fast enough cpu?

[jim mccartney]

My buddy has a 833mhz pentium running mame32.  We want to play mk real bad on his machiene but it does run smotth at all.  It runs like it's on a p150.  Any ideas what could cause these.  To run the mk games do you need a higher end cpu than that.  I would think a 833 should blow it away.  Any info would be greatly appreciated.  Later

[brandon]

That should be fast enough to run it.  I have a 900mhz Athlon and it runs fine for me.  I think the most demanding thing for those games is the sound.  It used to run decent on my 200mhz mmx with the sound disabled.  He should try disabling the sound just to get an idea what may be slowing it down.  If that does it then I would try finding different soundcard drivers or maybe lowering the sample rate in mame.   If its still slow then I'm not sure   Maybe you could try the various versions of MAME DOS/Win to help narrow down the problem.  Hope this helps

[jim mccartney]

Not to sound completly stupid but is there an easy way to disable sound in mame? thanks!

[Howard_Casto]

you've got enugh processor power, but that's not all you need.  A good video card will be necessary as well.  I'm not saying you need a 64mb monster or anything like that, but a cheap 2 dollar integreated video card is going to give poor performance no matter what you do with it.  Also do you have enough ram?  Mk runs sluggish with 128 mb of ram, it's runs adequately with 256 and full speed with more.  The memory isn't as much for the graphics as it is for the allocaiton of the sound processors (both on your sound card and the emulated chip that mame is intrepreting.)  I've got a athlon 900mhz iwth 500+ megs of ram and a 32mb ati a-i-w 128 pci card.  Mk Mk2 and mk3 run smooth as silk on my machine.  

I hope that helps

[brandon]

Hey Jim, to disable the sound in MK you can right click on it in the list and go to properties the click Sound tab and uncheck enable sound.

[jim mccartney]

Thanks everybody for the help. I've got a 233mhz with 256M of ram and without sound mk almost ran great.  So I can't imagine that there's not just a little bit of tweaking we need to do with his cpu.  Unfortunatly he's in the middle of moving so we can't really mess with it right now.  Thanks again everybody I'll keep you posted!