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All these tips are fairly simple, but they may help someone. The latest versions of mame are running games slower due to new coding, games that you used to play OK may now suffer slowdown.

These things worked for me using mame32 on win XP. Now I can play most games rock steady 100% speed even on games such as Strikers 1945 plus which used to slowdown intermittently on my system. I have a P4 1.7 GF3ti200

F11 during play will give you play speed info.

Go to mame / options / advanced / and set frame skipping to automatic.

Download ENDITALL2 http://home.ptd.net/~don5408/toolbox/enditall/ and see how many background programs you can shutdown.

Run mame and then Ctrl Alt Delete to bring up task manager, right click mame in the processes tab and set priority to high or realtime.

Any other tips are welcome

Don't blame me if you break anything

It's probably obvious to most people here but just incase you didn't know then you can usually get better results by not having autoframeskip but changing the frameskip setting manually.
Press F11 and then use F9 and F10 to up the frameskip or turn it down. In my case (PIII 500mhz bleh!) I can almost get full speed on these new games around frameskip 9!
Also playing without sound will help your speed dramatically but for some reason a few of these 067 games don't work without sound. Not sure why.

Konami games just absolutely have to be able to check that every single ROM is correct. Bit of a problem when sound is disabled as there is no sound CPU to check, so it fails.

DRN wrote:Press F11 and then use F9 and F10 to up the frameskip or turn it down. In my case (PIII 500mhz bleh!) I can almost get full speed on these new games around frameskip 9!

BTW it's F8 and F9 to increase/decrease frameskip.

F10 toggles the speed throttle.

I agree and have always used a manual frameskip setting when needed. I found performance a tad worse with autoframeskip. As you likely would suspect with that active a little additional code is run to calculate if you need to adjust the frameskip for the next so many frames. That calculation just takes more away from the game...even though it's small it is something.

BTW it's F8 and F9 to increase/decrease frameskip

Yeah, that's what I meant

Well Frameskip=6 obviously dosen't werk.. sexyparo score of 265100 got D3N13D.
I knew it was kinda iffy when Stage 2 didn't scroll as fast as it did before... I had planned on using that as a base frameskip parameter for the n00 Konami sh00terz.

BTW: what WAS the average speed in that recording?

Edit=Played it back..with autoframeskip on it gets to 80% during stage 2...recorded playback was not even over 80%...AGH. Still wanna know the avg. though.
It seems that the only way to get it halfway legal would be to put it at some obscene parameter like fskip=9, 10, or 11. If that's the case then sexyparo, gokuparo and tbyahhoo are unplayable fer meh.

Average speed was somewhere around 87%

Well I've decided my pc is well overdue for an upgrade so I've decided to buy myself a new cpu and motherboard (no, not just for marp. I've been wanting to for a long time anyway ).
Roughly what speed cpu am I looking for to run these new games? P4 2.4Ghz enough? What do you guys have?

Depends on what games you want to be able to play...

Williams Wolf Unit (eg: mk2, Rampage World Tour) - ~800MHz
Konami GX (eg: Twinbee Yahhoo, Sexy Parodius) - ~1.1GHz
Killer Instinct - ~1.5GHz
Cruisin' USA/World - ~4GHz (and good luck finding one of those)

2.4GHz is probably decent of a new PC.

Damn, I could use a new PC....

P4 2.4Ghz enough?

Yes, but get a 1.6a or 1.8 and overclock it to 2.4. Saves money and is faster than a standard 2.4.

if you don't want to mess around with overclocking (not a essential thing because you end up spending more dough on cooling equipment to keep it stable) consider AMD or P3 over P4, the processing power kicks P4's butt when comparing the same mhz to mhz AND they are cheaper, but P4 has better memory bandwidth of which will only help your load time not your gaming speed (the thing that's really important) as much as CPU power will.

mahlemiut wrote: Cruisin' USA/World - ~4GHz (and good luck finding one of those)

...stupid idea here, please don't actually try this unless you have the money to cover any potential losses, your mileage may vary, please keep a fire extinguisher and water-cooling equipment handy within two minutes of booting a system with this done, etc. etc.:

overclocking a P4 3.06GHz by 30-50% (for those of you not wanting to do the math, probably 3.97-4.6GHz)?

either that, or rewriting MAME in some manner to have it take advantage of multiple processors (? not sure how/if this would work - maybe input and main processor emulation on one processor, sound/video emulation on another?).

::waves to Hisa:: having a wonderful time in the land of not giving much of a fuck, wish you were here.

if you don't want to mess around with overclocking (not a essential thing because you end up spending more dough on cooling equipment to keep it stable)

You don't need to spend a single cent extra.

Buttermaker wrote:You don't need to spend a single cent extra.

Yesh ya do. Unless your P4 2.4 GHz comes with water-cooling equipment of some kind. Overclockin' turns yer CPU into the equivalent of an EZ-Bake Oven(tm) if you use the flimsy fan you got with the system.

Skyline wrote:

Buttermaker wrote:You don't need to spend a single cent extra.

Yesh ya do. Unless your P4 2.4 GHz comes with water-cooling equipment of some kind. Overclockin' turns yer CPU into the equivalent of an EZ-Bake Oven(tm) if you use the flimsy fan you got with the system.

You obviously have no idea what you are talking about. P4s run pretty cool and the retail heatsink/fan combo is more than adequate.