Struggling to get 100% with Win7x64 and i5 cpu

[nexuscab]

I've been out of the mame scene for a long time. My first cab was built in 2004 using Advancemame under Fedora Core 5. I miss that setup, things just worked, but the machine is long since dead.

I've given up on Linux because of known issues with trackball not working correctly, so I've moved to Win7 64 Home Premium. I'm more comfortable in Linux than Windows, but in the hopes of having a solid emulator I'm giving Windows a go.

I have crt_emu working well with an ATI HD4350 and a WG D9200 monitor, which looks really great.

What I haven't been successful at is getting games to run at 100% speed. I've been looking at tutorials and reading through the forums so I've been playing with d3d with frame_delay vs. ddraw, enabling multithreading, etc. but things are still slow.

For example, using galaga as a test case. If I use -nothrottle, it runs at 4200%. But with -throttle, I'm seeing games running around 80-90% speed. For my mame.ini I've just started with groovymame.exe -cc and updated a few things, mostly monitor type, nag screens.

I would love some ideas, thanks!

[Sledge]

Post a log so we can see what's happening..
groovymame galaga -v >galaga.txt

[haynor666]

I have similiar problems but only with ddraw and windows xp x64. Windows 7 should work fine. The only problem I have are strange speeds with vector games. What are spec. of your PC ?

[Calamity]

I have similiar problems but only with ddraw and windows xp x64. Windows 7 should work fine. The only problem I have are strange speeds with vector games. What are spec. of your PC ?

Yours is a totally different problem and you'd better open a new thread for it (like the one you have in the Software section).

[Calamity]

Hi nexuscab,

Same "problem":
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,143156.0.html

Create a fresh mame.ini with -cc, so you make sure you start with the stock options. Then only change your monitor type and roms paths.

The option that helps with vertical games running slow is -multithreading. Actually it's -triplebuffer but this is automatically enabled by GroovyMAME. It's only that -triplebuffer needs -multithreading enabled in order to work, and this is disabled by default these days, so you need to enable it manually.

Besides, you must not enable -triplebuffer or -syncrefresh globally in mame.ini. Leave them as "0" and GM will enable the right one when required.

[nexuscab]

Here's the diff between my current and the default mame.ini:

$ diff mame.ini mame.ini.orig
173c173
< disable_nagscreen_patch   0
---
> disable_nagscreen_patch   1
180c180
< monitor                   d9200
---
> monitor                   generic_15


Running with the defaults briefly the logs show ~78% speed:


arcade@arcade-PC /c/mame
$ ./groovymame64.exe -seconds_to_run 10 -v galaga > galaga.txt

arcade@arcade-PC /c/mame
$ tail galaga.txt
Starting Video Screen ':screen'
Starting Speaker ':mono'
Starting Galaga (Namco rev. B) ':'
Average speed: 77.84% (9 seconds)
Switchres: restoring DALDTMCRTBCD400x288x0x52 - Modeline "400x288_52 16.17KHz 52.34Hz" 8.54 400 416 456 528 288 290 293 309   -hsync -vsync
window_proc: WM_NCACTIVATE
blit_lock = TRUE
window_proc: WM_DESTROY
blit_lock = TRUE
Sound: buffer overflows=33 underflows=2


Running with -multithreading enabled is certainly better, goes up to ~99%, close enough.


$ ./groovymame64.exe -seconds_to_run 20 -v -multithreading galaga > galaga.txt               
arcade@arcade-PC /c/mame
$ tail galaga.txt
Starting Speaker ':mono'
Starting Galaga (Namco rev. B) ':'
Average speed: 98.95% (19 seconds)
Switchres: restoring DALDTMCRTBCD400x288x0x52 - Modeline "400x288_52 16.17KHz 52.34Hz" 8.54 400 416 456 528 288 290 293 309   -hsync -vsync
window_proc: WM_NCACTIVATE
blit_lock = TRUE
window_proc: WM_DESTROY
blit_lock = TRUE
Blitting thread destroyed
Sound: buffer overflows=9 underflows=0