which MAME release should I use? .36?

[cjb]

Here's my setup:

IBM Thinkpad 600E
Pentium II 300MHz
128MB RAM

I'm currently running the latest release (.82), but some games are slower than I'd like.  I did a little digging around through old posts and found recommendations to roll back to older versions of MAME for better performance with older hardware.  Specifically, that around one of the .36 releases there was a change in a BPP (?) setting (I have no idea what this means).  In any case, I'd like to pick the right version to run better on my machine - where should I start?  There are a bunch of different .36 betas/releases on MAME.net - not sure if it matters which one.  Thanks in advance...

[Minwah]

v0.36final would be a good one for starters.  They changed it so all games use 16 bit colour modes (even ones which originally used 8 bit modes) - I think that was somewhere v0.37 and 0.53 tho.  Effectively it made a bunch of classic games slower...

Anyway, 0.36final will run most of the classics very well, probably struggle a bit with some of the newer games in there, and NeoGeo games.

[Tiger-Heli]

v0.36final would be a good one for starters.  They changed it so all games use 16 bit colour modes (even ones which originally used 8 bit modes) - I think that was somewhere v0.37 and 0.53 tho.  Effectively it made a bunch of classic games slower...

Anyway, 0.36final will run most of the classics very well, probably struggle a bit with some of the newer games in there, and NeoGeo games.

Not exactly, 8-bit video was removed in 0.54, but that wasn't the big slowdown.  The main killer was in v36b13 (pre 0.36 final), when they enabled alpha blending, which just killed vector games with artwork.

There are also some difficulties with using older builds, DOS is required, some games may need sound samples that newer builds don't (might be tough to find).  At some point they changed from .SAM samples to .WAV samples, but I think that was before the 0.35 cycle.

Here are what I have as significant changes:

R36B10 - R36B16, The PONG Dynasty.

[Minwah]

Not exactly, 8-bit video was removed in 0.54, but that wasn't the big slowdown.  The main killer was in v36b13 (pre 0.36 final), when they enabled alpha blending, which just killed vector games with artwork.

Thanks for clearing that up

You missed the addition of lighgun support in the list...from memory ActLabs made a special version of 0.62, and it was in the official MAME at 0.63 (I think).

[Tiger-Heli]

Not exactly, 8-bit video was removed in 0.54, but that wasn't the big slowdown.  The main killer was in v36b13 (pre 0.36 final), when they enabled alpha blending, which just killed vector games with artwork.

Thanks for clearing that up

You missed the addition of lighgun support in the list...from memory ActLabs made a special version of 0.62, and it was in the official MAME at 0.63 (I think).

I checked the whatsnew.txt and MAME says it was added in 0.61, so I'm going to put that.  It is possible that Actlabs modified it with 0.62, and it was added officially in 0.63 like you said, I seem to remember something like this, but can find no confirmation of it.

I think I will list it under 0.61, unless anyone can confirm 0.63?

[cjb]

Thanks for the help everybody...

Last night I tried out .36 final and .53, and the both run MUCH better with my setup.  But now, of course, there's another problem: the older versions don't seem to support the autorotate parameter, which I had been using to display horizontal and vertical games correctly.  I'm building a cocktail with controls on 3 sides so I can run both.  I can use -norotate, but then some games point the wrong way...e.g. Galaga rotates left, but 1942 rotates right.  Is there a way to get them all to go the same way in the older builds?