Mame32 vs. Mame fps test

[Terry]

I was doing some fps testing with crusin usa and crusin world and I observed something interesting.

I am using a freshly unzipped version of Mame32 .77.  The only changes I made was to enable joystick input, and to uncheck the throttle for crusin usa and cruisn world.  (turned throttling off).  When I play these games on my p4 2.66 machine, crusin usa and crusin world both run at around 30 fps.  This is during game play.

Then I unzip a fresh copy of mame077b, and use createconfig to create an ini file, then make the same changes by enabling joystick, and then setting the throttle to 0.  I run mame from a command prompt to avoid any overhead from my front end.  With both crusin usa and crusin world, I get a significantly lower frame rate of around 15 fps.

Just curious why mame32 runs faster than mame.   I would think it was the other way around.   Almost makes sense to run mame32 under my front end if this is the case with all games.

[Terry]

I am running Windows XP Pro.

[SirPoonga]

Did you download regular mame or optimized mame?

[Terry]

Just the regular mame.  Should I try the optimized mame?  I always thought that the optimized mame was for the old pentium pro processors like the 200Mhz ones.

[SirPoonga]

It will still help out a little as pentiums are backward compatible.

[Terry]

So why does mame32 run faster than regular mame?  Is this apparent on other peoples computers.

[papaschtroumpf]

Just the regular mame.  Should I try the optimized mame?  I always thought that the optimized mame was for the old pentium pro processors like the 200Mhz ones.

Regular mame is not optimized for anything, so it'll run on really old hardware (intel 386 family or above) like a pentium non-MMX, mamepp on the other hand makes the assumption that you have at least a pentum pro or better (intel 586 family or above).

[Terry]

I see.  Thanks!

[Terry]

I tried optimized mame for windows and it didn't seem to make to much difference on my p4 2.8 system.  But what I am still amazed at is how much faster mame32 runs crusin usa and crusin world than either of the regular mames do.

Not that I am intersted in getting these games to work perfectly on my PC, but they seem to be a good benchmark, and sure enough there is something drastically different about mame32 over mame.  I have tested it on a P4 2.8, P4 2.66 and P4 2.53 machine and the results are always the same.  Mame32 plays the crusin games up to twice as fast on my P4 2.8 machine, and the difference is almost as much on my slower machines.  This is with throttling turned off, and everything else is left at it's default value.

I only use analog+ in my cab with my DK front end, and all the games I normally play run perfect, but I stumbled across this speed difference, and now I am curious!

Any comments on this?

[slycrel]

  Yeah, do some more tests and let us know why.  

  Seriously though, that's good to know.  I was contemplating Win98, DOS or Linux.  Anyone know how mame on linux works?  About the same?

[SirPoonga]

It works ok on linux.  Alot more options than windows mame!

However there is crap for FEs for linux.  I had gxmame running which is mame32 for linux.  I downloaded a new version when I redid my computer and I can;t get it to work now.  I have to get advmenu and give that a try.  But so far I can only get mame running from commandline.  I can't get FEs to work.

[slycrel]

  Thanks SirPoonga.  In the long run it might be interesting to work on something with linux, but for now I just want to get things up and going.  I'll probably use Win98, that seems popular and shouldn't be terribly hard to use.  Also, I use OS X at work every day and I'd have a hard time going back to linux.  =)

  Thanks for the info.

[)p(]

Be sure that you are running the same screen resolution and other settings...they may default to different settings as mame32 is basically just the normal mame core with the internal fe attached to it.

peter

[IceCold]

It works ok on linux.  Alot more options than windows mame!

However there is crap for FEs for linux.  I had gxmame running which is mame32 for linux.  I downloaded a new version when I redid my computer and I can;t get it to work now.  I have to get advmenu and give that a try.  But so far I can only get mame running from commandline.  I can't get FEs to work.

If you ever find a good frontend, please tell me.  I'd really like to use linux in my arcade cab.

[Howard_Casto]

Be sure that you are running the same screen resolution and other settings...they may default to different settings as mame32 is basically just the normal mame core with the internal fe attached to it.

peter

And that's the most likely culprit.  Mame and mame32 are the same, but mame32 has default settings that mame can't have.

[Terry]

It's interesting that these default settings in mame32 make it run so much faster.   One would think that just the core mame would run faster than mame32 with its GUI.   If I knew a bit more about the software, I would be interested in finding out what settings mame32 uses that the core mame can not have.

I assume if mame and mame32 are the same, then these differences would reside in the .ini files.   Mame32 uses two of them, one I think is just for the user interface stuff.

But I'm sure there's more involved than that.

Peter, I went through the basic stuff and set the .ini files the same in mame32 and mame, screen resolution, joystick stuff, frameskips, throttling, sounds, etc...  But as always, mame32 is significantly faster than mame on 3 of my machines.  2 running XP and one running 2000.  Though I don't know enough about the software to get into it too deep.

Terry

[Minwah]

It's interesting that these default settings in mame32 make it run so much faster.   One would think that just the core mame would run faster than mame32 with its GUI.   If I knew a bit more about the software, I would be interested in finding out what settings mame32 uses that the core mame can not have.

I assume if mame and mame32 are the same, then these differences would reside in the .ini files.   Mame32 uses two of them, one I think is just for the user interface stuff.

But I'm sure there's more involved than that.

Peter, I went through the basic stuff and set the .ini files the same in mame32 and mame, screen resolution, joystick stuff, frameskips, throttling, sounds, etc...  But as always, mame32 is significantly faster than mame on 3 of my machines.  2 running XP and one running 2000.  Though I don't know enough about the software to get into it too deep.

Terry

Check hwstrech (hardware stretch) too - sometimes having it turned ON can give a big performance boost.  (Sometimes it makes performance worse too).  Also check vsync, triple buffering etc. while you are at it...

[Terry]

Well, I played with the .ini files in mame and mame32 and mame32 still runs significantly faster no matter how I set it up.  I can get mame32 to run even faster by turning off some of the options like the sound, hardware stretching, and the clean strech, and a few other things I played around with.  Tripple buffering didn't seem to change the speed any.

But when I set the exact same options in regular mame, it still runs slower.  For example, I can get crusin world to play at 90% to 100% gamespeed in mame32 with no sound, no frameskip, hardware strecth disabled (though this didn't seem to make much difference), clean stretch disabled, and the resolution depth set to 16bit (this also didn't seem to make much difference.)  In regular mame with the exact same settings in the .ini file, it will play around 50% to 70% gamespeed.  This is on my P4 2.8 machine with W2K.

Anyway, I don't know what else to test.  Regular mame just runs games slower (at least the ones I have tested) than mame32.   Again, these are my personal test results, so who knows if I am overlooking some obvious settings.  But even when I leave mame32 with it's default settings, I still can not optimize regular mame to reach the speeds of mame32.

Has anyone else tried this?  It is a very quick and simple test.  I am wondering if others notice the same thing on their machines.  Crusin USA and Crusin World are good benchmark games since they don't run at full speed.

[Jakobud]

It works ok on linux.  Alot more options than windows mame!

However there is crap for FEs for linux.  I had gxmame running which is mame32 for linux.  I downloaded a new version when I redid my computer and I can;t get it to work now.  I have to get advmenu and give that a try.  But so far I can only get mame running from commandline.  I can't get FEs to work.

If you ever find a good frontend, please tell me.  I'd really like to use linux in my arcade cab.

Try Lemon Launcher.  Its similar to Game Launcher in looks.  Only works for Mame (not really for other emu's) so in some ways its not as good as Game Launcher, but one very very very nice thing about it is the option for an unlimited number of submenu's and sub-sub menu's and sub-sub-sub ...etc menu's.

[iwillfearnoevil]

this is weird because everything i've read says mame32 is a lot slower.

[Terry]

Have you downloaded the latest mame32 and the latest regular mame and compared the two?  I would also assume mame32 was slower, but at least on my three machines with all the default settings, and even optimizing the setting for performance in regular mame, mame32 is always faster.

If anyone else wants to test, it only takes a few minutes.  I used the crusn usa and crusn world games since they will not run at full speed and put them in the default rom directories.  Also the best thing to do is turn off automatic frame skipping and select draw every frame in mame32, and in regular mame in the .ini file, just set autoframeskip = 0.  That basically leaves everything in it's default settings but gives a little more speed optimization.  To run the games in regular mame put the mame077b directory in your C: folder, and then select the RUN from the start menu and type c:/mame077b/mame crusnusa <ENTER>.  Play it using the keyboard and compare the difference with F11 (FPS monitor) turned on.

[dreamfreak]

hi,
have someone tryed advancedmame (optimized for p4 or athlon) or nonamemame ?

[slycrel]

It works ok on linux.  Alot more options than windows mame!

However there is crap for FEs for linux.  I had gxmame running which is mame32 for linux.  I downloaded a new version when I redid my computer and I can;t get it to work now.  I have to get advmenu and give that a try.  But so far I can only get mame running from commandline.  I can't get FEs to work.

If you ever find a good frontend, please tell me.  I'd really like to use linux in my arcade cab.

  Just ran across this, let me know if it's any good.  

  http://www.gurkensalat.com/arcade/frontend.html