[NoHotAshes]

Hey guys, ive posted for a solution to this all over the place with no luck. Im hoping someone here can help me.

I have a Core i7 920 on an EVGA x58 Mobo, and im running Vista 64. You'd think i would have no problems playing something as simple as Metal Slug or Metal Slug X, but they run with unbearable slowdown, stuttering on the title screen, and slowing down at explosions or multiple enemies, even more infuriating is that these games ran great on the P4 with XP that i upgraded from. I have tried a ton of things to get the games to work properly but i always get no where. Here is what i've tried so far...

I've tried old MAME32 versions, new MAME64 versions, new MAMEui versions. Ive tried different builds of Final Burn Alpha and 2dfighter.com, ive also tried different versions of Metal Slug and Metal Slug X thinking maybe that would help. Ive tried compatability mode, running as admin, turning hyperthreading on and off. I have the latest drivers from nvidia, i have the latest frameworks, latest directx, latest system updates, latest x58 chipset drivers, everything else runs flawless but this, i mean Crysis is maxed out but i cant even play Metal Slug that my P4 ran easily???

Basically ive ran out of things to try, hope someone can help. thanks alot.

 

[nosound.97]

Have you set processors' performance to maximum or at least medium.

 

[Squall-Leonhart]

Disable hyperthreading. its a known cause of slowness in some applications using the i7 core.

 

[NoHotAshes]

Yes i tried running it at max priority, that didnt help. i also tried with hyperthreading on and off and it made no difference... :/

 

[dragonmasterx2]

have you enabled the multithreadingoption in Mame?

 

[mudlord]

There is no point.

By design, MAME will be slow. Its not a bug, its a feature. Its 100% intended by the developers.

MAME is only about hardware preservation. Software optimization is something MAMEDev collectively completely disregard, and MAMEDev prides itself on cycle/subcycle accuracy and nothing less. The developers completely also disregard anything that can be used to speed up games, including game specific hacks and methods to optimize drawing without comprimising accuracy.

Don't like it? Then don't use the emulator at all. Mame World moderators will happily ban you if you disagree with how things are done with MAME.

 

[Squall-Leonhart]

he states the truth... i've seen it done >.<

 

[LensLarque]

Yeah it's the truth but, hey, playing Neo Geo games in Mame is ok even with a Pentium III. So his problem has nothing to do with cpu power and Mame's natural slowness, it's definitely something else.

Did you try both DirectDraw and Direct3D modes NoHotAshes ? Still the same ?

Other tips:
- do not enable things like 'wait vsync', 'sync to monitor', 'game refresh' etc...
the only two options you need are 'throttle' and 'triple buffering', these two will take care of everything.
- there's an option like 'use RDTSC timing' that should be checked if you're using a desktop pc, and unchecked if using a laptop.
- 'sleep when idle' or something like that should be checked.
- make sure that Mame is configured to display in 32bit color mode.

 

[Squall-Leonhart]

triplebuffering will not work without Vsync. sorry but thats how it works.

 

[LensLarque]

triplebuffering will not work without Vsync. sorry but thats how it works.

Well I don't know how Mame deals with this but it strangely works pretty well with just the 'triple buffering' option enabled... maybe checking it enables vsync by default even without checking the actual 'wait vsync' option, without Mame telling you. What the sync options really do in Mame is not made obvious in the GUI anyway.

Having 'wait vsync' alone enabled makes the games go all skippy and jumpy. 'sync to monitor' forces all games to your monitor's refresh rate and might speed up some of'em too much. 'match game refresh' seems too obscure to me, I can't tell the difference between this and 'trottle'.

Well... it's Mame...

 

[Squall-Leonhart]

are you using nhancer? because we actually found a bug in 2.4 and older......

 

[NoHotAshes]

the only option on the advanced tab i currently have checked is triple buffering. mame runs the same in direct3d and directdraw. what is nhancer? if its seperate from mame im not using that either. also im not trying to get the games to speed up. i just want them to run at normal speed, just like they did on my pentium 4. but they are not running normally all metal slug games are suffering from crippling slowdown on my i7

 

[LensLarque]

Well there's no real feature to 'speed up' games in Mame anyway, we're just suggesting settings to get'em tu run normally.
But it's hard to figure out what's wrong here...

 

[NoHotAshes]

thanks for the continued suggestions guys. i have discovered a few other things. in mame 0.119 i can get it work on that by deleting the line

<cpu>
<clock index="0" value="100"
</cpu>

from my .cfg file for the game im trying to play, unfortunately this only works offline, the second i try to play online it is crippled again. Also on the latest build of MAME64 i can get it to run right by going to slider controls and putting cpu overclock at 150% or higher, but firstly i shouldnt have to overclock to get this to work, and secondly this emulator is offline only and therefore useless.... :/

 

[Paratech]

If you're trying to play via Kallerina builds you probably are getting slowness because of the Internet access. It's a build MAME DEV doesn't like, and it has poor security as it isn't open source. If you want to play an illegal online build of MAME that is your choice and right, but MAME DEV has nothing to do with it and you will get banned from other "MAME friendly" forums even for bringing it up...

 

[JJXB]

i can't understand why the MAME dev's won't even give the option for speedhacks or any speed improvement optimizations of any kind myself. i respect the idea of preserving accurate hardware emulation but can't speedhacks/GPU hardware acceleration be added as optional toggles that are off by default for example? that would achieve their goal for hardware accuracy still while allowing playability as well.

i tend to use MAME++ 0.119 (i think it is) when i use any MAME versions to play stuff and while i know a lot of people would give me s*** for it, i want to play games at a good speed, not have them run at 5-10 fps.
the offical mame builds run games far too slow to be playable for me and for playability i have to turn to these third party builds. as soon as i can actually code for s***, i'll try and attempt to optimize some code but until then, all i can do is use builds like MAME++.

 

[mudlord]

No. The only way to fit the MAMEDevs motives, is if you use *information* from MAME to build your own emulator which has those things. Aand even then, that comes under scrutiny from them, as they expect you contribute back to MAME then, which I find rude.

Especially this scrutiny. That is downright insulting. Why would I want to contribute to a project that is so oppressive of views? Emulation has shades of grey: I hope they realise that......

And yes, GPU accelleration. Allowing for accuracy as well as speed. And they still believe software rasterization is the future *facepalm*. Why not offload to shaders?