Less hardware emulation, more actual hardware

[Ninja Supremacist]

Good evening Gentleman,

MAME is a wonderful scientific project on hardware emulation but watching my CPU get roasted on Pac Man isn't amusing.  Are there versions of MAME that use actual system resources besides my CPU?  Perhaps I've been missing something right in front of me.

Just thought I'd ask.

Peace.

[Howard_Casto]

If your hardware can't run pacman in mame it's crap anyway.  Sorry but those are the breaks. 

Regardless, just use an older version of mame, or vantage.  But again, if you are having problems with pacman then you have bigger problems.

[Ninja Supremacist]

Thank you for the useless comment, Obvious Guy.

An Athlon64 and 1 gigabyte RAM with an 256MB ATI Radeon9600 is running just about everything.

That, however, doesn't change the fact that it's roasting my CPU.  There are emulators out there that run more advanced games with less use of the CPU.  Zinc comes to mind.  But I would _expect_ Street Fighter EX2 to raise my system temperature more than Pac Man.

That, however, is not the case.  Pac Man costs much more in CPU cycles.

Is there a MAME version that makes more use of the video card?

[Minwah]

Thank you for the useless comment, Obvious Guy.

Considering the vaguenes of your question I thought his answer was pretty good.

That, however, doesn't change the fact that it's roasting my CPU.  There are emulators out there that run more advanced games with less use of the CPU.  Zinc comes to mind.  But I would _expect_ Street Fighter EX2 to raise my system temperature more than Pac Man.

That, however, is not the case.  Pac Man costs much more in CPU cycles.

I presume you're running SFEX2 in Zinc then...if so yes it is surprising but is probably due to Mame's more accurate emulation, at a guess.

Is there a MAME version that makes more use of the video card?

Not that I'm aware of, although it's possible there is an unofficial build somewhere that does (?)...

[Ninja Supremacist]

Thanks, MAMEWah.  I know my question could have been better which is why I didn't call him a troll.

So we're not allowed to discuss unofficial builds?  What about advanceMAME?  Does that make better use of the GPU?

[Minwah]

So we're not allowed to discuss unofficial builds?  What about advanceMAME?  Does that make better use of the GPU?

I think unofficial build discussion is allowed here...I really don't know if there is one that uses more video card power, but I haven't heard of one personally...

[NinjaEpisode]

Thank you for the useless comment, Obvious Guy.

An Athlon64 and 1 gigabyte RAM with an 256MB ATI Radeon9600 is running just about everything.

That, however, doesn't change the fact that it's roasting my CPU.  There are emulators out there that run more advanced games with less use of the CPU.  Zinc comes to mind.  But I would _expect_ Street Fighter EX2 to raise my system temperature more than Pac Man.

That, however, is not the case.  Pac Man costs much more in CPU cycles.

Is there a MAME version that makes more use of the video card?

Have you stopped to think that perhaps the Athlon64 is processing differenly than a normal Athlon chip there toughguy?  Last I checked there wasn't a version optimized for Athlon64 processor's.  Have you tried on a normal Athlon to see what the difference is?

I stand corrected..there IS an optimized build:

http://redump.emubase.de/mame.php

[Ninja Supremacist]

 

CPU temperature didn't move with the Athlon64 optimized version.  Went back to MAME32 to double check, temperature jumps by 7C.

Sorry about the grumpy response to Howard's comments.

Thanks, NinjaEpisode.  Peace.

[thebrownshow]

I think the reason why he responded so grumpily is that MAME isn't about optimization or any of the things we want it for... it's to accurately emulate old hardware.  Sure, we all get a great emulator that can play awesome old games, but the devs do it for a much different reason than why we WANT it.... if that makes any sense.  Just check out the MAME faq and whatnot.

Anyway, as far as Pac-man roasting your machine, I'd check to see what settings you have for video and whatnot.  Pac-man ran at what, 51 Hz?  If you've got triple buffering or other sync options set, it might just be screwing things up.

[Minwah]

Pac-man ran at what, 51 Hz?

60.60606060Hz actually...

I'm slightly curious what it matters how much CPU it is using, as long as it runs fullspeed.  Ninja Supremacist: are you just trying to make your CPU last longer?  I know the old Athlons run super hot, are Athlon64's the same?