Why does my Double Dragon run so slow?

[allroy1975]

I remember the first time I plaeyed DD in MAME, it was so slow it was unplayable.  I fired it up again recently on my newest cab (a P4 with 512mb, not sure of the exact specs from here) but it ran better...until I had to fight someone.  once bad guys came on the screen, it started crawling again. 

is this a common problem?  I searched but I don't see anyone else mentioning it.  help?   

Allroy

[Hoopz]

Not sure if this is a complete answer for your situation, but this was in the offical MAME FAQ:

I07. Hard Drivin', Metal Slug 2 and Double Dragon are choppy, but I have enough CPU power.

Although the FPS counter shows 100% speed for these games, they may appear choppy. This is true to the original - even the original hardware of these games struggled with them and therefore the choppiness is actually accurate emulation of these games. You may be able to get rid of it in some cases by using the -cheat parameter, hitting the tilde key and browsing the on screen menu until you find "CPU overclocking". This will run the emulated CPU faster which may or may not fix it. It may also cause the emulation to have errors, so don't bug people if overclocking screws up a game.

[destructor]

Do you have 100% speed?
In mame or mameplus you will see it after hit F11 key.

[gonzo90017]

That's the same way it was in the arcades. You can overclock the games cpu by pressing the ~ button on your keyboard a couple of times. When you get to the cpus just overclock them. That'll get rid of it.

[Pi]

Or you can run any of the bootlegs, those don't have slowdowns. They used better (faster) hardware than the original. Happens with various of the classic games in MAME.

[allroy1975]

Or you can run any of the bootlegs, those don't have slowdowns. They used better (faster) hardware than the original. Happens with various of the classic games in MAME.

now THAT'S what I was looking for! 

I felt really stupid (rightfully so) for not reading the MAME documentation to see that it was the way the original game ran.....

I'll check out the bootlegs! 

Thank you very much!

Allroy

[blakes]

I don't know about Double Dragon 1, but I own the original board for Double Dragon 2 and it appears to run much faster than it runs in mame.  I am using an Athlon XP 2800+ with an ArcadeVGA card, so I'm pretty sure it's not the computer.  I will have to do some more testing, but I wish that they could fix this somehow.

[u_rebelscum]

I don't know about Double Dragon 1, but I own the original board for Double Dragon 2 and it appears to run much faster than it runs in mame.  ...  I will have to do some more testing, but I wish that they could fix this somehow.

Are you sure you don't have a bootleg version with faster hardware?  As mentioned:

Or you can run any of the bootlegs, those don't have slowdowns. They used better (faster) hardware than the original. Happens with various of the classic games in MAME.