Hello I got also MAME inside my JAMMA cabinet (via J-Pac) and I was wondering why Model2 games lag and some MAME games like Gauntlet Legends, Winter Heat, Tekken 1(lol), War Gods, Mortal Kombat 4. I know some of these aren't well emulated but at least what I tested, Tekken 1 runs fine on my Quad Core desktop PC. PC details: HP Compaq dc7600 Intel Pentium D 820 Dual Core Processor (2.8-GHz, 2x1MB L2 cache, 800-MHz FSB) 2GB DDR-2 Memory Radeon X1550 (PCI-E 16x) I was wondering if it is because of the crappy GFX card since the CPU should be enough? No? I got Windows XP x64 and all drivers properly installed. Model 2 emulator 1.0 and MAME Plus! eXTended v0.142r4851 (x64).
You're never going to be able to emulate all games fast, especially the relatively modern ones. It's probably significant that your issues are all with games with fast 3D - it's not realistic to be able to play these on most 'normal' PCs as the arcade boards used expensive, specialised, high-speed hardware to produce their effects. Picking a random example Winter Heat is an STV game (basically a Saturn) and the hardware supports multiple screen layers with effects set up between layers - easy enough to do in silicon but the only way to emulate it on general-purpose is to calculate what's going to be on each layer and then throw away the areas that won't get shown. Likewise anything involving fast RISC processors is going to need a very decent PC - this post implies 2GHz for Killer Instinct which was released in 1994! You can do some tricks with HLE but MAME focuses on accuracy rather than speed so you're never going to get cycle-perfect, full-speed emulation on a mid-range PC like that. If you have to play them it's way easier just to buy the arcade boards and plug them into your JAMMA harness Stone
Yeah, indeed. Just because a game is old, that doesn't mean that any modern PC can handle it. You might well find that the better specced the PC, the better. Windows XP x64 sucks, by the way! It was plagued with driver and compatibility issues upon release. I gave up on it years ago, so I don't know whether these are fixed. You might find that it runs better on standard Windows XP, though. In fact, some people steer clear of Windows for emulation in a cabinet altogether.
MAME aims to be perfectly compatible with games, which means it sacrifices speed in order to be more accurate. In my experience I found that older versions of MAME are way faster in older processors (specially all versions below 0.98). As for newer games (specially 3D titles), you probably won't be able to run them at decent speed unless you have at least a relatively new Core 2 processor. Graphics cards don't make a big difference in MAME, I get near double the speed with my notebook (which has an Intel Core i3 330M @2.1GHz with Intel HD integrated graphics) than with my desktop (Intel Pentium E5400 @2.7GHz with a 1GB GeForce GT240). My personal advice is not to rely entirely in MAME for newer games, as Sega Model2 and other similar systems have custom emulators designed with speed in mind and work way better. You can manage all emulators with some frontend like GameEx.
The only thing I can really add is that, as stated above, your video card means extremely little when it comes to getting more speed with MAME. However: http://www.ultimarc.com/avgainf.html If you wanted a video card for a MAME box I would suggest something like that. Cards like this strive to support "non-standard" resolutions and refresh rates some arcade games demanded of their displays as well as the 15khz rate arcade monitors use as well. Aside from that just shoot for the most powerful CPU in terms of single threaded performance. My i7 can just almost handle Cruis'n USA on MAME but I wouldn't anticipate being able to play it full speed for another year or three. MAME will never completely support multi-threading as most arcade games just won't benefit from splitting the load across multiple cores/procs. Maybe when today's games fall under MAME's umbrella that use SMP heavily we might see a benefit to multi-threaded emulation. I'm not a MAME driver dev so I really can't be sure.
What sort of i7? I have a Core 2 DUO that is rather old now and Cruisin USA runs perfect for me. 60fps no skipping. MAME as you mentioned doesn't take advantage of CPUs with lots of cores. Instead you should go for the fastest individual cores you can get. When I got my machine I could have gotten the DUO or the Quad. I picked the DUO since the clock speed was significantly higher even though it meant two less cores. The reason being that at the time there wasn't much software that would benefit from even having 2 cores, much less 4 cores. And MAME was a primary use of more CPU power so if it could only use 1 core really, it should be as fast as I could get. Anyway, as it was mentioned, MAME is extremely CPU dependent. The CPU you mentioned is enough for most 2D arcade games. But once you move into 3D games it just isn't going to cut it for alot of them. Other emulators that target specific hardware tend to use hardware acceleration so your 3D graphics card will make a big difference.
i7 Q720 @ 1.6ghz. It runs at 50fps pretty solidly but doesn't quite hit 60fps long enough for me to want to play it. Might be the fact I've got TrueCrypt on my laptop eating CPU cycles or any number of things in the background.
Oops forgot to post here too Most games run nicely now with no lag, had to turn on MultiThreading :-D
