Author Topic: Increasing Performance of Mame (Read 6380 times)

Demon-Seed · « **on:** December 24, 2002, 03:38:14 pm »

Hi,
Some games do not run as good as I had hoped. Ie) Area 51. I relize that these games may need more juice but I wanted to know if anyone knew of any ways to increase performance? I am running the windows command line one, a duron 900mhz system, xp, 256mb ram and a geforce card. I could up my system to a 1.2 tbird but i am not willing to do it unless it will really help. Down the road I plan on doing the 4ghz thing..any good prices? ehhe

take care
Jim

Howard_Casto · « **Reply #1 on:** December 25, 2002, 04:13:35 am »

Double your ram, that will help on the harddrive games like area 51. You can also turn on cheats and mess with overclocking/underclocking the virtual processors. This is in the "~" menu I believe but I haven't messed with it in a while and they ONLY show up with cheats turned on. The 1.2 gig processor will help for maybe area51 and those games, but not for much else, there isn't a big leap from a 900 to 1.2 unless the bus-speed/cache is a great deal better.

Merry Christmas!

SNAAAKE · « **Reply #2 on:** December 25, 2002, 09:10:05 pm »

i dont think area 51 would even run 100% without some 4ghz pc..i heard that somewhere that these newer games(cruise n usa and others).

I might be wrong but double you ram..i have 1 gig of ram and things works perfect except those games(newer).

SirPoonga · « **Reply #3 on:** December 25, 2002, 10:33:50 pm »

If oyu don't care about sond you can turn sound off, that will help the fps.

Howard_Casto · « **Reply #4 on:** December 25, 2002, 11:13:00 pm »

Area51 and maximum force are not 3d games and thus their system requirements are much lower than the crusin games. Max force almost runs at full speed on my puny 900mhz with 512 ram. The only slowdown you should see in those two games is on the scene transition as some funy video efects are used which slow things down.

But both guys are right ram is going to help as well as turning off the sound. However as both games are at a playable speed on my pc I see no reason why you couldn't get them working if you had at least 512 mb of ram.

Ghoul · « **Reply #5 on:** December 26, 2002, 03:16:56 am »

Quote from: SNAAAKE on December 25, 2002, 09:10:05 pm

i dont think area 51 would even run 100% without some 4ghz pc..

I dunno, I ran the first level of area 51 as a test on my new comp (athlon xp 2000+ 512MB pc2100 ram) and it ran with 0 slowdown, at least no slowdown that I noticed.

Cruisin on the other hand, is a monster.

JLR2000 · « **Reply #6 on:** December 26, 2002, 12:08:00 pm »

Are you using integrated sound, or do you have a separate sound card? If you are using sound from the MB, buy a cheapie sb compatible sound card. When using the integrated sound, you are using CPU that could be used by the game.

Right now my cab has an AMD TBird 1.2 with 512 ram, $7 soundcard, ATI 8 or 16mg video card with TV out running MAME .60 and getting full speed on everything (Stun Runner runs well, maybe a glitch here or there, but I'm not sure thats the machine or the game). Everything else runs great....of course I'm only up to .60, so the newer stuff may need more UMPF!

Anyway, I found that a separate soundcard helps, and they are usually cheap.....

Just my 2 cents.

u_rebelscum · « **Reply #7 on:** December 27, 2002, 02:00:39 am »

If you are using win mame, add "-nosleep" (or "sleep 0" to mame.ini), if you haven't already. Nosleep makes sure mame doesn't give up the cpu to other processes.

FYI: Mame32, nosleep is default, in (win) mame sleep is default.

ScienceofSpock · « **Reply #8 on:** December 31, 2002, 01:51:03 am »

I run a 1.4ghz Athlon (not an "xp", though I don't know if there is a difference) with 512mb ram, 266mhz fsb, SB Live! and a GeForce2 Pro in my cabinet, and an Athlon Xp +2000, 1gb ram, 333mhz fsb, Onboard 5.1 sound, Geforce2 Pro in my PC and I don't notice a difference in Area 51 or Max Force between the two systems. I haven't tried Cruisin USA at all, though.

Lilwolf · « **Reply #9 on:** January 04, 2003, 02:06:25 pm »

quick note. Durans are about 20% slower then the same speed athlon. So a 900mhz duron probably can't handle it even without sound.

my 1ghz athlon can without sound. And almost with sound (80% I think). So a new processor will probably be needed.

Howard_Casto · « **Reply #10 on:** January 04, 2003, 05:23:17 pm »

That is true, I had completely forgot about that.... for those of you that care durons are more geared towards workstations and small server-like applications. They are more durable and thus the name. Athlons run faster (like and athlete are you getting this now

) but run hotter and are often less-stable when running 24/7. So if you are building a mame machine or any graphics intensive machine NEVER put a duron in it.

Sorry man, you probably are going to have to upgrade.

rampy · « **Reply #11 on:** January 04, 2003, 09:07:16 pm »

Quote from: Howard_Casto on January 04, 2003, 05:23:17 pm

That is true, I had completely forgot about that.... for those of you that care durons are more geared towards workstations and small server-like applications. They are more durable and thus the name. Athlons run faster (like and athlete are you getting this now ) but run hotter and are often less-stable when running 24/7. So if you are building a mame machine or any graphics intensive machine NEVER put a duron in it.

Sorry man, you probably are going to have to upgrade.

I may be wrong, and I don't have anything handy to back it up... but my understanding (which could be wrong) is that the duron was AMD's foray into the lower end workstation market, i.e. analogous to intel's celeron... and the cheesier performance mhz to mhz of their athlon chip.

*Shrug* sorry to be contentious....

rampy

Lilwolf · « **Reply #12 on:** January 05, 2003, 12:27:39 am »

btw, intel was the cheeze ones. They started dropping performance to gain mhz... until the northgate machines came out, they where really getting bad.

Durons have a few things ripped from them. And yes they are to compete with the celerons. I think it's less memory cache and there could be some removed pipes in the processor. But basically a cheaper slower chip for the mhz.

Demon-Seed · « **Reply #13 on:** January 05, 2003, 01:47:42 pm »

Hey,
Well the DURON system died so i have no choice. and my home pc died too so I need 2 systems likely unless parts are salvageable. I have a Athlon XP 2000 on the way.. would this be good for the cab? I want it to run all the games smoothly. As for a MB what is good but decent price? since I am buying 2 pcs i have to be careful. Also which Video card? (hooked to a PC not TV) and how much ram?

any info is much appreciated thanks so far.

Win mame command.. If I recall I could not find an ini file I could edit? there was many config files but when I attempted to open them in Notepad, wordpad or even ms office it was garbled??? any ideas there?

thx
Jim

Spectrum · « **Reply #14 on:** January 05, 2003, 04:27:55 pm »

As far as the Athlon 2000 you should be fine (barring cruising

) I have an XP1900 in my main box and don't have any problems with it. For motherboards I like ABIT, MSI, ASUS, and TYAN. Shouldn't have any problems with those, but YMMV.

Win Mame doesn't automatically create a config file. You have to create it yourself. "mame -cc" will create the ini. If you have the pentium pro optimized mame, replace mame with mamepp. the ini file will be the mame exe's name.ini. IE if you have mamepp.exe it will be mamepp.ini.

Hope this helps
Robert

Brax · « **Reply #15 on:** January 09, 2003, 10:34:21 am »

As for a video card I'd still be tempted to go with an ATI with tv out. It just leaves your options open. The Radeons may not be the card of choice for 3D applications but they're no slouch either. I really don't think you can go wrong with ATI. Annnd, they're CANADIAN! Yay! heh.

Howard_Casto · « **Reply #16 on:** January 09, 2003, 01:46:31 pm »

Actually if you want to go all out you could get the radeon 9700. So far the tests say that it whips the ass of any card out there, including the brand new invidias. Plus it has the stellar tv-out and 2d support ati is famous for. Also I've been told that it has component(not composite) out and scart/hdtv as well as digital output. It's expensive, but it's REALLY the card of the future at this point.

heh the canadians got something right... call the police eh?

Demon-Seed · « **Reply #17 on:** January 12, 2003, 03:42:26 pm »

Hey
The good news is I got the home PC done and bought a CPU for the cabinet.. should be back in a couple weeks. I think I am going to be the ATI 9000 its onlsale here and is a very good card 128mb..and tv out etc.....

I upgraded to a 2000mhz cpu, and getting a nice board with ddr/
Jim

Wade · « **Reply #18 on:** January 20, 2003, 10:44:12 am »

I just wanted to say that I tried a couple of things mentioned in this thread with GREAT success!

First, tweaking the CPU clocks in cruisn' worked... frame rates were still not ideal but the game actually ran. With the default settings, it barely moved. Like 1 frame/sec.

Secondly, on my 450mhz K6 machine, I could only get about 18 fps in 720 and Super Sprint. These games didn't seem like they'd need that much horsepower. Well, I downgraded to an older MAME version (around .36) and those games run 100% now!!!

Thanks guys!!

Now I have a question, why are the same games running that much slower in the new versions of mame? I wouldn't think there would be significant changes to older roms like 720 and ssprint that would make them slow down so much.

Wade

rampy · « **Reply #19 on:** January 20, 2003, 11:50:20 am »

non-technical answer

more accurate emulation which costs more cpu time

Either they add video effects that slow it down (like the neogeo driver for example) or they gank out sample support for more "authentic" (at least attempt / work in progress) simulation of discrete audio circuitry.

There's probably more reasons - it's a common comment/question on other boards... the stock answer is that MAME is a documentation project and not for playing x game at lightening framerates - some faster stand alone emu's take "shortcuts" or use HLE which is kinda an incomplete documenation/hack but is faster (that's the argument/explanation paraphrased anyways - not necessarily my opinion or actual fact) so sometimes MAME devs add details/etc that might not be super apparent but more faithfully emulates the orginal board...

*shrug*
ymmv,

rampy

EDIT/PS The mame devs also have made lots of core changes to how MAME does things internally - I suppose one of these fundamental changes could be the specific reason .36 is faster than later builds... i.e. how they handle video bliting and other techno things I don't really understand...

shookow · « **Reply #20 on:** January 31, 2003, 06:46:48 pm »

So, if you have all of the .62 ROMS, do you have a chance of making them work in .36?

Lilwolf · « **Reply #21 on:** February 02, 2003, 08:05:06 am »

If you are looking for video cards. I would STRONGLY recommend this

Get a sapphire 9500 128mb (not the pro or the 64mb) its about 150 bucks. Then with rivaTuner you convert it to a 9700 free and clear. All this WITHOUT overclocking. (you can do that also to get it to a 9700pro, but its not needed with any games yet, so why try). So its not the fastest on the market today (but very very close) without worry about damaging it... for 150 bucks!

beware sucky drivers. The drivers themself are ok, but the install sucks. I had to reinstall winxp because it didn't recognize it right after an upgrade... Don't know if I did something wrong or what... but it was time for a reinstall anyway...

and great tv out and great video and soso drivers


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