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Bigun
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Joined: 21 Sep 2003
Posts: 2196
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 Posted: Wed Apr 28, 2004 2:57 am Post subject: XMame way too friggin slow for this system [unsolvable] |
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Ok, this is my system:
AMD Athlon 1400
256 Mb DDR 333Mhz Ram
ATI Radeon 9200 SE w/ 128 MB of RAM
And I'm running the 2.6.5-gentoo-r1 kernel
I'm running xmame version 0.81 and using the XGL executable. All of my games run fine until I attempt to run either a 3D game (Virtua Fighter, etc.) or a hard drive based game (Killer Instinct 1 & 2). The game slows down to not where is it unplayable, and very annoying. Any suggestions?
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Last edited by Bigun on Sat Dec 10, 2005 1:06 pm; edited 2 times in total |
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spacejock
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 26 Sep 2003
Posts: 94
Location: Australia
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| Posted: Wed Apr 28, 2004 3:06 am Post subject: |
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A lot of the newer games in mame are unplayable on today's systems. When 9ghz quad-core PVII systems are more common, you might be ok.
On the other hand, defender is perfectly playable on a Celeron 366 with 128 megs of ram.
Cheers
Simon
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Bigun
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Joined: 21 Sep 2003
Posts: 2196
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| Posted: Wed Apr 28, 2004 3:14 am Post subject: |
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| spacejock wrote: | A lot of the newer games in mame are unplayable on today's systems. When 9ghz quad-core PVII systems are more common, you might be ok.
On the other hand, defender is perfectly playable on a Celeron 366 with 128 megs of ram.
Cheers
Simon |
:/
Surely there is a way...
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skunkworx
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Joined: 02 Feb 2003
Posts: 420
Location: Planet Houston
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| Posted: Wed Apr 28, 2004 5:53 pm Post subject: |
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Remember that MAME has to emulate all the hardware of the original cabinets, including 3D hardware. You've no doubt seen the difference in performance between hardware-based and software-based 3D rendering, so imagine the specs required to pull off software-based 3D rendering on top of all that other hardware emulation.
Like spacejock said, it will be a while before many 1990s games are playable in MAME. Either computers will have to get that much faster, or somebody will have to figure out how to translate the emulated 3D hardware instruction sets into DirectX/OpenGL/etc. commands. Since that would have to be done for every bit of 3D hardware ever used in an arcade game, my money is on computers getting fast enough to handle it in software before somebody figures all that out.
If you're looking for a particular fix, Sega released one or two of the Virtua Fighter titles for Windows back in the day. They might run under WINE.
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Bigun
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Joined: 21 Sep 2003
Posts: 2196
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| Posted: Wed Apr 28, 2004 10:52 pm Post subject: |
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| skunkworx wrote: | Remember that MAME has to emulate all the hardware of the original cabinets, including 3D hardware. You've no doubt seen the difference in performance between hardware-based and software-based 3D rendering, so imagine the specs required to pull off software-based 3D rendering on top of all that other hardware emulation.
Like spacejock said, it will be a while before many 1990s games are playable in MAME. Either computers will have to get that much faster, or somebody will have to figure out how to translate the emulated 3D hardware instruction sets into DirectX/OpenGL/etc. commands. Since that would have to be done for every bit of 3D hardware ever used in an arcade game, my money is on computers getting fast enough to handle it in software before somebody figures all that out.
If you're looking for a particular fix, Sega released one or two of the Virtua Fighter titles for Windows back in the day. They might run under WINE. |
Good point...
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Kaboosh
Apprentice
Joined: 10 Jun 2004
Posts: 162
Location: Edmonton, AB - Canada
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| Posted: Mon Dec 05, 2005 2:11 am Post subject: You won't need a 9GHz machine... |
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| skunkworx wrote: | Remember that MAME has to emulate all the hardware of the original cabinets, including 3D hardware. You've no doubt seen the difference in performance between hardware-based and software-based 3D rendering, so imagine the specs required to pull off software-based 3D rendering on top of all that other hardware emulation.
Like spacejock said, it will be a while before many 1990s games are playable in MAME. Either computers will have to get that much faster, or somebody will have to figure out how to translate the emulated 3D hardware instruction sets into DirectX/OpenGL/etc. commands. Since that would have to be done for every bit of 3D hardware ever used in an arcade game, my money is on computers getting fast enough to handle it in software before somebody figures all that out.
If you're looking for a particular fix, Sega released one or two of the Virtua Fighter titles for Windows back in the day. They might run under WINE. |
This makes no sense whatsoever....if this was the case it would be impossible to run Mupen64 without a Dual 9GHz CPU setup. This problem appears to be a deficiency in mame which is actually why the speed of 3D games in xmame sucks. They appear to only be using OpenGL to draw the game "cabinets" and resize the screen but not utilizing it for rendering the game's 3D objects.
Either way - one quick solution is to emerge games-emulation/zinc (an alternate emulator available as-is only in binary format - no source code). Here is a user guide for this emulator. |
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airyk
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 17 Jan 2004
Posts: 93
Location: Salem, CT
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| Posted: Mon Dec 05, 2005 11:25 am Post subject: Re: You won't need a 9GHz machine... |
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| Kaboosh wrote: |
This makes no sense whatsoever....if this was the case it would be impossible to run Mupen64 without a Dual 9GHz CPU setup |
the reason for this is the the primary goal of the mame project is 100% accurate hardware emulation. they don't use any coding hacks that sacrifice emulation accuracy for playability, which is what allows emus like mupen64 to work. |
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maKKus
Guru
Joined: 07 Aug 2002
Posts: 356
Location: /Universe/Milky Way/Sol/Earth/Europe/EEC/The Netherlands/Limburg/Beek/Neerbeek
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| Posted: Mon Dec 05, 2005 2:00 pm Post subject: |
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| Mame is indeed based on accurate emulation and not playable emulation. For the most games this is not a problem but the later ones, especially the 3d ones suffer from this. You can use the zinc emulator for some of them, like tekken/2/3 or death or alive. |
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Jon Beilin
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 18 Dec 2003
Posts: 90
Location: Hanover, NH
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| Posted: Mon Dec 05, 2005 5:07 pm Post subject: Re: You won't need a 9GHz machine... |
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| Kaboosh wrote: | | This makes no sense whatsoever....if this was the case it would be impossible to run Mupen64 without a Dual 9GHz CPU setup. |
note that mupen64 emulates only one hardware platform and does, in fact, translate the 3d instructions to opengl instructions.
it would be a huge project to do all that for every bit of arcade hardware. plus, it just isn't as accurate since there is no guarantee that your graphics card renders things exactly the same way as the original hardware (granted, it gets down to minutiae at that point comparable to the difference between ati and nvidia renders). |
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feld
Guru
Joined: 29 Aug 2004
Posts: 593
Location: WI, USA
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| Posted: Mon Dec 05, 2005 6:47 pm Post subject: |
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I want a mame emulator that requries a quarter slot hooked up via USB or something.
http://www.robboweb.com/mamecab/gallery/imagepages/image12.htm
That would be cool 
-Feld
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VeryWeary
n00b
Joined: 12 Aug 2003
Posts: 50
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| Posted: Thu Dec 08, 2005 1:34 am Post subject: Re: You won't need a 9GHz machine... |
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| airyk wrote: | | Kaboosh wrote: |
This makes no sense whatsoever....if this was the case it would be impossible to run Mupen64 without a Dual 9GHz CPU setup |
the reason for this is the the primary goal of the mame project is 100% accurate hardware emulation. they don't use any coding hacks that sacrifice emulation accuracy for playability, which is what allows emus like mupen64 to work. |
I think it has more to do with the hardware they are trying to emulate and the level of interest in emulating that hardware. N64's are cheap, tons of info about the hardware is freely available and there are probably hundreds of guys out there working on emulation for it. Any enterprising electonics engineering hobbyist can buy one for next to nothing, rip it open, dump data from it and reverse engineer it. With arcade emulation you've got 1000's of different machines, which aren't easily obtained, no real information about the hardware, no information about development on the hardware, and maybe a couple of guys working to reverse engineer a system they have no access to and very little information about. It took a really really long time for the community to get CPSII emulation working decently and Capcom used that hardware in a ton of their games and there were a lot of people working on it. I imagine it's going to take significantly longer to get some of these more complicated, less widely used pieces of hardware up and running. |
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Kaboosh
Apprentice
Joined: 10 Jun 2004
Posts: 162
Location: Edmonton, AB - Canada
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| Posted: Fri Dec 16, 2005 4:08 pm Post subject: Re: You won't need a 9GHz machine... |
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| airyk wrote: |
the reason for this is the the primary goal of the mame project is 100% accurate hardware emulation. they don't use any coding hacks that sacrifice emulation accuracy for playability, which is what allows emus like mupen64 to work.
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Ahhh...and this goal has certainly paid off as the hardware for every game you play is flexible yet faithfully recreated!
I didn't mean anything derogatory towards the mame team with my comments, I was just stating fact (if you'll excuse my use of the word "sucks" of course  )... |
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elvis_a_presley
n00b
Joined: 17 Oct 2004
Posts: 51
Location: Brisbane, Australia
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| Posted: Tue Dec 20, 2005 11:13 pm Post subject: |
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| spacejock wrote: | | When 9ghz quad-core PVII systems are more common, you might be ok. |
Quad-core won't help. Emulation is a very serial thing, and MAME will never go SMP. Raw clockspeed is the only solution.
Even AdvanaceMAME doesn't truly utilise SMP. It merely offloads some SDL stuff at a blitter level, and does nothing at a core level. Expect a 1% speedup at best with dual-core or SMP rigs and AdvanceMAME.
If you're buying CPUs for MAME use, just get the fastest single-core you can afford, and at least 512MB of RAM for the bigger games (KI and some of the newer NeoGeo games decompress to roughly 300MB just on initial load). |
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