different emulators

[cheezeflap]

Allright, I know this is going to come off as a really stupid question but...
I'm having a little trouble telling the difference between different releases of the Mame emulators out there.    There are dozens of versions (advanceMame,original mame, no name mame,mameFX,ect) but I can't tell what is differents with any of them are.   Im seting up Mamewah to work with a 27 inch TV via a Radion 8500 DV card.

Can someone tell me what the differences are with the major realeases and maybe make a recomendation for me?

Thanks

[Khenemet Heru]

Regular MAME is what it is. As for the variants, I only tried a few, but the various flavors are designed to support things that vanilla MAME does not or doesn't handle well.

AdvanceMAME and a few others are geared towards using an ArcadeVGA card for an arcade monitor; SmoothMAME is good if you have a funky monitor that doesn't like odd resolutions (it runs everything at 60hz); FastMAME is heavily optimized to make almost anything run at- or as near to- full speed as possible without having to resort to heavy frameskipping; MAMEAnalog+ provides support for analog controls and some odd mouse/trackball arrangements, as well as multiple controls of the same type (2 lightguns for example). NoNameMAME is essentially all of them rolled into one program, with the result (I'm finding anyhow) that it's the most compatible and flexible of the variants.

I would try AdvanceMAME, SmoothMAME if you can compile it yourself...  but NoNameMAME is my personal recommendation.

I hope this all helps, if you have specific questions related to your hardware ask, someone here will definitely have an answer.

[Khenemet Heru]

Regular MAME is what it is. As for the variants, I only tried a few, but the various flavors are designed to support things that vanilla MAME does not or doesn't handle well.

AdvanceMAME and a few others are geared towards using an ArcadeVGA card for an arcade monitor; SmoothMAME is good if you have a funky monitor that doesn't like odd resolutions (it runs everything at 60hz); FastMAME is heavily optimized to make almost anything run at- or as near to- full speed as possible without having to resort to heavy frameskipping; MAMEAnalog+ provides support for analog controls and some odd mouse/trackball arrangements, as well as multiple controls of the same type (2 lightguns for example). NoNameMAME is essentially all of them rolled into one program, with the result (I'm finding anyhow) that it's the most compatible and flexible of the variants.

I would try AdvanceMAME, SmoothMAME if you can compile it yourself...  but NoNameMAME is my personal recommendation.

I hope this all helps, if you have specific questions related to your hardware ask, someone here will definitely have an answer.

[ErikRuud]

My understanding is that FastMAME was compiled using a different compiler that was optimised for Windows.  The code is exactly the same as regular mame.  Using FastMAME does not mean that everything will run at full speed.  It only means that thing should run faster under windows.  I have tried it on a slower PC, and some games runn faster, but many do not, or are not noticeably faster.