Dos MAME load time

[WonderMellon]

I have recently set up an old PII 350 machine to run just some of the classic games in DOS Mame.  It takes about 20 to 30 seconds just for Mame to load.  Even just typing dmame.exe at the command line takes this long just to pull up the usage text.  Is this normal and is there a way to make it load quicker?  I have tried it from the command line and from ArcadeOS.

-WM

[Minwah]

Do you have smartdrive running?  If not try that...

[Chris]

Smartdrv will probably make a huge difference.  Also, DOS MAME is packed with UPX; unpacking it could help.  But if you're not loading Smartdrv, that's probably it.

[SirPeale]

You didn't mention what version of Mame you were using.  Some versions have a *very* long wait time as it verifies the ROMs each time you load it.  They eventually made that feature an option you could turn off.

[WonderMellon]

Thanks for the comments.  I am using version 0.79.  Smartdrv helped a lot. It is not perfect but bearable.   

[Chris]

May want to add cwsdpmi -p to your autoexec.bat; this makes CWSDPMI stay resident so MAME doesn't have to re-load it every time it executes.  (Depending on how your front-end is loading MAME, it may or may not be loading CWSDPMI every time... but hey, it's worth a try.)

--Chris