I've played few MAME games on a 667Mhz Sam440.
Most of the time the speed is good enough, but when games are newer and not too old the SDL based port is too slow.

Does anyone knows if there is a native graphic port of MAME newer than the one on OS4depot (dated 18 Jun 05!) ?

I've also tried to use the amikit joystick "competition pro" but no luck: am I dumb or xMAME doesn't support it?

Note: Sam+OS4.1beta are a perfect couple and a pleasure to use!
Is really coming back the time when computing was fun!

@virgolamobile

as i remember ther was also another version that was not SDL. based.
but yes it is slow too...


hmm on my xp 2000 ,2ghz pc with a nvidia 5600 ultra 256 mem..
i cant relly play CHD mame files on that. its not just the cpu but also GFX card.
so its not just the cpu on sam. its the limet gfx card and pci connecter.

anyway CHD files is harddisk files an there are normal on 6 gigabytes. maby more or les. but ther cant even run propper on my pc.

normal roms yes you shouldent have any probs with the SDL version i belive. maby a new version will speed things up a bit. as fare as i know chd files cant even be located in mame to os 4.x

@virgolamobile

Steffen Häuser are in progress a new release but I don't know when it's done

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@samo79

Is Steffen still around?

@samo79

Quote:

samo79 wrote: @virgolamobile Steffen Häuser are in progress a new release but I don't know when it's done

yes i remeber he said that long time ago but i think he is way too busy and that he might have forgot about it.

i havent got enough memory and no linux knowledge to do a cross compile with the files allready in place.

that said, i am sure that a recompile might actually solve a few things as the SDK has got more mature and ofcourse minigl 2.0 and the switches are in xmame sources but just deactivated in steffens port due to its age.

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@virgolamobile

Quite a lot of newer games are slow on a very high spec PC. This is mostly down to the fact that MAME strives for accurate emulation of the hardware making up the machine, and not the fastest implementation or shortcuts to make things run more quickly.

Most titles using CHD images are notoriously slow, especially if those machines make use of 3D (Gauntlet for example, or any of the N64/PSX based hardware). Now some of the laserdisk games are being added, but these use very large files (the currently supported laserdisk game has a 10GB CHD file needed).

The biggest speed improvements in MAME come from using a dual core machine (the faster your CPU the better), a good graphics card, fast memory (the lower the latency the better) and using a 64-bit CPU in conjunction with a 64-bit OS.

MAME does not support more than dual core processors at the moment, so no advantage is gained from having a quad core machine.

So long as you are not looking to play the 3D games, a vast majority of the fully functional 2D games will play very well indeed (even the old WOS and PUP compiles of MAME 0.36.x played a majority of the 2D titles they supported at good speeds).

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@_Steve_

Gee....thats really odd that games are slow on a high spec PC or even a 667Mhz PPC.

I used to run MAME on a Pentium II prety darn well and at full speed, as well as on an old ppc MAC (Probably G3 or less) and the games ran fine............even the Beatem Ups like Mortal Kombat II, Samurai Showdown...etcc.

Something must be wrong in the programming. its insane to think its slow on such powerful machines....especially on a machine running the ultra-Light AmigaOS.


Something is wrong.

@Virgola

You have to wait for an improvments of amiga os 4.1 video drivers for sam and a new version of mame that should be on the way, as samo79 said directly from Steffen H.. i had, at the time, the same problem with the first version of MAME and the early version of amiga os 4.0 on the micro G3 800Mhz, then it become playable

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@Mr_Capehill

Yes he is around, but he is also busy with other things, there are also another big problem, he doesn't have (at the moment) any Amiga hardware to develop within, this is the main reason about the slowdown of xMame ...

So the actual work are on Linux and some strange and annoying crosscompile

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@Toaks

Are you sure you can't compile with OS 4.1 virtual memory system?

I've looked at porting MAME to AmigaOS myself... but to be honest I'm not sure there's much point. These days the overhead of using SDL is nothing compared to the CPU power required to run the emulator in the first place, and because MAME keeps on being updated it'd be a nightmare to keep the Amiga version up to date.

Better off just using the SDL version. Possibly with MiniGL stuff, that might help.

As was said earlier though, MAME is less about getting the games out and playable and more about accurate emulation for preservation etc., so it will be slow, and as it gets more accurate it gets slower. There's nothing to stop you using an older version for most games though!

@virgolamobile

Is SDL allready hardware accelerated since 4.1 ?

@bennymee

It supports OpenGL (MiniGL).

@Spirantho

Well, XMame and SDLMame still blit a lot slower than what can be achieved when using direct memory access and a few optimisations such as unrolling blit loop to copy using 32/64bits data.

I maintain the MorphOS port, so i could experience that, and compared to SDLMame, I blit 4 times as fast as SDL. If you take a neogeo game for example (running nominally at 60fps), you have 16ms to process the frame. Plain SDL ports (linux or whatever) already eat more than 4ms just to blit the frame, leaving less than 12ms for the rest, when you could have 15ms left. The same can be said about audio data copy too (but it's less important). Then, some drivers can punctually be optimized in some places too.
But in any case, a native port for neogeo/cps2/... games is about 30-40% faster than a plain SDL port. Of course for more demanding games, the blit/emulation ratio gets lower and it's less important, but these demanding games wouldn't run correctly (that is full speed) on our targets anyway.

Then, it's not a nightmare to maintain MAME without using SDL, because unlike many other projects, MAME has a clearly defined backend for audio, video, input and filesystem. Much more portable than some SDL calls everywhere in the code. :)

And by the way, i doubt using OpenGL would be a good thing for us, performance-wise. With amigaos, we have better performances when accessing directly vram. On other OS like linux or osx, OpenGL might help tho. :)

Last edited by Fab on 01-Oct-2008 at 03:15 PM.

The available port of MAME for AmigaOS 4.0 even if old, plays most of the games very fast and accurately. Even 3D games like Cruis'n USA and Cruis'n World are playable on microAmigaOne. The best games from the arcades are playable without slowdown - Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, Street Fighter, Altered Beast, Hang On, Out Run and all the other good games. Even if they use 68000 processor they perform even faster than E-UAE. Small drawback of MAME for AmigaOS 4 is the lack of AmigaInput support, which makes some games hard to play. For example no analog support for racing games and flying sims. I very often run the MAME AmigaOS 4 port.

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@drHirudo

So, according to you, running cruisnusa at less than 50% speed (or rather 25-30% on your µaone) is playable and fast enough? Ok, but you have very low expectations then (which is a good thing sometimes :)).

I also highly doubt cps2 games run at 60fps on your configuration. But at least in this case frameskip can help a bit, while it clearly doesn't help at all on something like cruisnusa.

@Fab

Do you think is it possible to back port your mantained MorphOS port to OS4?
If it is faster than both XMame and SDLMame that would be great!

@virgolamobile

Mostly a few API differences on process creation, some morphos specific calls to remove/adapt (blanker disabling, buffered overlay output, ...). Unless amigainput has a usb->lowlevel API wrapper or so, joypad support would have to be adapted too. The builtin GUI doesn't use MUI4 features yet, AFAIR so it should be fairly easy there too.

But i can't do it myself. :)

@Fab

I'm ashamed of myself but I cannot help you much here (I only know js and php), unless you only need the possibility to compile on a OS4.1 environment and you can guide me (remote VNC call?).

Does anybody in this forum can assist Fab properly?

@virgolamobile

nah, a vnc link wouldn't be practical at all for several reasons. :)
But a few OS4 developers i know could port it quite easily.