Joust Question

[jedimason]

Here's the situation:

When I play Joust, in certain moments of the game the birds start flying pretty slow and then suddenly start speeding up again after I have beaten that level.  Kind of like there is a sudden drop in framerate.  Is this normal?  I know it's not my system(Athlon xp2000) so is this just something inherant in the game?
The frameskip is set to auto just like all the other games that not one has had a problem.

Thanks for the help,

Jedimason

[REBIRTH]

Hit your F11 key to see the framerate while you are playing and see if it changes a lot.  The FPS will display in the upper right corner, if you see i go from llike 20 to 60 then there is an issue.

It doesn't sound right.  The birds fly at basically the same speed from the start of the level to the end of the level.  Obviousy as they are flying around they'll switch directions which means the will slow to a stop and reverse direction or drop down/up the screen - but the other birds would continue at the same speed while this is going on.  The only other thing is the... darn I should know the name of the thing, I play this game a lot - the terradactal looking thing that comes out if you take too much time on the board, that will fly somewhat slow and then once you clear the board, it will speed up to get off the board so that the next level can start - but that doesn't sound like it is what you are talking about.

[Floyd10]

I have this problem too. And not just in this game. It seems like the comp is bogged down, but we each have high end computers. its messed up. What front end do you have? and what ver of mame?

[jedimason]

Okay, I have been messing around with Joust and the settings.  I just played it and it never moved from 60 fps even though I still had 2 times during the course of the game(Over 100,000 for me!  not bad while watching the framerate in the corner) that everything just seemed to go into slow-mo for a few seconds and then it speeds back up.  It seems to happen after I have died on a level and then regenerate.  Do you think it is my rom or what?

Mame version .79
Mamewah frontend

[REBIRTH]

Odd, I have no clue.  Hopefully someone else can answer.  A couple of ideas which I doubt will help but might as well yell out what I can think of:

- Is there anything else running in the background?  Anti-virus or task scheduler, something like that?  I have nothing running in the background at all.

- may want to run a anti-adware check on your hard drive (like with search & destroy, or similar product).  Maybe you have some adware lurking in your PC that wakes up every now and then.  My regular PC was having an issue like that, every 10 minutes or so it would really slow down for a couple of minutes - ran an anti-adware program which found and deleted almost 50 adware programs.  Ran fine after that.

[Edgedamage]

Even big blue can't run joust at full speed. The reason is even the original hardware had problems. I have owned/repaired 20 jousts. And they all have this problem the original processor just took a little time to catch up. So to answer you there is nothing wrong with your systems. Here's a cool trick to do to Defender on wave 2 save all the humans and keep them under your ship. Save the pod for last. Now with only the pod left land all the humans in the same spot and press smart bomb at the same time. On the original machine it would the hang the processor for about three minutes. It was cool to see the smart bomb get rid of a pod frame by frame. #1 screen flashes white #2 pod opens #3 swarmers show on screen #4 some swarmers get killed some warp out to other side of planet. Also watch out because when the machine "catches up with the action" there will be some swarmers left and where the humans were landed there is too many of them in one spot. And they start walking down from the top of the screen and it is easy to kill them with the ships laser. We used to do this in the arcades in the 80's

[Floyd10]

This sometimes happens for me in MK3. Any sugg?

[jedimason]

Even big blue can't run joust at full speed. The reason is even the original hardware had problems. I have owned/repaired 20 jousts. And they all have this problem the original processor just took a little time to catch up. So to answer you there is nothing wrong with your systems.

Thanks for the info.  I figured it would probably be something with the original hardware.  I have nothing elso running(I don't have anything else on it besides emulators and games) and have never had it hooked up to the internet besides updating windows.

[REBIRTH]

Even big blue can't run joust at full speed. The reason is even the original hardware had problems. I have owned/repaired 20 jousts. And they all have this problem the original processor just took a little time to catch up. So to answer you there is nothing wrong with your systems.

I disagree - I have Joust running on 3 different machines, a friend who has it on his Mame cab as well - that is 4 machines, all runs fine, 60FPS, plays perfectly.  Joust isn't a "big" game that a typical PC nowadays can't keep up with.  There may have been an issue with the processors in the days of the original Joust cabinet, but running the ROM on a current PC should be no problem at all.

[wakerlet]

I think you are all missing the point.  This is how the game worked in the arcades when there were a lot of sprites on the screen and since MAME emulates the original hardware, this happens when playing it on your computer as well.  It is true to the original.

[Edgedamage]

I think you are all missing the point.  This is how the game worked in the arcades when there were a lot of sprites on the screen and since MAME emulates the original hardware, this happens when playing it on your computer as well.  It is true to the original.

AAAAAAAHHHHHHH  someone who gets it!!

[lokki]

I think you are all missing the point.  This is how the game worked in the arcades when there were a lot of sprites on the screen and since MAME emulates the original hardware, this happens when playing it on your computer as well.  It is true to the original.

AAAAAAAHHHHHHH  someone who gets it!!

I think you mean even Joust cant run Joust at full speed :-)

[DennisInMN]

Yep, that is how the original arcade game played.  When I started reading this thread I had a flashback of playing this game at the Ben Franklins by my house.  The kids in the neighborhood would line up with their quarters on the machine for the next game.  Its been so long ago that I don't remember what level it was that you could get the last enemy trapped by the hand, stand on the center land mass and kill the terri over and over and over and....

As a side note, I just got my cab in a playable state this weekend and played Joust with a joystick for the first time in a long, long time.  It felt great!!

[REBIRTH]

I dunno, I play that game all the time and never noticed it changing speeds like that at all.  I've played it maybe 20 times since seeing this thread, so I am looking for it - don't see a thing.  The only bird that changes speeds like that on my Mame is the teradactyl thing.  I assume everyone is right though, so I'll sit down.