Some games running at 85% speed

[chromium]

Hi all, excuse the n00b. I've only just got GroovyMame going for the first time today. It's hooked up to a couple of CRTs I got from paradroid via a VGA to SCART cable using a HD4850 and crt_emudriver in Windows XP 64. CPU is an i7-930 and I have 12GB of ram in the box, so I don't think the PC hardware is the issue

Most games work fine, but there are a few such as wonder boy, wonderboy in monsterland and pacman that run at 85% speed. I've tried various monitor modes in the mame.ini such as arcade_15ex, arcade_15, pal, ntsc and generic_15 but nothing helps.
I've tried running vmmaker with various monitor settings too. Is there a solution for this or do I need to change settings and put up with tearing or stuttering sound or live with the slow speed?

Cheers.

[Sledge]

Reporting problems. How to create a log

If you're experiencing problems with a certain game, please create a log and post it when reporting the problem. This will provide most of the required information beforehand and will save us from asking you to post a log, which depending on your time zone may delay the answer by a couple of days.

Steps to create a log:

- Run GroovyMAME like this:

c:\mame_folder>groovymame.exe romname -v >romname.txt

- Upload romname.txt as an attachment to your post. Please don't paste it inside the edit box as it makes things unreadable.

maybe upload your mame.ini (as mame.ini.txt) as well

[chromium]

Thanks for the tips

[Calamity]

Hi chromium,

The pacman case is typical for being a vertical game, you can simply enable -multithreading and -triplebuffer for this one.

But the wboy one is really odd. Having looked through your log, I can't see any reason for it running at 84%. First, do the obvious check of disabling throttling by pressing F11, and run it at full speed, that will show us it's not CPU related. Then you need to find out if the problem is that it's running at an odd refresh. If this is the case, the scroll should be perfectly smooth despite the wrong speed. This would mean the actual refresh is 50.4 Hz (very odd).

[chromium]

Thanks for the reply. I'll try the throttling thing later and get back to you. It is weird because from what I can see in the log it is picking the correct res and refresh rate, which is 60Hz. I've tried it on 2 different TVs for the same result. Wonderboy in Monsterland was the first game I tried so at first I thought I'd done something wrong and all games would be like that, but when I tried others they were running at or close to 100%.

[chromium]

I tried wonderboy in monsterland again with no throttling and all that happened was the music went funny, like stuttering and skipping. Game still ran at around 85%.
I alt-tabbed out of groovymame to check CPU usage and the game started running insanely fast, at least I could hear the music running really fast. GroovyMame was only using around 10% cpu, so no idea what the issue is

I just tried wbml with triplebuffering and multithreading and it ran at 100%, same with wboy

It doesn't have tearing or jerkiness but it doesn't quite seem silky smooth, no idea if it's supposed to, probably wasn't checking for smooth scrolling last time I played it in the arcades

[Calamity]

I tried wonderboy in monsterland again with no throttling and all that happened was the music went funny, like stuttering and skipping. Game still ran at around 85%.

 

What happens if you switch to DirectDraw? (-video ddraw)

Running with -triplebuffering will do the trick but that's cheating and you'll get stuttering, these games should run at 100% just with vsync.

[chromium]

I tried wonderboy in monsterland again with no throttling and all that happened was the music went funny, like stuttering and skipping. Game still ran at around 85%.

 

What happens if you switch to DirectDraw? (-video ddraw)

Running with -triplebuffering will do the trick but that's cheating and you'll get stuttering, these games should run at 100% just with vsync.

Tried tried wbml with -video ddraw and it ran at 50%!!

[Calamity]

That's odd. Some test I'd do:

- Launch ArcadeOSD and test the 512x240@60 video mode. Press "5" while in full screen mode to measure the refresh rate.
- Launch wbml like this: groovymame wbml -nomodeline_generation

[chromium]

That's odd. Some test I'd do:

- Launch ArcadeOSD and test the 512x240@60 video mode. Press "5" while in full screen mode to measure the refresh rate.
- Launch wbml like this: groovymame wbml -nomodeline_generation

512x240@60p measured V (Hz) at 59.980 and H (kHz) at 15.714

Tried with -nomodeline_generation and it still ran at 85% (see attached)

Hmm, I tried normal mame64.exe and it still ran at 85%, even on an LCD. Surely it's not my CPU holding it back, it's an i7-930

[Calamity]

Hmm, I tried normal mame64.exe and it still ran at 85%, even on an LCD

So do you mean that base line MAME also runs wbml at 85%? There's something really odd going on there. Have you tried it in the same folder where GroovyMAME is or created a new one? I'm wondering if any old config file in the ./cfg folder could be causing issues...

[chromium]

Hmm, I tried normal mame64.exe and it still ran at 85%, even on an LCD

So do you mean that base line MAME also runs wbml at 85%? There's something really odd going on there. Have you tried it in the same folder where GroovyMAME is or created a new one? I'm wondering if any old config file in the ./cfg folder could be causing issues...

It's totally weird. I tried the same mame folder, with same config, etc on a different PC and wbml runs at 100%.

I tried a brand new mame folder on my groovymame machine, extracted straight from the official mame archive and wbml still runs at 85%. Street Fighter II runs at 100% as well as pretty much everything else I've tried, so I'd be surprised if my PC couldn't handle wboy and wbml. I am tempted to try installing official Radeon drivers to see if it's CRT emudriver causing the issue but I'm worried it'll be a pain to get it installed again.

Just tried some other games that I thought might be troublesome and it's the vertical games like commando, 1942, pacmania. Pacmania runs at around 85% without triplebuffer and multithreading and commando and 1942 run at 97%. I think the arcade refresh is 60hz and it's selecting 58.48 for me. Does that mean the mode selection can't find a modeline at the right refresh for me? I'm not really sure how the mode generation and selection works, I've done a lot of reading but still a bit confused. If I run the vertical games with the orientation set to vertical they all run at 100%. wbml and wboy are still baffling though.

Also, is there a setting that makes the vertical games auto rotate rather than having to set the orientation switch each time? I have a small CRT here that I can easily turn on its side for vertical games. I've tried playing with the rotate option in the ini, setting it to 0 and 1, chaging autorol and autoror but nothing works. If I set -norotate, -autorol or -autror from the command line it works but I'd rather have it in the ini. It looks like switchres is overriding what I have in the core rotation options of the mame.ini. The rotation options in the ini work fine if I use a vanilla mame with no switchres settings in the ini

Edit: So it looks like an i7-930 at 2.9 Ghz isn't fast enough for some games, I can kind of understand it only running Street Fighter EX2 at 60% with no multithreading (I can get it up to 86% turning multithreading on. I can't understand why Wonderboy in Monsterland won't run at 100%, even with MT on it only runs at 92%. I thought a P4 would have been fast enough for wbml, I'm sure I was running it years ago with no problems. I installed the latest official Catalyst and it didn't help, so nothing to do with crt_emudriver or groovymame Maybe XP 64 performs poorly? I tried disabling hyperthreading my bios too to make sure it wasn't causing anything funny, but not joy.

My i7-4770k running Windows 8.1 is running everything I throw at it at 100% I wanted a dedicated groovymame machine though

Just did a quick test on wbml with -nothrottle. It runs at 82% on my i7-930 and 1300% on my i7-4770k, is my 4770k really 15x faster? I wouldn't have thought so

I did the same test with -mt on and my i7-930 ran at 873% (more like it) and the i7-4770k at 1473%, so why on earth is throttling bringing it down under 100% on the i7-930? Argh, tearing my hair out over this, been messing with it all day! It has to be an XP x64 thing.

Another edit:

I'm convinced that xp64 just plain sucks. Tried standard mame64 on a windows 7 x64 machine with a Q6600 and 4GB ram and everything is running at 100%, even sfex2, this is without -mt on. So if my ancient Q6600 can run this games fine then surely my much newer i7-930 can. I installed xp x64 because the groovymame guide I followed recommended it! Can't believe how much time I have wasted on this crap! I think I might just use xp32 on my Q6600 for groovymame and be done with and install an operating system on the i7-930 that it deserves

It's a real shame we can't use windows 7 for crt_emudriver

[Calamity]

Hi chromium,

- You must not use the usual rotate options with GroovyMAME. Use the -orientation option instead, this will manage all required rotation options. If you plan to tate your TV, use the 'rotate_r' or 'rotate_l' params with the -orientation option.

- Looks like you're having a problem there with XP 64, definitely. Most of us are using XP 64 just fine. Probably it's not too compatible with your hardware or you don't have all the required drivers for your MB chipset, or whatever. So maybe XP 32 would be better after all.

- I'd just test GroovyArcade live cd with your i7-930, so you can measure its performance without XP 64.

- We'll have W7 support soon. I'm convinced many users will go back to XP 64 after testing it.

[chromium]

Hi chromium,

- You must not use the usual rotate options with GroovyMAME. Use the -orientation option instead, this will manage all required rotation options. If you plan to tate your TV, use the 'rotate_r' or 'rotate_l' params with the -orientation option.

- Looks like you're having a problem there with XP 64, definitely. Most of us are using XP 64 just fine. Probably it's not too compatible with your hardware or you don't have all the required drivers for your MB chipset, or whatever. So maybe XP 32 would be better after all.

- I'd just test GroovyArcade live cd with your i7-930, so you can measure its performance without XP 64.

- We'll have W7 support soon. I'm convinced many users will go back to XP 64 after testing it.

Yes, definitely having xp64 trauma, I figured most were using it so it must be me I've got the latest drivers for everything, it's a Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R with an Intel X58 chipset, so nothing really fancy there. I did get AHCI going on my intel SATA controller, which was a pain at first, it seems to be ok though. I also realigned my SSD partition and disk performance is pretty good, reading at around 280MB/sec and writing at 180MB/sec. No idea what it could be, is there a better place I could discuss it on here?

As another test I pulled out an old Dell laptop with a Core 2 T7300 running Windows 8.1 and that also runs wbml at 100% fine and even sfex2 at 100%!

I did have a go at that live CD earlier but I couldn't get it working properly. I gave it my mame roms folder but it still only showed me the built in list and when I selected a game the I couldn't get a picture on either my CRT or PC monitor. Might have another go. I'm sure it's not the PC though if much lesser hardware is performing much better.

[Calamity]

Make sure to check the most recent live-cd, posted yesterday: http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,130667.msg1422206.html#msg1422206

[chromium]

Make sure to check the most recent live-cd, posted yesterday: http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,130667.msg1422206.html#msg1422206

Oh what

I tried one from Feb last year, it's all I could find. Anyway, I was able to run groovymame from xterm on it and everything is running at 100% on this i7-930, so xp x64 is definitely the culprit. No idea how I'm going to solve this

[chromium]

So, installed windows 7 x64 on the i7-930 and everything runs great, so now how the hell do I get XP x64 to play nicely?