Very choppy gameplay in MaLa

[FunWithFire]

To start off with, I am very new to Mame. I have just started construction of my first cab. I put together a computer with an Intel Celeron D 2.65 processor and 512 megs of RAM. I have XP installed with very little running. The computer loads extremely fast and in Windows the computer reacts pretty quickly. Even in MaLa everything moves pretty quick, but as soon as I start a game, the gameplay is pretty close to unplayable.
I get horrible echoing with the sound, and even games like Arkanoid are too slow to play. The game play is the same from Arkanoid through Killer Instinct. I brought up the task manager to see if the system was getting bogged down, and I noticed that as soon as Killer Instict went to the background, the sound immediately cleared up. I could hear that the game was then playing at a normal pace.
I really am not sure what to check. I plan on installing Mame32 to see if that plays fine, but I have to burn a CD to get the program to that comp so I haven't had a chance to do that yet. If anyone knows what steps I should take from here, I would really appreciate it.

[loadman]

The FE should not change the way Mame Games run

1) Try running Mame directly from a command promt to see if that
eg c:\mame\mame invaders

2) Try a earlier version of mame as they use less resources
eg mame 089

Have fun

[Kook]

I'm re-doing a cabinet right now too. I experienced some chopiness in MAME (110) when I started this project. Mine is Windows XP based. AVGA 2 card for video and SB Live for sound. There are so many things that can cause performance issues. A couple of things helped me...

- Get a benchmark program so you can tweak different settings and quickly see results. I like Passmark.
- Make sure your graphics card is working full speed. For me, that meant messing around with motherboard BIOS settings (to get AGP to 8X with Fastwrite turned on), and installing latest AVGA 2 drivers. I discovered that my system didn't like the default motherboard  BIOS setting for "AGP Drivng Value" and it was causing me to not have any hardware acceleration. That made a huge difference (in my benchmark program and in MAME).
- Mess around with MAME resolutions. I think if you can run games at their original resolutions, they will perform better.
- Install the latest sound card drivers. Don't stick with Windows built in driver for your sound card.

Let us know what you discover.