Mamewah slows MAME down?

[Cirrus]

I recently got Mamewah working, and found that it slowed down my "newer" mame games quite a bit.  When playing through Mame32, which isn't as pretty, they played great.  

Is this because I have a big background file and display screenshots/marquees?  I'm assuming they must still bog the hardware down in the background.  

I'm sure someone has noticed this.   Any suggestions?  Perhaps there is another frontend that is very small and unimposing.  I'm running a P3-450 in my cabinet, but it can handle these games.

Thanks!

[KHAN]

MameWah is not invading for mame.It provides a best platform
to run games quite perfectly.Mamewah is fully customisable,it does
not mean that heavy skins intrupt between MameWAH and MAME.

All fake...
                 There is no comparision between mamewah with mame
                 and mame32

Personally i recommand you to keep MameWah as a frontend
and try to look arround your confuguration settings and mame.ini

[Buddabing]

I recently got Mamewah working, and found that it slowed down my "newer" mame games quite a bit.  When playing through Mame32, which isn't as pretty, they played great.  

Is this because I have a big background file and display screenshots/marquees?  I'm assuming they must still bog the hardware down in the background.  

I'm sure someone has noticed this.   Any suggestions?  Perhaps there is another frontend that is very small and unimposing.  I'm running a P3-450 in my cabinet, but it can handle these games.

Thanks!

It's possible that more memory would remedy your situation. How much do you have? I'm guessing that Mame32 takes up less memory than MAMEWah. If you don't have enough, then you'll start swapping out to disk, which will cause the delays you mentioned.

[Cirrus]

Well, I have nearly 400 megs of RAM on that computer.  How much could Mamewah really take up?  A few megs overall, I would guess.  I have no idea.  There is absolutely a difference though, no question.  Mostly, it is Neo Geo games that slow down.  

Sound skips a bit, action is more choppy, etc.  And I hate switching to the Mame32 frontend to play those games...

[arcaic]

When mame is running having been launched by Mamewah, Mamewah isnt using any CPU cycles at all (this may change slightly post 1.51 but is still negligable).

This means that mamewah cannot directly be affecting the performance of Mame. If memory is tight then there could be an issue but doesnt seem likely in your case.

The thing here is that your not comparing like with like. Although from the same source base Mame32 and command line mame are not identical (I'm not sure but does Mame32 use the MS Visual C compiler?).

What you should try is opening a command prompt and then running one of the games that has problems using....


mame 'thegame'

This will essentially be doing exactly what mamewah does. If you dont have the same speed issues then let us know and we will think again.

if the game is still slow from Mamewah and from the command line then its an issue that lies in the differences between mame32 and command line mame and I think you'll be stuck with it.

cheers

Andy

[Cirrus]

Well, that makes sense to me.  I wonder, is it possible for Mamewah to use the mame32.exe executable?  Or are they very different?

The little frontend that comes with mame32 seems semi-nice, but not nearly as streamlined as mamewah. (Plus, you need to use a mouse to get around, it seems.)

Are there any frontends for mame32 that are more similar to mamewah?

[Minwah]

Here's what I think the problem is:

You are probably using MAME's 'resolution auto' setting.  When MAME is launched from a commandline (at desktop res.), it may pick different resolutions for the game than when launched from MAMEWAH (assuming MW is running at a different res. to your desktop).  Running MAME at different resolutions can give dramatically different performance in some cases.

As Khan said edit your mame.ini file, and set a fixed resolution (640x480 is a good start for a PC monitor), and if neccessary play around with some other settings (turning on hwstretch often improves performance).