MAMEwah Gamelist Slowdown (when no art)

[Necro]

Having kind of an annoying problem - it seems in my console emu listings in MameWah, I get a serious lag when a game is hit that doesnt have art for it.  It seems to only be when all art is missing.  It's a very noticeable 2-3 second lag, then things go again.

Anyone have this issue/have any ideas how to fix it?  I was thinking it might be scanning for some kind of 'auto fit' art thing, but I'm not sure.

(It's occured with 1.61 and still with 1.62b9)

[brophog]

Is this a custom layout? Do you have an art image assigned in the case that there is no screenshot?

[Necro]

It's a custom layout, and I have one assigned - as far as having an art1.jpg, art2.jpg, etc. in the folder with the other images.

They do have transparency, however.  And are small (50x50).  (I've attached one).

Not sure what could be the problem.

[Necro]

Removed all the art files (the default to show in case of no art) and still getting the slowdown. 

I've tested a ton of options and it's definitely when there is no art to display. :/

[brophog]

try putting the default mamewah-art.jpg back in the custom folder and see if it will load that.

[Necro]

Tried it.  It shows the image - slower then if a snap/title is present - but then still has the 'freeze' effect afterwards. :/  Its basically 3-10 seconds where no input is received, etc.

Grrr....

This...is annoying.  Having 2 images display doesnt seem to have any effect on speed (compared to one).

I'm out of ideas.  Aside from making sure every single rom has a snap.  Or using no art at all.

[brophog]

Makes no sense to me. Maybe minwah has some ideas when he comes back.

[Necro]

I figured it out.  And...I don't think there's a solution. 

It's occuring because there are so many files within the snapshot folder.  I'm not sure exactly WHY it's occuring...but it seems I'm going to have to sort my snapshots also....

This is going to be fun. At least I'll have a space-efficient setup 

Thanks for your help Brophog   Your the only one who tried  hehe

[LJHalfbreed]

Bah... I can only post to so many forums at a time! (and when I have time... *sigh*)

I'll just repost what I said on the mameworld.info forums for whomever's benefit, or to help testing:



I finally have Mamewah running pretty decent on my new machine, so I could do some testing for you...


Game/Emu: Any
List size: 100+ (to allow for testing/scrolling)
Missing artwork: Manually removed between 1 to 10 artworks of various types (I only have artwork1 and artwork2 being used...sorry!) All artwork was located on the same drive as Mamewah, and was not shared over a network.


Testing: The main emu/list I used had a full set of matching art1 and art2 files. The emu had it's own layout.lay and other files. I took out artwork around the letters T-V. I started with one, and worked my way (quickly) to 10, gauging roughly the amount of 'slowdown' or 'lag' in the scrolling as compared to other sets with full artwork. All my artwork is in PNG format, and in 640x480 (or similar 4:3-ish proportion) resolution. No transparent pictures are used.

Results: Starting from 0-A, just removing one artwork from t-v resulted in choppy/laggy scrolling. It got vaguely worse as I removed them. Strangely enough, once I actually got down to the bottom of the list (and the games with missing artwork were scrolled through), I could scroll back through that same list with no slowdown until I got around halfway through.

Fix: I couldn't figure out why my other lists were fine...even ones with missing artwork, until I realized that in *those* lists/emus (all my emus have emu-specific layout.lay files in their emuname folders) I have art.png and art1.png files as 'No screenshot' and 'no title' filler pieces. The only thing I can think of is that Mamewah looks for pic files and tries to buffer them, and by not having artwork in your 'snaps' location, or a supplemental generic pic in your config\emuname folder (art.xxx), it gets stuck trying to look for a matching picture.

Unfortunately, i'm not sure exactly why the scrolling-lag would be so pronounced at the top of the list for missing artwork in the bottom of the list.

Either way, try making non-transparent filler pics for your layout, and name them accordingly. Example: (how it's set up on my machine, might work differently for yours)

\config\emuname folder has:
layout.lay (emu-specific layout)
main.png (emu-specific main/background pic)
logo.png (emu-specific logo for my logo position)
art.png (generic "no screenshot" for my artwork1 position)
art1.png (generic "no title" for my artwork2 position)


So in my Vectrex folder, this would show up as:
\config\Vectrex
layout.lay
main.png (nifty Vectrex background)
logo.png (nifty Vectrex logo)
art.png (blurred-by-photoshop Vectrex logo with big letters of "No Screenshot Available")
art2.png (Blurred-by-photoshop Vectrex logo with big letters of "No Title Shot Available")

With those two files, the slowdown/lag disappeared for me. If you have one layout that you use for all your emus/programs, you can put the 'art' pics straight in your \config folder.

IIRC, somewhere in one of the mamewah docs (or maybe on a forum?) I saw that mamewah has problems with transparencies, so keep that in mind for your pictures.   





...And don't forget that animated gifs are locked (won't animate) unless you get the registration code/reg key from Minwah by donating (sometimes repeatedly) on his site. 


 

[LJHalfbreed]

Another thing... keep your artwork *small*.


I accidentally lost some of my artwork due to all this testing, and went in through the emulator (and mamewah) to grab screenies.

Well, after I exited out, I was still super laggy, and couldn't figure it out


So I ended up going through my whole snaps/title directories... one thing popped out at me...


Average filesize for the rest of my snaps: 80k .pngs

Average filesize for my newly made snaps (and titles): 430k pngs!


Turns out they were snapped at fullscreen of my monitor... so they were at 1900 instead of a much more manageable 400 or less.

Did some more testing, and just a few large pics can throw off the emu.

So, take a nice batch-able image editor (irfanview is great, and free), and convert all your artwork to the same filetype (again, I use png, but YMMV) and more importantly, make sure they all have relatively the same dimensions (I batched all mine to 400 on the long side, which is okay for both vert gaming and widescreen gba-style games, and made sure that proportions were checked) and *bam*... no more lag!

On a side note, I try to keep all my game snaps/titles to a 4:3 format like many tvs (and around 400x300) instead of a more streamlined/efficient 1:1 (256x256) or a better resolution (800x600). Depending on the TV/monitor, I've found 800x600, or even 640x480 to be perfect sizes for Mamewah (especially due to some emu's limitations... saves on all that rez switching!). 400x300 seems to be a great resolution that hits that sweetspot between quality and size. Feel free to tweak around a bit to see what you'd like.

On a whim, I renamed my snap folder, and increased my art.png to a 1900x1200 resolution. Needless to say I think I almost crashed my system, as I was having around 10 seconds between scrolls. 

Try batch-resizing/converting your artwork and see if that works.

(will repost this wherever else I've seen you post your problem)

[Necro]

Sorry, I responded over there, got screwed up in a preview thing I didnt think I had...so misposted.  Anyway, the issue is arising under these circumstances:

- NES rom set.
- Cleaned up NES rom set (only usa, and europes in certain cases)
- Misnamed or missing art files for snaps and/or titles
- Fixing art names removes the lag for that particular rom
- All art is under 20k in size (I'm only using the Screenshotarchive snap/title sets.  Some are not actually the same name as the names of goodnes roms).

Since I'm running on an HTPC setup, the screenshots dont need ot be big.  I only need 1/4 (max) of a screen at 800x600 so...file size hasnt been a problem yet.

I also turned off drive indexing, etc., to no avail.

[Minwah]

This shouldn't happen in v1.61 to my knowledge, but in the latest beta I believe the slowdown is due to a new feature to use incorrectly named images where no correctly named one exists...I need to have a look into improving/fixing this.

[brophog]

Using 1.62 it definitely stops scrolling when there is no image found, even if you have a filler image assigned to it.

I never noticed it in 1.61.

The easy solution to the end user is to simply have an image for every rom.

[Necro]

That gets kind of hard/insane when it happens in mame because of missing flyers/cabs/controls.  You have to have named files for every rom. 

That and the same thing happens in almost every console since many roms have missing screens/titles.

[Minwah]

That and the same thing happens in almost every console since many roms have missing screens/titles.

This is why I added the feature...so partially matching images work (for clones etc).  As I said I need to take a look at improving it.

[Necro]

Oh no, I think the feature is great.  Maybe add a toggle for it or something.  My computer isn't the speediest, so it could be that.  Not totally sure.

I just find it annoying as all hell in MAME where there's no chance I can fix it.  I pretty much got it resolved using a multitude of tools (renamers) and taking various screen/title shots for games to fill in the missing ones.  The pause is so obvious, it's easy to scan for missing images.

(Love the program btw, it's so customizeable...stuff like this is bound to pop up).