Suggestions for Games That Almost Play

[Goatz18]

I have games on my mame that play but lag just enough to make it unplayable. Other than the obvious like driver updates, does anyone have any performance enhancing suggestions? Here's my system and the games I almost can play:

Pentium III 800 Mhz
512 MB RAM
ATI Radeon 9550 XL 250 MB
Sound Blaster Live
Windows XP startup shell into MAMEWAH
MAME v1.06

Games I can almost play:
Jurrassic Park
Mortal Kombat
Rampage World Tour
others... point is they skip video and audio every few seconds and may play if I am missing something that could give them a push like maybe more memory or some software or XP settings that your average person wouldn't think of that would help. Thanks. Maybe even an older version of MAME if that would help, I don't even know.

[TelcoLou]

More RAM, a faster CPU.

[DaveMMR]

Add more RAM.  See if you can find a beefier CPU for your motherboard.  That's the easiest way with the best results.  The cheaper way is to use an older version of MAME (or even try FastMAME). 

Personally, I'm running a 2ghz computer with 1Gig of RAM in my cabinet and I still keep .99 around (alongside .116) for some of the more troublesome games.

[Goatz18]

Alright, thanks Dave. I am currently in the process of acquiring a bunch of Mame v0.95 roms and gonna give .95 a try.

[TOK]

I have a Pentium III in my bartop cab, and I think you're basically bumping into the limits of what that computer can do. I'm running .84 on it, and that level of game you're trying to run is still kind of sketchy. You might get MK running alright by going with an older version.

Nothing really to do with your question, but I'm starting to change my thinking on MAME computers.
I've always used recycled parts from upgrades and junk that I've been given for MAME cabs. Two of the P4 machines I have in cabs were freebies that just needed power supplies or something small... Places like Newegg have such killer combo deals now that I might just buy a fast CPU and motherboard to upgrade one of the cabs. They have an Athlon 5800+ and motherboard combo for just over 100 bucks now. Very tempting.

[gonzo90017]

Here's a list of changes in different Mame versions. From u_rebulscum

I was searching for releases best suited for older machines as well and compared releases from 0.93 through 0.106... Don't know if any of this will help or not.

* v0.93 had the audio rewrite.
* 0.107 is the first full release for the new video code - the actual rewrite appeared in 0.106u1
* hiscore.dat was removed (and replaced with save state) in v0.108
* CPS2 decryption was added in v0.112
* There was a big Donkey Kong update in v0.116
* CPS3 decryption added in v0.116u2

[Goatz18]

Nice. I learn more about this stuff every day. Just 2 months ago I thought MAME was just about the gayest word I had ever heard.

[Goatz18]

Another option or work around is playing a Genesis or SNES emulator that plays the likes of the Mortal Kombats and other games that may not play on MAME that were released on consoles that it will play on. They won't have as good of graphics but they will be playable. Right? I ask because in theory it should work but I haven't tested it. I'll post again when I do if it works or not.

[jasonbar]

For most of the games that aren't quite running @ 100% on my machine (or even not too close to 100%...), I can often get by with the auto frameskip feature.  Hit F9 11 times until it says "SKIP AUTO" (or maybe it's just "AUTO"?) & that often works.  The animation might be a little herky jerky, but sometimes it's just fine.

-Jason

[caver01]

Auto frameskip is so erratic and over compensates so I have better luck using the fkeys as you say to find the acceptable frameskip and then I save a copy of the mame.ini, renaming it to match the rom name. Inside the new .ini file, set your frameskip value. Now that game will always start with appropriate frameskip.

Also, adjusting the audio sample rate to 22050 or even 11025 will improve performance for some games. Donkey Kong is a perfect example. With the new audio emulating properly in that game now, it takes a big performance hit. Dkong sounds are not great to begin with, so lowering the sample rate eliminates jerky performance without really hurting the audio experience.

Finally, you might investigate other emulators like winkawaks that tend to run sets of games faster. I started using something other than name for Neo Geo and Capcom titles for better performance.