Best NFL Blitz 2000, Gauntlet Legends and Dark Legacy Emulations?

[DashRendar]

Working on my cabinet, and I have a number of MAME, NES, and SNES games emulating just fine.

But some of the newer games are either-

a) poorly emulated
b) hard or impossible to find

What I am hoping to add to the cab, and the emulations available, would be:

NFL Blitz 2000 - MAME, PS1, N64, Gameboy, Dreamcast, PC
Gauntlet Legends  - MAME, PS1, N64, Dreamcast
Gauntlet Dark Legacy - MAME, PS2, Gameboy Advance, Gamecube, Xbox

Note: I am NOT looking for ROMS or CHDs!  What I am looking for is the best-performing emulations of these games.

I have NFL Blitz 2000 for MAME, and it performs choppy (video stutters a bit, and the sound definitely stutters on a high-end PC).

MAME can emulate all of these titles, but doesn't seem to do very well.  It looks like PCSX2 could emulate all of them as well.  Has anyone tried them with PCSX2 to see how they perform?

[u_rebelscum]

...some of the newer games are either-

a) poorly emulated...

I have NFL Blitz 2000 for MAME, and it performs choppy (video stutters a bit, and the sound definitely stutters on a high-end PC).

MAME can emulate all of these titles, but doesn't seem to do very well. 

"Poorly" isn't the best term.  The problem is mame emulates them too correctly.  This results in needing pretty much 4.0+ Ghz Core 2/i7, or theoretically 8.0+ P4 (dual or not), CPUs.  Unless you're overclocking your CPU, it's not highend enough to emulate these games.  So the better term is "a) slowly emulated".

I understand from a user's point of view "slowly" is almost the same as "poorly", but from mameDev's POV, how fast has little to do with how well or poor the emulation. 

Some possible improvements for your computer, mame & these games, the best is to use 64 bit windows and 64 bit mame (~10%-20% speed increase).  Others are smaller and include: turn off -autoframeskip, decrease the game's resolution in the game's menus (not in mame's options), turn off -waitvsync, turn on -triplebuffer, reduce -samplerate, enable -multithreading, and maybe enable -priority.  But they will only help if you're already almost running at speed.

I've heard that dreamcast has the best ports of the games; I don't know how good the emulation of the dreamcast is ATM though.

[DashRendar]

Thanks as always for the helpful information.   

Is there any such thing as a user-created patch that keeps MAME from emulating these games too correctly (changes to the .ini etc)? 

Or would this be something we might look forward to in a future build of MAME?

[Malenko]

I think the DC emulated versions of Blitz and Gauntlet are your best bets

[DashRendar]

I think the DC emulated versions of Blitz and Gauntlet are your best bets

Yeah, I'm considering either setting up a multi-system box (MAME/Dreamcast with a switch), or using something like Chankast with MAME.

Or, I could pick up something like a multi-jamma board and buy the PCB/hard drives for these games (well, I already have a Blitz 99 PCB).  Issue with that would be the power supply though, as well as fitting the guts for MAME functionality in. 

It's odd that Gauntlet Legends and Gauntlet Dark Legacy were made for different consoles.  Especially considering that I believe it's the same engine for both games.

 

[u_rebelscum]

Is there any such thing as a user-created patch that keeps MAME from emulating these games too correctly (changes to the .ini etc)? 

Or would this be something we might look forward to in a future build of MAME?

MameDev never would sacrifice emulation accuracy for speed.  Their goal is emulation, not playability.  Remember, they aren't paid for their time spent working on mame, and everyone's a volunteer.  So they have no reason to do what users want.

If they find some way of speeding up without messing up emulation, OTOH, they'll add it.  But since playability isn't a main goal, most mameDev isn't spending much time optimizing the code speed.  Plus it's very hard; only a few are smart enough to even think about trying.  And with computers getting faster every year, it's easier to just wait a year or three for the hardware to catch up.

Some of the other variants out there might have some hacks that might help with those games.  I'm thinking maybe the "plus" and "FX" variants, but don't use them, so don't know.  Someone else?