MAMEWAH SLOW WITH LARGE MAME COLLECTION

[colonelsnow]

I have 3000 plus Mame roms. Mamewah is very slow when I try to switch from Mame to the next emulator. Is there a slution to that other than fewer roms?

[JoyMonkey]

Are you running Windows XP? Perhaps you just need to switch off XP's zip file support. By default, XP reads zip files as folders; so a large collection of zip files and make it crawl when reading folder contents.

To turn off XP's zip support:
Click Start, then Run. Type "regsvr32 /u %windir%\system32\zipfldr.dll" at the prompt and click OK. Reboot.
Want it back? Do the same thing; just leave out the "/u" in the command above and XP's handling of ZIP files will be restored.

Here's a few rants about it, you might want to read one of these first:
http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/article03-202
http://www.lecour.net/richard/archives/001066.html

[Trenchbroom]

And make sure you turn off the "refresh picture" feature, that way when you are scrolling with the joysticks it doesn't have to pause to load and display the pic of each game you are scrolling through.  Helps quite a bit.

[stuzza]

I used to have the same problem with my old cabinet running Win98 and an older version of Mamewah.  At one stage it took up to 5 seconds to switch from the Mame list to the next emulator.  If your not running the latest Mamewah, I'd suggest upgrading to that.  Also go to WinXP if your running 98. (if your machine can support it).

[JoeB]

I once tried to use MAMEWAH against my ROM dump directory (I think it's missing only 1 MAME game) and it works nice and fast.

What CPU are you running?  I got a P4 2.53Ghz with 756MB of RAM.

Mind you my arcade machine has only ~125 games broken across a few categories (Classics, arcade, sports, shooters, fighters, racing & daphne).

I can't imagine trying to find my favorite game between 3000 using a joystick!    

[Minwah]

I have 3000 plus Mame roms. Mamewah is very slow when I try to switch from Mame to the next emulator. Is there a slution to that other than fewer roms?

This is a known Win98 issue...basically the best you can do is use a filtered (Custom) list(s) so that you are not switching from such a large list.  For some reason Win98 has a problem clearing a lot of info from memory prior to reading the new games list.

One of those things I hope to improve in the future...