Anyone running MAME on Intel Core 2 Duo?

[OldSchoolGamer]

Just wondering, my old Athlon XP 1800+ with / Geforce Ti 4200 64mb was
pretty great for MAME but of course anything with .chd files or some of the newest roms were very slow as in unplayable.

I am upgrading soon with min spec of Core 2 Duo E6600 / 2GB DDR 2 RAM /
500 GB HD / Videocard UNDECIDED.................of course this is all for productivity, video editing work etc BUT figured since I am doing it anyway...
How much of an improvement can I expect for games with .chd files or even newer titles with 3D polygons etc? I once heard that MAME performance is more about the CPU than the videocard?

Any opinions, suggestions, feedback etc greatly appreciated!

[roushimsx]

How much of an improvement can I expect for games with .chd files or even newer titles with 3D polygons etc? I once heard that MAME performance is more about the CPU than the videocard?

You'll see a pretty massive improvement in speed/playability in a lot of games, but a bulk of the high end 3d hardware stuff (voodoo-based boards and whatnot) is still going to be out of reach. Aaron Giles has been doing some ninja work (http://www.aarongiles.com/) on improving this recently (with greater benefits for those with Vista 64-bit), though you still won't be able to play Blitz at 100%.

But hey, you'll be golden for a bunch of ST-V, ZN-1/2, System 11, etc stuff though and that's gotta count for something (unless you prefer Zinc and SSF in which case it probably doesn't count for much).

Enjoy the new cpu. I've been using an E6600 for a little bit now (having upgraded from an Athlon 2500+) and it's just been wonderful for emu/games/work/high def porn.

p.s. high def porn is scary. If there's one thing that should max out at 480p, it's porn.

[gepeto]

The only chip I found to have trouble with mame was the old cyrixs chip. man that thing couldn't run pacman. I was totally depressed.

[diskoboy]

I'm running MAME on 2 pc's.... My desktop (AMD 4400 X2 - 2gb ram) and my laptop (Intel P4 2.8 ghz with hyperthreading and 2GB DDR2).

My laptop runs MAME a helluva lot better than my desktop, for some odd reason. I wish they'd make a version of MAME that is more dependant on the GFX accelerator, than just the processor and RAM. I say this because MAME runs mainly off processor speed and RAM. And now with the Dual core chips NOW finlly breaking the 3.0ghz barrier, MAME was hindered by the older dual core chips - even when you're runing MAME with the multi-threading mode on.

My next PC will be a quad-core, so I can't wait to see how much of a speed increase the additional CPU cores will provide.

[Trebuken]

I never really played any of the .chd games but having an E600 as well I gave it a shot. I could not get them fast enough to be playable though they worked fine.

Everything else I have tried is perfect though...

[boatofcar]

I can't even get OutRun to run at full speed on my 1Ghz iBook :/

[Cryomancer]

I can't wait until gauntlet is runnable at a good speed.

And Planet Harriers is added 8/

[Ze_ro]

Aaron Giles has been doing some ninja work (http://www.aarongiles.com/) on improving this recently (with greater benefits for those with Vista 64-bit), though you still won't be able to play Blitz at 100%.
Some of his more recent work involved making a polygon engine that could be off-loaded onto another core... so if you're running 0.120u1 on a multi-core system, you should see some improvement on those systems that make use of this functionality. Unfortunately, any game that DOESN'T use that functionality will make absolutely no use of multiple cores.

--Zero

[john_soper]

There's a thread in arcadecontrols.com main forum right now about a guy with a 4Ghz duo-2 setup doing benchmarks. Sorry, too lazy to link.

[MysteryRidahz]

I use smooth mame, and i am using intel PIII 600MHZ, all games runs pretty smooth. I never played the CHD files tho, even tho i might look into trying it out and see how it runs. \\^_^/

[Cryomancer]

Any word on a 64bit version of MAME32 ever happening?

[boatofcar]

I use smooth mame, and i am using intel PIII 600MHZ, all games runs pretty smooth. I never played the CHD files tho, even tho i might look into trying it out and see how it runs. \\^_^/

Smooth Mame? I tried searching for it but all the links I found were dead...

[MysteryRidahz]

Smooth Mame? I tried searching for it but all the links I found were dead...

http://www.zophar.net/mame.html

go down a bit until you see it. :rocker:

[roushimsx]

I can't even get OutRun to run at full speed on my 1Ghz iBook :/

I've never been happy with MacMAME's performance either :( My G4 powerbook may have a decent battery life, but god damn if it doesn't suck balls for anything emulation related.

[Greg2600]

Anything in the Pentium III era can run games through around 1991 or 1992 fairly well. I would say P4 for the rest of the 1990's. roushimsx, I'm not going to comment on your performance on an Apple product, because that's a foreign world to me. However, I'll just say I'm no fan of Apple's performance.