heres some benchmarks for a REALLY low end computer (",)

[danny_galaga]

well, you may have gathered ive been experimenting with an old laptop. the laptop was free so it was definitely worth fidding with. and now i know its powerful enough im working a project around it. super low budget naturally as befits the laptop (",)

ok, so the laptop is a gateway2000 solo. it is 90mhz  about ten years old and runs win95. last night i tested out a few old school games to see what it could do. i deliberately picked only a few old games as im not patient enough to see what would happen if i tried to run street fighter or something 

i used mame32 v36 11:

invaders- can go to 170% unthrottled. perfect play

pong (!) - about 90% and 9/60 fps. probably slow because its not an emulation as such

pacman- 100%. plays well

berserk- up to about 120% unthrottled, this drops to 40% when going to next level. with auto on its not too bad since it just drops a lot of frames. plays well.

astro invaders- can go to 170% unthrottled. firing sounds are dodgy, unthrottled or not.

asteroids- about 95% at 20/60 fps. quite playable. no sound. this version of mame is the last before alpha blending and as such should let vector games run faster. i dont even know what alpha blending is, just quoting what i read!

1942- approx 75% with 9/60 fps. not very playable and sound is a bit scratchy and echo-ey.

so there you go! anthing faster and you are definitely set for the old school stuff!

[brophog]

You'd be amazed sometimes what would run on those old computers. In fact, most things seem to run out of ram first (on stock setups) before processing power limits it.

[Howard_Casto]

My gorf cab (with the burnt out pcbs) was initially only gonna play gorf so I just threw a "throw away" 200 mhz pc with integrated sound and video in it.  As long as I'm just running dos, everything does fine.  I can play anything prior to 1989 on it.  I think the fact that I'm running mame in -arcade monitor mode helps a lot though.  No hardware stretching means faster performance. 

[danny_galaga]

hehe. whod a thunk a 200mhz pc would be overkill! im very challenged in the OS and software field but i do enjoy learning things (where i can actually retain anything  )

[Howard_Casto]

Well you've got to remember, I'm also using an old version of mame on it.  The newer the version, the higher the resource requirements. 

[danny_galaga]

well, since you mentioned gorf, i thought id throw a couple more games on the old beast.

gorf- approx. 30% at 2/60 fps. pretty slow, huh?

qix- approx. 66% 3/60fps

mario bros- 95% 10/60fps

[Howard_Casto]

gorf uses samples which means it taxes the processor a lot.  Ironically it's the slowest game on my gorf machine.

[danny_galaga]

hmmm, space invaders and berserk use samples too but they seem to run fine. maybe the emulator for gorf (at least in mame v36) isnt very efficient?

[Minwah]

Have you tried booting to DOS and running DMAME?  That's what I would do with that spec pc...if nothing else it will boot quicker.

[danny_galaga]

yeah, you probably didnt see my thread about DOS.

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=56533.0

i will put DOS mame on this lil sucker eventually. just that every version i tried i had to install different missing thingos. i got sick of running down to the corner store and paying two bucks for a cd just so i could add a 30kb dll file!! the machine is actually more than fast enough for what i plan to use it for. i just thought id throw a few games on and post the results. people often ask about performance and the answers tend to be 'well i THINK this is what will happen'. i cant imagine anyone ever trying this on anything SLOWER so this is a handy gauge for one end of the spectrum.

what i want to do though will need a later version of mame, so im hoping that although its a later version running in DOS will compensate somewhat (once i can figure out mame dos  )

[Howard_Casto]

hmmm, space invaders and berserk use samples too but they seem to run fine. maybe the emulator for gorf (at least in mame v36) isnt very efficient?

Space invaders and berserk use like 2 or 3 samples... gorf has dozens of samples, all of which must be cached in memory ahead of time.

[Space Fractal]

I think samples is still faster then emulated sound?

A another tweek could set the samplerate to 11025hz in mame.ini / gui instead of normally 44100hz?

[Howard_Casto]

Not really sf.....  while they are faster than descrete sound, they are still slower than regular old sound effects in the average game.  Plus there is the ram issue.... for speed's sake mame loads em all in memory and they are uncompressed to ease processor taxes, so for a game like gorf or punchout that's a lot of resources for a low-end pc. 

[danny_galaga]

hmmm, space invaders and berserk use samples too but they seem to run fine. maybe the emulator for gorf (at least in mame v36) isnt very efficient?

Space invaders and berserk use like 2 or 3 samples... gorf has dozens of samples, all of which must be cached in memory ahead of time.

that makes sense! your figures are wrong but the general idea is the same:

invaders: 18
berserk: 29

gorf: 98 

[DaOld Man]

90 mhz cpu??
I can remember about 12 years ago when 133 MHZ was considered high end.. and I bought a computer with AMD 133, 16 meg ram, and win95, 15 inch monitor, SB16 sound card, 1 meg PCI video card, I think it cost me about 1200 shucks.
Now we are pushing 4 Gigahertz and dual processors..
Will 4 ghz be really low end 12 years from now?
When will it end?