME, creating an artificial divide doesn't have any real benefits either because if some common code needs to be made more accurate those changes have to be applied to both projects anyway, even if you split them.  I would eventually like to see MAME and MESS become one *officially* hence the UME builds I offer but I see a lot of opposition from it from people who think it will degrade the core emulator in some way because people are misinformed about such things, so posts suggesting such don't help matters.

I work on emulation with the view that everything deserves to be emulated as much as anything else, if people only emulated the absolute top games, most well known hardware platforms etc. then a lot would be lost, and neglected.  To a degree that's what was happening with the Gambling / Fruit machine stuff, the people in those scenes were typically choosing *one* set of a game, and hacking it up by any means necessary to run in an emulator that seldom saw updates while tossing every other set unchecked, and mostly unsorted in a dat file.  It wasn't even remotely clear what was dumped, wasn't dumped, was a good dump, wasn't a good dump, was complete / incomplete or anything else and without somebody stepping in to start sorting them out a bit more that situation was only going to get worse as more and more piled up; sorting through 15 years of unverified dumps done to no standard was no small task.

Now, as much as I hate the games I don't think it's right that they should be lost to history like that, they have value of sorts and a big part of the reason MAME was created was to properly document things and preserve information.  Put like that, maybe you can see that I feel it would be irresponsible of me if I hadn't started doing something about the situation?  MAME was the ideal place to start doing this work because all the basics needed were already there because MAME is a generic emulation framework and has a huge number of cores and components ready to simply be plugged together.

If it were up to me, I would want to devote more resources to removing input lag from existing games, rather than adding new ones.

I'm not sure what you mean by input lag, if you mean actual input lag (rather than using it as a way of expressing performance) then MAME isn't really adding any unavoidable lag (unless you start turning on triple buffer etc.)  You're *always* going to get 1 frame of additional lag with emulation compared to real hardware, because real hardware is drawing to the screen in real time whereas under emulation you have to wait for a frame to be complete to present it, beyond that MAME isn't specifically adding anything.  You might get some other lag depending on when controllers are read by the host operating system if that mismatches when the games read the controls, but again that's not something you can really avoid, unlike the original hardware you're not wired directly to the controls, you're going through layers of an operating system.

If you mean performance in general, yes, there are some areas in which MAME struggles, even more noticeably in MESS where the systems / games tend to be more demanding on the framework, there is no easy solution to them in many cases tho, we don't intentionally make MAME slower, just attempt to make things more accurate and develop a framework which is as easy to develop with as possible, drivers which are easy to read, all while ensuring things are portable.  Unfortunately all those things have a cost and the closer you get to 'how things work' the steeper the performance requirements; Pong is probably the ultimate example of emulating something at circuit level, it crawls, and as far as the discrete games go that's the most simple of the bunch.

Of course if you're writing something to only emulate a *single* platform then you can make more assumptions, cheat a lot more, and gain performance that way, but you also end up with code you can't reuse and one of the great things about MAME is that you have a whole bunch of reusable components which are of value way beyond the scope of something to play games.

Anyway, not the place for this discussion.

[rCadeGaming]

Anyway, not the place for this discussion.

I know, can't resist replying though, this is an important issue to me.  Let me know where is a better place.  Maybe this can be moved to another thread or something.  As far as the thread hijack, I think the OP's question may be resolved now (hopefully, we'll see if that helps him).

Well there aren't really many people working on it, you've got me mostly looking at the non-video ones, J.Wallace who did AgeMAME (which was the old gambling build) providing assistance, and Robbie doing a lot of the Video Gamblers (I did some of those in the past)  Robbie has never really worked on anything else either, so no loss to the team there.

I still do other work on MAME / MESS too, as you can see from my page, the gambling games just form part of the cycle of things to look at, they've also helped iron out some general bugs in chip implementations and helped pave the way for things like the non-video synths MESS is starting to emulate.  Really they're just another piece of the Jigsaw.

Ok, that's cool, I didn't know that.  Just wanted to ask.

as much as I hate the games I don't think it's right that they should be lost to history like that, they have value of sorts and a big part of the reason MAME was created was to properly document things and preserve information.  Put like that, maybe you can see that I feel it would be irresponsible of me if I hadn't started doing something about the situation?

I guess if it were me, I wouldn't be concerned with losing something to history that I don't consider worth playing.  Gambling game enthusiasts have the option to preserve it if they're interested in it, but I wouldn't feel responsible to take it upon myself.  I understand your point of view though, and it's quite noble.

Right, but some of it is just spreading misinformation / giving people a false view on things.

Yeah, you're right.  That's why I said respectful feedback, and I did ask it as a question.  I understand the huge problem with people stating these things as fact and spreading them around. 

This has been helpful to me in understanding the situation with fruit/gambling games.  Any negative feelings I had about it have been cleared up.

I'm not sure what you mean by input lag, if you mean actual input lag (rather than using it as a way of expressing performance) then MAME isn't really adding any unavoidable lag (unless you start turning on triple buffer etc.)  You're *always* going to get 1 frame of additional lag with emulation compared to real hardware, because real hardware is drawing to the screen in real time whereas under emulation you have to wait for a frame to be complete to present it, beyond that MAME isn't specifically adding anything.

What I said to gman was mostly about the avoidable input lag from video settings (yeah, mostly triple buffer), but I think there is some input lag that could be reduced in other places.

1 frame is outstanding, and not likely to be detectable unless it's being added to the lag of a poor display or controller encoder, etc.  However, while there are many games that run this way, I think there are also a lot of others that do add a significant lag.  For example, I noticed that Radiant Silvergun has 3 or 4 frames of lag, measured using the frame-advance method.  This may have been fixed in the latest version, I need to check, but I think there are a lot of games like this, and it does begin to significantly affect gameplay.

Let me know if the frame-advance method isn't accurate.  In the past I've used a high speed camera at 240fps to measure input lag on LCD screens, using a CRT as a benchmark.  I plan to use a similar method to test my MAME setup in the future.

we don't intentionally make MAME slower, just attempt to make things more accurate and develop a framework which is as easy to develop with as possible, drivers which are easy to read, all while ensuring things are portable.  Unfortunately all those things have a cost and the closer you get to 'how things work' the steeper the performance requirements...

Of course if you're writing something to only emulate a *single* platform then you can make more assumptions, cheat a lot more, and gain performance that way, but you also end up with code you can't reuse and one of the great things about MAME is that you have a whole bunch of reusable components which are of value way beyond the scope of something to play games.

I appreciate this very much, and I'm willing to upgrade my hardware to run things properly.  This is why I stick with the official MAME releases, aside from the changes I make when compiling.

You may have heard of ShmupMAME, which is specifically written to minimize input lag.  It's tempting, but it seems to value that above all else, using methods that could be considered cheats or hacks; it's biased toward supporting mostly that genre of games, and it's based on the pre-107 rendering engine.  I still stick with the official MAME because I appreciate the accuracy, overall quality, and continuing improvements; but I really hope it can improve in terms of input lag in an accurate and responsible manner.

I have a limited programming experience in VB and C++ and things like that.  I'm hoping that when I get my career established and settle some other personal things I'll have some free time to develop some programming skill that's applicable to MAME, and I can contribute.

[Haze]

1 frame is outstanding, and not likely to be detectable unless it's being added to the lag of a poor display or controller encoder, etc.  However, while there are many games that run this way, I think there are also a lot of others that do add a significant lag.  For example, I noticed that Radiant Silvergun has 3 or 4 frames of lag, measured using the frame-advance method.  This may have been fixed in the latest version, I need to check, but I think there are a lot of games like this, and it does begin to significantly affect gameplay.

RSG is a peculiar case, it's running on the arcade equivalent of a Saturn, and yes, it's always a driver where I've found the input to be laggy.  The I/O chain is quite complex, going through a separate sub-cpu etc. and various layers before it actually gets to the game, and that's on original hardware.  I've heard many reports that a fair number of Saturn games have noticeably laggy controls even on the real system, although I would have thought if RSG suffered form that issue on real hardware more people would have mentioned it.  It is possible there is a bug in the timing, things need tighter syncs, interrupts are being fire off at the wrong times and missed, something like that.  There are definitely still issues with the Saturn emulation (evidenced by MESS where a number of games suffer from no working inputs at all) the problem is fixing some of them makes it even slower, and it's slow enough already for the time being!  I'm not sure I'd recommend the current version for RSG anyway, apparently some of the improvements made to the driver (and improve Saturn support as a whole) have actually caused it to regress in places, it's not a nice system to work with and right now it's a bit like balancing plates.

Let me know if the frame-advance method isn't accurate.  In the past I've used a high speed camera at 240fps to measure input lag on LCD screens, using a CRT as a benchmark.  I plan to use a similar method to test my MAME setup in the future.

Frame advancing did used to cause some odd side-effects with games which required CPU intervention during frame time to display the screen (raster effects etc.)  I can't comment on how accurate that is right now but I'll trust it, we shouldn't be doing anything *stupid* in there.

You may have heard of ShmupMAME, which is specifically written to minimize input lag.  It's tempting, but it seems to value that above all else, using methods that could be considered cheats or hacks; it's biased toward supporting mostly that genre of games, and it's based on the pre-107 rendering engine.  I still stick with the official MAME because I appreciate the accuracy, overall quality, and continuing improvements; but I really hope it can improve in terms of input lag in an accurate and responsible manner.

Yeah, I've heard of ShmupMAME, they're unfortunately stripping away lag that WAS present in the original games (either by design, some games added it to intentionally be harder!) or by breaking layer sync in the process (some games buffer inputs and/or sprites to ensure the different layers get rendered correctly and in sync)

It achieves what they want, but I find the side-effects undesirable.

[MaxVolume]

Ugh... I wasn't implying that any DK slowdown was a direct effect of adding fruit machines, just complaining about the overall effect this pointless detour is having, like "full sets" needing a 1TB hard drive or ROM sites being a pain to navigate because they're bloated with that crap.

Obviously, my choice is to not upgrade, and that's what I've decided to do... er, I mean not do.

Still, what pisses me off is that there's SO much "real world" stuff to simulate with these things, and pinball games too, but we can't freakin' have PONG.  Seriously?  You're gonna construct a "skin" to show a bunch of reels, panel lights, buttons, etc. and yet because PONG was a state machine with no microprocessor, it got removed?  Seriously?  Pretty blatant double standard if you ask me.  The prospect of finally having a "loader" or at least better emulation of CarnEvil, Solvalou, or some other game that really should work on my 3GHz PC come along years from now when Multiple Stuff-We-Found-A-Bunch-Of-Boards-For Emulator has got to the point where it needs its own hard drive really irritates me as well.

I think you're missing the point here... we're not telling you WHAT to do with MAME, just that if MAME had started out like this, we wouldn't have bothered.  Kind of like when your favorite musician/actor/director is successful enough to stop "compromising their artistic integrity" and puts out crap.  Sure, do whatever that little voice in your head tells you to do, just don't ---smurfette--- when nobody buys it.  No, MAME is not a commercial product that relies on sales to keep going, but do you honestly think it would have got anywhere without the throngs of people who saw it as a way to play their favorite arcade games at home without dropping quarters into a beat-up machine that may or may not work?  Facebook only recently became a publicly-traded company, but what people thought of it still mattered when there was no money to be made off it.  Sure, Zuckerberg seems to be ignoring user feedback and doing whatever he pleases just like the MAME folks, but all someone has to do is come up with something people like better, and it's bye-bye Facebook.  Look what happened to MySpace... they tried to please everyone by letting them "pimp out" their pages, and the whole thing turned into a bloated mess.

[Tafoid]

Ugh... I wasn't implying that any DK slowdown was a direct effect of adding fruit machines, just complaining about the overall effect this pointless detour is having, like "full sets" needing a 1TB hard drive or ROM sites being a pain to navigate because they're bloated with that crap.

Obviously, my choice is to not upgrade, and that's what I've decided to do... er, I mean not do.

Any capable front-end can disseminate a given list or let you create a list of only the games you wish.  Your assertion that to play one game, a few games, or dozens of games you like requires downloading of (using current stats) about 45gb (regular roms in ZIP) and another 250gb or so CHD's (HD/CD based games as well as supported laserdisc games)...  you don't need to.  Bang for the buck is purely what you feel like putting into it.  The more you have, the more work you need to put in to maintain set between MAME versions.   Most gamers can put their most commonly played games easily on a CD or DVD and still have room.

Still, what pisses me off is that there's SO much "real world" stuff to simulate with these things, and pinball games too, but we can't freakin' have PONG.  Seriously?  You're gonna construct a "skin" to show a bunch of reels, panel lights, buttons, etc. and yet because PONG was a state machine with no microprocessor, it got removed?  Seriously?  Pretty blatant double standard if you ask me.  The prospect of finally having a "loader" or at least better emulation of CarnEvil, Solvalou, or some other game that really should work on my 3GHz PC come along years from now when Multiple Stuff-We-Found-A-Bunch-Of-Boards-For Emulator has got to the point where it needs its own hard drive really irritates me as well.

You haven't been keeping up with progress, have you?  Pong is available in MAME (since 0.146u1 and requires a "netlist" text file) and is emulated in a proper way, not simulated like it was so many years when it first hit MAME and "removed".  It's playable on the fastest of machines and there is always room for improvement - but it's there.  With that framework, more TTL/Discrete based games are expected to show up in coming versions after schematics are disassembled and verified.  External projects such as "DICE" are also approaching discrete emulation in a similar way.   And, as I'm sure has been pointed out - as far as MAME using any type of patcher/loader to make commercial games play will not happen.  That is not emulation and it's not even preservation - target machines and the hardware contained in them for these games will not last forever which is the whole point of software emulation.

Speed issues?  Generally those who complain about speed and "should really work because" arguments don't understand how or why MAME emulates things the way it does.  MAME is more than a PC emulation project for playing games.  It's about as cross-platform as any current project can be and having no specific target means no specific areas to 'cheat' to gain speed.  I guess I don't know the motivation behind the irritation - you are free to code other ways or use other specific Arcade emulators which often do a better job of emulation due to their structure and focus on ONE platform - Sega Model 2,3, or Dreamcast/Naomi/Naomi 2 based might be more playable on these focused emulators.  PC specs will continue to rise and emulation often improves over time and effort put in meaning games thought never playable when first supported are fully playable now.

I think you're missing the point here... we're not telling you WHAT to do with MAME, just that if MAME had started out like this, we wouldn't have bothered.  Kind of like when your favorite musician/actor/director is successful enough to stop "compromising their artistic integrity" and puts out crap.  Sure, do whatever that little voice in your head tells you to do, just don't ---smurfette--- when nobody buys it.  No, MAME is not a commercial product that relies on sales to keep going, but do you honestly think it would have got anywhere without the throngs of people who saw it as a way to play their favorite arcade games at home without dropping quarters into a beat-up machine that may or may not work?  Facebook only recently became a publicly-traded company, but what people thought of it still mattered when there was no money to be made off it.  Sure, Zuckerberg seems to be ignoring user feedback and doing whatever he pleases just like the MAME folks, but all someone has to do is come up with something people like better, and it's bye-bye Facebook.  Look what happened to MySpace... they tried to please everyone by letting them "pimp out" their pages, and the whole thing turned into a bloated mess.

The under laying goal of MAME hasn't changed in some time.  The project strives to document and through this documentation of the hardware, histories and software running on those machines, MAME works on emulation to present to the user the best example of original behavior as possible, short of using the real machine.  Purely run by volunteers, no money is given or exchanged, anyone associated with the project is there because they care more about MAME as a game machine or saving quarters.. it's paramount of preservation is and always will drive the rightly motivated  people to the MAME project - allowing it to continue.  Using other examples of failed (or soon to fail) websites bear no comparison to MAME.  The project, in one form or another, will likely outlast us all living today.

Or.. maybe the About section of mamedev.org explains things better:
"MAME is strictly a non-profit project. Its main purpose is to be a reference to the inner workings of the emulated arcade machines. This is done both for educational purposes and for preservation purposes, in order to prevent many historical games from disappearing forever once the hardware they run on stops working. Of course, in order to preserve the games and demonstrate that the emulated behavior matches the original, you must also be able to actually play the games. This is considered a nice side effect, and is not MAME's primary focus. "

[Haze]

I think you're missing the point here... we're not telling you WHAT to do with MAME, just that if MAME had started out like this, we wouldn't have bothered.  Kind of like when your favorite musician/actor/director is successful enough to stop "compromising their artistic integrity" and puts out crap.  Sure, do whatever that little voice in your head tells you to do, just don't ---smurfette--- when nobody buys it.  No, MAME is not a commercial product that relies on sales to keep going, but do you honestly think it would have got anywhere without the throngs of people who saw it as a way to play their favorite arcade games at home without dropping quarters into a beat-up machine that may or may not work?  Facebook only recently became a publicly-traded company, but what people thought of it still mattered when there was no money to be made off it.  Sure, Zuckerberg seems to be ignoring user feedback and doing whatever he pleases just like the MAME folks, but all someone has to do is come up with something people like better, and it's bye-bye Facebook.  Look what happened to MySpace... they tried to please everyone by letting them "pimp out" their pages, and the whole thing turned into a bloated mess.

MAME isn't meant to be a work of art tho, there is no 'artistic integrity' to compromise, it's a serious project more akin to a history book.

Sure in the early days the 'classics' hit hard and fast because they'd never been emulated before and naturally a lot of people had a higher interest in emulating those, but even today interesting things get done and quite often I'm the one doing them, even if I'm also the one doing a lot of the gambling / Fruit Machine type stuff.

Also with MAME the integrity and quality of the emulation of other parts is only enhanced by having a greater number of test cases, the robustness cores, legitimacy of the project etc. are all boosted by such things, MAME today is an emulation platform.

There are places you find the Fruit Machines / gamblers painstakingly maintained, just like any other classic arcade game, I've pointed out Mr. Ps classic amusements before ( http://www.reelfruits.co.uk/The-Machines1.html ) and to people who like that genre you have classics on par with the likes of PacMan etc.  When I work on the emulation of them I see a peek in interest too, and just like any other genre, I get comments asking about when things will be ready etc.

MAME can't *unemulate* something like PacMan to recapture the old days by emulating it again, but it still emulates it as well as it ever has done, and things like Donkey Kong, the subject of this topic are emulated today at levels not even remotely possible on the hardware available back when MAME was born, the experience is better than it's ever been.

What I don't expect is for people to spread misinformation that the things we're doing are inherently making the emulation somehow worse, they're not, you can choose to completely ignore everything other than the 5 games you care about with the latest MAME and for 99% of cases you'll get the best quality of emulation MAME has ever offered.

With new versions for the past year or so I've tried to point out interesting developments and improvements across the projects for each release, things people might otherwise have missed.  In the other thread I pointed out Planet Probe and Taito's Sky Destroyer but there's much more going on.  The DECO classic 'Angler Dangler' aka 'Fishing' which was a most wanted (or at least curious) title for a decent number of people was finally emulated a couple of versions back thanks to a rare cassette tape and dongle being read + dumped, work which is painstakingly difficult compared to ANYTHING Mame was doing back in the day, likewise things like the chip decaps have offered the ability to massively improve some protection emulations, and do things which would have been unthinkable in the past.

Things like the gambling games, and developments in MESS are all part of what MAME is today, and what helps improve MAME, keep it going.  I know a lot of people have a strong view that MAME should just release a 1.0 version and call it quits, many people seem to think that should have happened years ago and I struggle to comprehend why because cool stuff is happening every single week.

Even if something was to come along and 'replace' MAME because you think MAME has become somehow 'uncool' these days I can guarantee you that 95% of any project would only exist *because* of MAME, and would ultimately come to the same conclusions and direction of growth.

I'm probably not going to play half the gambling games, ever, aside from development and testing, but there are people who will, as much as anything it's a case of spreading our nets, making sure that there is something in MAME which can emulate everybody, that way there are always opportunities and positions for people to contribute and become involved with the project and *that* is vital to the project having any future at all.

I've said in messages before, people are quick to vote, or demand *destructive* action, when really there is no benefit to anybody from taking such action.  I'm pretty sure if I put up a poll and said 'should we remove all Mahjong games from MAME' you'd get 95% saying 'remove them' and 5% saying 'keep them'  but the fact is by existing they're doing no harm to the project, only improving it, and removing them would hurt the 5% much, much more than it would benefit the 95%

The problem is some people seem to see arcade video games as some sort of religion, they somehow see gambers and/or home systems as not worthy by comparison.

The reason MAME is having to reinvent the wheel when it comes to the PinMAME / Pinball support, and basically redo it from scratch is *exactly* because the old build was a side project, ended up being a full on fork, and eventually ended up with a codebase so different to current versions the code was impossibly to maintain and impossible to port general improvements to / from, which ultimately meant it ended up dug into a hole with no real way to improve the quality of emulation offered.  Now maybe some of you are perfectly happy with that situation, just like you'd be happy if MAME 'stopped' but that's a very short-sighted view of things.

Anyway all this just comes down to one thing, YOU don't like those games, and YOU don't want them in there, MAME as a project has no room for such selfish viewpoints.

People are very quick to say they'll never upgrade again, but I can pretty much guarantee if we do manage to figure out Raiden 2 one day then a huge number of users will upgrade for that even if MAME was emulating talking sex toys by that point.

[gman314]

Sorry to get back on topic, but I got a chance to tinker around with some DK settings. I enabled the autoframeskip and it seemed to fix the problem. The percentage actually stood at or momentarily jumped above 100, but if I wasn't staring at the number I wouldn't have noticed any deviation from the norm. Next, I experimented with the keepaspect option. With this disabled, regardless of whether autoframeskip was off or on, this also seemed to get the game running perfectly.

I am not sure, however, how I feel about playing a vertical game without the proper aspect ratio. I'm sure that my eyes would get adjusted to it over time, but something just doesn't feel right about it. I'm curious as to how others feel about this.  Thoughts?

[Haze]

the keep aspect option shouldn't really make any difference to performance unless you have a terrible video card / drivers / are forcing ddraw (or don't have directx installed)

it sounds like a problem with your setup

[gman314]

the keep aspect option shouldn't really make any difference to performance unless you have a terrible video card / drivers / are forcing ddraw (or don't have directx installed)

it sounds like a problem with your setup

What directx should I be using? I currently have the June 2010 one installed.  Should I revert back to directx 9?  Also, keep in mind that mame 127 runs perfectly. 

By the way, my specs are: ASUS mb (on board video), AMD 64 dual core cpu, 4 gb ram, samsung 830 series 256 gb SSD.

I think that the keep aspect options makes the action on screen seem artificially faster since there is a larger playing field.  In other words, in  DK, the barrels seem to move faster since they have a greater distance to travel.

[BadMouth]

By the way, my specs are: ASUS mb (on board video), AMD 64 dual core cpu, 4 gb ram, samsung 830 series 256 gb SSD.

Why do you never give your processor speed or model number?
It's the most important spec regarding games not running full speed.

[CheffoJeffo]

Anyway all this just comes down to one thing, YOU don't like those games, and YOU don't want them in there, MAME as a project has no room for such selfish viewpoints.

I was in the midst of writing a response, then reread the thread and found this, which more elegantly makes the same point.

Everybody wants everything to be playable ... except for the stuff that THEY don't want.

Pick a version that does the best job for what you want and stay with it until a new version does more of what you want.

Don't like the size of a full set of ROMs ? Then install just what you want.

And, for God's sake, leave the bad analogies at the door.

[MaxVolume]

Oh for ---fudgesicle---'s sake, it's NOT about games *I* don't want to play!  It's about the fact that when these games DO boot up, it's a blank ---smurfing--- screen with maybe an LED or numeric display or two.  You have to SIMULATE so much crap to make it actually playable, yet a TRUE VIDEO GAME like PONG or Computer Space gets left out... which is pure ---That which is odiferous and causeth plants to grow--- in my opinion.

My cabs are done... why the ---fudgesicle--- do I still even bother with this ---smurfing--- place.... 

[gman314]

By the way, my specs are: ASUS mb (on board video), AMD 64 dual core cpu, 4 gb ram, samsung 830 series 256 gb SSD.

Why do you never give your processor speed or model number?
It's the most important spec regarding games not running full speed.

Sorry.  I'm usually at work when I send these posts and don't have the specs in front of me.

The CPU is:  AMD|A64 X2 6000 3.0G AM2 2x1M R and the MB is ASUS|M2A-VM HDMI AMD 690G AM2 R

[yotsuya]

My cabs are done... why the ---fudgesicle--- do I still even bother with this ---smurfing--- place.... 

Good question.

[BadMouth]

Oh for ---fudgesicle---'s sake, it's NOT about games *I* don't want to play!  It's about the fact that when these games DO boot up, it's a blank ---smurfing--- screen with maybe an LED or numeric display or two.  You have to SIMULATE so much crap to make it actually playable, yet a TRUE VIDEO GAME like PONG or Computer Space gets left out... which is pure ---That which is odiferous and causeth plants to grow--- in my opinion.

My cabs are done... why the ---fudgesicle--- do I still even bother with this ---smurfing--- place.... 

If those discrete games were 100% emulated in MAME, you'd just complain about the processor requirements being too high.
YOU are the one who wants MAME to be a collection of pc ports instead of an emulator.

I weeded all the stuff I don't want out of my xml file and romset in an afternoon using romlister.
http://www.waste.org/~winkles/ROMLister/
(manually add "mechanical" and anything else to things to exclude at the bottom)

[Haze]

Oh for ---fudgesicle---'s sake, it's NOT about games *I* don't want to play!  It's about the fact that when these games DO boot up, it's a blank ---smurfing--- screen with maybe an LED or numeric display or two.  You have to SIMULATE so much crap to make it actually playable, yet a TRUE VIDEO GAME like PONG or Computer Space gets left out... which is pure ---That which is odiferous and causeth plants to grow--- in my opinion.

My cabs are done... why the ---fudgesicle--- do I still even bother with this ---smurfing--- place.... 

Pong is included, unlike the previous time it appeared it actually does now run a true netlist of the components which is stored in an external 'rom' file.  There is maybe *one* person on the dev team with the hardware level understanding to do something like that, said person isn't working on things like the Fruit Machines.  Also, it's very slow when you consider it's pong, that's what circuit level emulation costs you.

Load up something like '30 test' in the latest version of MAME and you might not even realise it's a non-video game, the internal layout is pretty damn good, it's a fun little reaction tester type game, which admittedly would be a lot easier with a gun or a touchscreen.  Sure in their basic form the Fruit Machines might not look that pretty, but if people do artwork for them they can do, and if they help advance the MAME artwork system and we eventually get the ability to do full 3d simulation of cabinet models which some of the limited tech late 70s / 80s classic games really need anyway then you'll start to see even better things across the board  (something like Space Encounters, would look much better with a more developed artwork system with true light sources, heck even Space Invaders would look better if if you could adjust the viewpoint at will)  By emulating things like Fruit Machines, and being able to identify needs of systems anybody wanting to come up with a new rendering engine is far better positioned to do so.

As I've said, it's all part of the puzzle in the end and nobody is forcing you to run things if you have no interest in them.

As far as download size of the entire rom collection goes that's shrunk recently too, one of the recent things I did was add 7-zip support and the saving of having everything 7-zipped more than offsets the increased size caused by any of the mechanical games anyway, and the entirety of it can be dwarfed by a couple of HDD / CD based titles.

Finally, I don't get why people are taking offence to me looking at it, I've consistently delivered things people WANT to see in MAME over the years, even recently, the PGM games (Demon Front, DoDonPachi II) that many people consider make 146 worth upgrading to, that was my work, the Cave SH3 stuff, getting that to *playable* speeds (even if it's since been taken out) was my work, many of the other significant systems in the past (CPS3, SuperNova, Psikyo SH hardware, the original Sega System 32 implementation) were at least in part, my work.  That's in addition to countless random Korean titles, obscure games on one off hardware and even some most wanted titles form better known manufacturers.  If I want to work on Fruit Machines and Gambling games I'll damn well do so because while as games they generally suck they can be just as interesting to study and it's a *massively* under documented area right now (I can't find any references anywhere for a decent number of games even from the major manufacturers and there are literally countless video based systems we've never seen so much as a rom for either and that's just looking at the UK market)

[rCadeGaming]

Ok, first of all, the sentiments of a certain individual here do not reflect those of the community, at least I should hope not.  Maybe we should just be grateful that MAME devs are taking time out of their busy schedules to have a frank discussion about our concerns here...

RSG is a peculiar case, it's running on the arcade equivalent of a Saturn, and yes, it's always a driver where I've found the input to be laggy.  The I/O chain is quite complex, going through a separate sub-cpu etc. and various layers before it actually gets to the game, and that's on original hardware.  I've heard many reports that a fair number of Saturn games have noticeably laggy controls even on the real system, although I would have thought if RSG suffered form that issue on real hardware more people would have mentioned it.  It is possible there is a bug in the timing, things need tighter syncs, interrupts are being fire off at the wrong times and missed, something like that.  There are definitely still issues with the Saturn emulation (evidenced by MESS where a number of games suffer from no working inputs at all) the problem is fixing some of them makes it even slower, and it's slow enough already for the time being!  I'm not sure I'd recommend the current version for RSG anyway, apparently some of the improvements made to the driver (and improve Saturn support as a whole) have actually caused it to regress in places, it's not a nice system to work with and right now it's a bit like balancing plates.

Oh no, sounds like a mess!  I'm very interested in playing RSG, but ever since I found out about the lag in MAME I had been planning to import the Saturn version; maybe I'll stick with that plan for anything Saturn based.

When I get a copy I'll use a 240fps camera method to check how the lag compares between the Saturn port and in MAME.

Yeah, I've heard of ShmupMAME, they're unfortunately stripping away lag that WAS present in the original games (either by design, some games added it to intentionally be harder!) or by breaking layer sync in the process (some games buffer inputs and/or sprites to ensure the different layers get rendered correctly and in sync)

It achieves what they want, but I find the side-effects undesirable.

Is it possible that the input/frame buffering present in some games would be unnecessary when running on a PC that's fast enough to ensure everything gets done in under a frame?  Perhaps there should be a configuration option to turn buffering on or off, depending if it's necessary in your setup, or for certain games but not others?

I think that if a game added lag just to make the game harder, that's kind of a bad design decision, and I wouldn't mind improving it.  That being said, I understand that MAME's goal is to accurately portray whatever the original hardware did, and "making improvements" based on someone's opinion obviously isn't acceptable in the official MAME release.

What I'd propose is that these kind of changes should be available in optional diff patches.  That way when I compile I could choose to use the hacks where I deem them to be more beneficial than harmful.  I could stick with the official "vanilla" MAME because I appreciate all the advancements you've mentioned, and the hacks I'd like to include wouldn't be mucking up the integrity of the core MAME release.

Are you familiar with this patch?  It seems to remove some buffering, I just recently found it and haven't had time to play with it:

http://daifukkat.su/2012/08/mame-no-buffer-patch/

I've consistently delivered things people WANT to see in MAME over the years, even recently, the PGM games (Demon Front, DoDonPachi II) that many people consider make 146 worth upgrading to, that was my work, the Cave SH3 stuff, getting that to *playable* speeds (even if it's since been taken out) was my work, many of the other significant systems in the past (CPS3, SuperNova, Psikyo SH hardware, the original Sega System 32 implementation) were at least in part, my work.

I for one appreciate all of this immensely, especially the CPS3 emulation.

That Cave stuff was amazing as well.  I'm not an expert on the legal issues, but is their any kind of date we can look forward to when that can be added back in?  Like a certain time period after the initial release, or after it is no longer commercially available?

-

gman, 3.0ghz should be more than plenty for DK unless there's something else wrong with your system.  I'd also agree that the aspect ratio settings should not be having any effect on speed; anything you're noticing is probably an effect of your perception as you said. 

I would leave the aspect ratio at standard 4:3 (may be called 3:4 for vertical games) for most games.  Whatever the "pixel aspect" of these games, they were generally designed to fill a 4:3 monitor.  Games like DK weren't intended to display perfectly square pixels, just look at the way the barrels are drawn.

You should also probably be running Direct3d for your purposes, and you probably are if you didn't change much from the default.  I would guess that you should just keep your DirectX updated to the newest version, but I'll defer to the experts here on that one.

[Haze]

Are you familiar with this patch?  It seems to remove some buffering, I just recently found it and haven't had time to play with it:

http://daifukkat.su/2012/08/mame-no-buffer-patch/

yes, it hacks out the generic buffering of spriteram some games use.

this will cause horrible bg / sprite sync bugs, and possible single frame palette issues etc. too because the sprite updates no longer happen when they should.

it is not the role of mamedev to maintain / offer such hacks, I consider them *incredibly* damaging, along with things like the 'force 60fps' hacks, while the effects of either might not be immediately obvious they're both very dangerous.  The role of Mame / Mamedev is to offer the most accurate emulation we can, not artificially break or enhance it, and of course if it turns out we're emulating something 'too well' it will seem worse in later versions once we start emulating sprite limits causing flickering / additional slowdown etc.  (which again I've seen as ammo against used newer MAME versions, funny how people only want an authentic experience when it's 'better')

there are reasons games might intentionally add lag, input smoothing, ensuring that no rogue movements are triggered are common ones (and in fact in the past people were *demanding* such features in MAME) but sometimes it's done on purpose as part of the game  to give you the feeling that you're trying to move a big heavy ship / tank, crappy design maybe but I've seen it done before.

beyond that the games might want to be able to process some kind of ai based on your movements before your movements happen, to give the computer an edge, it's a bit unfair, but if it knows where you're going to be in 2 frames it has 2 frames extra knowledge to aim bullets at you or whatever, although MOST of the time it's the hardware doing the buffering of sprites and then the game software doing buffering of other registers, palette etc. to keep everything in sync.

the Cave stuff, if it was up to me I'd add at least the driver back, but it isn't, so I don't know.

[rCadeGaming]

it is not the role of mamedev to maintain / offer such hacks

I wasn't suggesting that it should be.  I was just thinking that if someone was going to offer something like ShumpMAME, it would be nice if I could use some of the better changes sparingly in the current MAME with diffs, instead of having to deal with a separate version based on .99.

Maybe some of these hacks could be improved to take advantage of benefits without the problems, but I'm not expecting this of you or any other MAMEdevs if it's not your interest.  Maybe it's something I could work on some day.

there are reasons games might intentionally add lag, input smoothing, ensuring that no rogue movements are triggered are common ones (and in fact in the past people were *demanding* such features in MAME)

Yeah, I understand there has to be some smoothing to avoid erroneous split-second joystick data and such.  We'd never be able to consistently pull off Shoryukens in Street Fighter without this, and just look how much better that's gotten from SFII to SFIV.  When you're getting into several frames of lag though, I think that should be improvable.

the Cave stuff, if it was up to me I'd add at least the driver back, but it isn't, so I don't know.

I just didn't know if there was any kind of statute of limitations on intellectual property after so many years after the product is no longer being sold.  I'm sure we'll have it back eventually.

Any thoughts on this:

"Is it possible that the input/frame buffering present in some games would be unnecessary when running on a PC that's fast enough to ensure everything gets done in under a frame?  Perhaps there should be a configuration option to turn buffering on or off, depending if it's necessary in your setup, or for certain games but not others?"

[gman314]

By the way, my specs are: ASUS mb (on board video), AMD 64 dual core cpu, 4 gb ram, samsung 830 series 256 gb SSD.

Why do you never give your processor speed or model number?
It's the most important spec regarding games not running full speed.

Sorry.  I'm usually at work when I send these posts and don't have the specs in front of me.

The CPU is:  AMD|A64 X2 6000 3.0G AM2 2x1M R and the MB is ASUS|M2A-VM HDMI AMD 690G AM2 R

Sorry to keep butting in, but does anyone have any idea why DK on 147 is running slow for me?  I can't see how the specs would be an issue (especially for DK).

By the way, I figured that I would throw my 2 cents in.  Do I like fruit machine and unplayable pinball roms?  No.  Do I like the fact that my merged 147 set is over 40 gb while my split 127 set is barely 16 gb?  No.  But what is the true reason that Mame exists?  It is to preserve games that we otherwise would likely no longer be able to play.  Think about it, technically, you are only only "legally" entitled to download a rom if you own the actual hardware (anyway, that's what the nag screens say).  So, the bottom line is, to that end, that the developers are doing a great job at preserving "all" of gaming for future generations.  The fact that we can actually get to play these games on our arcade cabs is just an awesome byproduct of this.  I never truly appreciated games like Donkey Kong and Galaga until I built my cab.  Thank youmame developers, for bringing them to my attention.   

[paigeoliver]

Speaking of gambling games. Is Omega's Double Up dumped?

This one here.

http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=7628

I know it isn't the same as HI-LO Double Up Joker Poker or Cal Omega - Game 15.9 (Wild Double-Up).

If it isn't dumped then is there any interest in dumping it? I have one.

[rCadeGaming]

Sorry to keep butting in...

Haha, sorry, I know.  This is interesting stuff though!

I thought you said it was running at a solid 100% with autoframeskip?