Need to get up to speed with MAME again.

On Tue, 1 Jul 2008 13:55:52 -0700 (PDT), Philip
<philip.mcculloch.RemoveThis@gmail.com> wrote:

>zeebop,
>
>for a front end, I've recently had success with a free program,
>Mamewah:
>http://wiki.arcadecontrols.com/wiki/Mamewah
>
>From screen shots I've seen of commercial products, you can configure
>Mamewah to look and run just as smoothly, for a better price.
>
>A question for others: Does anyone know the minimum sort of computer
>specs needed to get newer 3D games like NFL blitz and Tekken (1,2,3
>etc) and others to run at their original speeds under MAME?
>
>-Philip

Thanks for the feedback.
I've just checked out the PC running my cabinet and it was a version
of MameWAH. so I must have liked it then.

In the absence of any other comments, I'm going to assume this is the
best bet for cabinet front-ends.

Now I'm trying to work out which directory the roms should go in....
 >> Stay informed about: Need to get up to speed with MAME again. 

> A question for others: Does anyone know the minimum sort of computer
> specs needed to get newer 3D games like NFL blitz and Tekken (1,2,3
> etc) and others to run at their original speeds under MAME?


For Blitz a 64bit build + core2duo @2.66GHz minimum should do
Tekken needs less...
Anyway...any decent C2D system should do for your named ones...however
there are still CPU hogs which won't be playable
 >> Stay informed about: Need to get up to speed with MAME again. 

zeebop,

I spent a good two weekends on setting mamewah up.. but I'm not very
bright.

It took me one weekend to figure out that mamewah doesn't do anything
other than display information from mame. I used the current rev of
MameUI to set up my Mame stuff because it seems to be the easiest to
use for noobs like me. The roms simply go in the rom folder, the
artwork in the artwork folder, etc.

Then I just made a mamewah config file that made calls to the MameUI
\Roms\ and MameUI\artwork\ etc. The only thing native to the mamewah
program is the mamewah config file, and some front-end artwork files.

good luck,
Philip

Roman,

Thanks for the info, my MAME computer way older than 64bit chips and
multi-core chips.
 >> Stay informed about: Need to get up to speed with MAME again. 

I have various versions of MAME from 1999-2001. (All but one are DOS
-- I downloaded MAME32 (Windows) in 1999, and not surprisingly it
didn't work very well on my P75, which at that processor speed (a bit
slow even by 1999 standards -- a *lot* slow today) is hardly
surprising -- it's probably a miracle it worked at all! But it
worked quite well on a P2/200 I had access to back then.)

I'm wondering if I need to get an update, as I've tried one of them
under DOSBox on my new laptop (running WinXP Pro) and it actually
works better than it did in a direct DOS session under Win95/98!
(Those versions of Windows had the bug that if a DOS program was
interrupted by pressing the Windows key, as often as not one got the
dreaded "this program cannot be restored" error. No danger of that
with DOSBox, as it's a Windows task running a virtual DOS machine.)

Perhaps if I get a new version of MAME32 (I don't know where the old
one is, or even if I still have it); that would probably be the best
way of running more recent games, which might not run too well on my
old DOS versions due to the DOSBox overheads. (One thing I remember
is the reason why I stopped updating my MAME after 2001; a fault in my
P75 machine's graphics card's high memory, which fortunately only
showed up when using extreme (for the time) graphics modes such as
1024x768x16M, meant that I had to run MAME with the "depth=8"
parameter to constrain all games to 256 colours or less, otherwise
MAME would get to the first screen of any game (even the B/W ones) and
immediately bomb back to DOS. Unfortunately MAME stopped supporting
the "depth" parameter sometime around 2001, which as I couldn't afford
to replace my graphics card (even if I could find one which worked on
such an already-old machine) made the newer MAMEs unusable on my
system. Thank goodness I've now completely replaced that machine...)
 >> Stay informed about: Need to get up to speed with MAME again. 

Robert Baker wrote on 24. July 2008:
>
> I have various versions of MAME from 1999-2001. (All but one are DOS
> -- I downloaded MAME32 (Windows) in 1999, and not surprisingly it
> didn't work very well on my P75, which at that processor speed (a bit
> slow even by 1999 standards -- a *lot* slow today) is hardly
> surprising -- it's probably a miracle it worked at all! But it
> worked quite well on a P2/200 I had access to back then.)

As I prefer the old classics I never saw any difference, no matter if I
played them on my first PC (P1 with 133 MHZ) where I also discovered
MAME, or a 1.5 GHZ I tried it lately.

> I'm wondering if I need to get an update, as I've tried one of them
> under DOSBox on my new laptop (running WinXP Pro) and it actually
> works better than it did in a direct DOS session under Win95/98!
> (Those versions of Windows had the bug that if a DOS program was
> interrupted by pressing the Windows key, as often as not one got the
> dreaded "this program cannot be restored" error. No danger of that
> with DOSBox, as it's a Windows task running a virtual DOS machine.)

As along as Windows is new, nl prob. But after installing stuff, may be
on-access virus scanners and stuff, also MAME should slow down at some
point.

> Perhaps if I get a new version of MAME32 (I don't know where the old
> one is, or even if I still have it); that would probably be the best
> way of running more recent games, which might not run too well on my
> old DOS versions due to the DOSBox overheads.

I guess also with Windows you can have more than one MAME version. So
keep the one you have and try the most up-to-date one in a different
directory.

May be (bit I am not a Windows user) you can also just link the existing
roms directory to the new version so no need to copy them and waste space.
--
Andreas
Old school arcade classics at <http://www.ankman.de/mame/>
Tired of Windows malware but fear to try out Linux? Try a CD-live Linux which
does not touch your harddisk. Like <http://www.ubuntu.com/> or
<http://www.knoppix.com/>. Find out if Linux works for you without any risk.
 >> Stay informed about: Need to get up to speed with MAME again. 

Why is a mushroom called mushroom? As usual, Andreas Kohlbach
<ank.DeleteThis@spamfence.net> got it all completely wrong and wrote:


>May be (bit I am not a Windows user) you can also just link the existing
>roms directory to the new version so no need to copy them and waste space.

Yes, you can. It's what I'm doing at the moment.
 >> Stay informed about: Need to get up to speed with MAME again.