DMAME / SPEED

[Alan sinking]

Hi, I've been trying to speed up dmame i've tried several versions of dos and found that MS-DOS 6.22 on FAT16 is by far the fastest (twice the speed of MS-DOS 7.1 on FAT 32) the only drawback is the max partition size in FAT16 is about 2GB,
Does anyone know of a way around this 2GB limit without creating lots of partitions.
Thanks in advance.
Alan.

[RayB]

Where exactly are you running into speed problems? File loading?

[Alan sinking]

Hi, The main problems are loading individual games takes around 10 seconds with dos7.1 and playing most games struggle to run, whereas it takes only 4 seconds to load games with dos6.22 and no running problems

[RayB]

Do you have SmartDrive running (when in DOS 7.1)?

And it's the exact same version of MAME in both setups?

If so that's a really interesting difference.

[elvis]

1) The 2GB partition limitation of FAT16 is a physical limitation.  You cannot get around this with software, nor any sort fo tricks or hacks.  A different file system is your only option if you want larger than 2GB partitions.

2) The problem you speak of where in DOS7.1 games run slower - that sounds very strange.  Are you using identical configurations?  Once a game is loaded, the file system will not affect the running speed of the game.  The problem must lie somewhere else within DOS7.1.

Have you tried FreeDOS?  It supports FAT32 as well as NTFS, and also has drivers for UDMA for faster drive access.  I don't know what it's status is with MAME, but it might be worth trying.

http://www.freedos.org/

[unix4hire]

I tried unsuccessfully to get freedos working completely.  It worked sometimes with dmame but always gave 1/2 page length strange errors with arcadeos.  However, it did seem quite a bit faster than the DOS I ended up with (from a win98 install, not sure what version?), however everything does run with the win98-installed DOS version.  Just slower.

FOr some games it works just fine, but other games like pacman you can definitely see a problem such as sounds messing up and pac's mouth not moving exactly right, kind of skipping a "bite" occasionally.  Not sure what to do about it.  I also run smartdrv (came with windows).

I had a good link to setting up the whole thing with DOS but lost it when my kid killed the browser window.  I don't think it was a complete document but the closest I could find online.  If I can get freedos working perfectly I"ll post it all over the place.