In the absence of any sort of average FPS being embedded into the recordings I thought it might be interesting to know what spec machines fellow MARPers are using for their recordings and what the minimum percentage is you feel the game must be running at before you will make a recording ?!
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I'm running a K6-2(3D) 300 mhz machine running at 100mhz on the mother-board, 64 megs of DIMMs and a Viper V330 video. (Yes I'm looking forward to the next release of Retrocade !!! )
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So, what spec machines are you other MARPers running with and what's your minimum percentage of original arcade speed that you need to obtain before you'll make/submit a recording for a game ?!
Interesting thread, I have often wondered about this but never asked.
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I actually just got a new machine for home, which will now become my primary place for recording scores (as opposed to my work machine before). The new system is a P2-450, 128MB RAM, and a Viper v550 video card. So far, it has run everything I've tried at 100% with no frameskip (hehe). (FYI, the work machine I was using before was a P2-300)
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Regarding the minimum percentage of original speed for me to playback, I'd have to say between 90-100% (only ranging down to 90% because I noticed a few games that seemed to be 100% were actually running 5-10% slower). If I notice the game running slow, I will adjust the frameskip to get it to 100%.
I use a p2-400 BX system with a G-200 graphics card. Most games run at 100% so I seldom have to run with frame-skipping and the like.
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My opinion is that recordings done with slow computers (emulation below 80-90 %), should not be allowed. The games are not supposed to be played this way, and the scores would certainly not be 'legal', in the sense that you probably wouldnt have achieved it if the games was running at full speed.
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Hope the mame-team add a function that saves machine information/emulationspeed-information in the recordings.
As mentioned before, I have a Hewlett-Packard P2-450, 128 megs of SDRAM, 10 gigs of HD space. The only games I've had to use frameskip with on MAME are a few Neo-Geo games... I can't believe how slow Blazing Star is!
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I used to have a Pentium-90, but my friend who had a mild interest in emulation let me do some recordings on his P2-266 too. I've tried to keep my recordings "legit" too, I'd do whatever it took to get the game running 100%, whether it was frameskipping or turning off sound. If I couldn't get full speed, I just left the game alone.
Me and my friend built an arcade machine a few weeks ago, installed an ordinary PC with latest version of MAME, and connected the keyboard curcuit to 2 8-way arcade joysticks. We also added support for coin insertion, player start etc. with special keys. A trackball is working as our mouse and can also be used with some games.
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This whole project turned out to be the most addictive machine I have ever seen! Its just about as close you get without actually playing the real arcade. All my recordings from now on will be done using this arcade machine ..
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If you want more info about building arcade cabinets : http://www.arcadeathome.com (theres also a picture of our fine machine somewhere)
I'm running a Cyrix 6x86 166 with 32 megs of ram and a 2 meg Trident video card. Most of these ancient games will run at 100% by tweaking the frameskip and/or turning sound off, but as far as Neo Geo or CPS-1 games are concerned it may as well be overclocked Scramble hardware.
Since I usually wasn't playing the popular machines in the arcade (until SFII), the sound was almost always off anyway.
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With the old frameskip (m34) I set the games however it takes to get them 100% speed for recordings. With the new frameskip, I watch the framerate in a few test games to make sure it's hovering around 100% to make sure the autoadjust is able to work correctly. Mortal Kombat runs at something like 40% at frameskip 11, so it'll have to wait for an upgrade
The computer fairy blessed me with a brand new machine yesterday (Cyrix MII-333), so I'll be able to run my sorely missed fighting games again. That, and some nice MAME person FINALLY fixed the sound in Demolition Derby
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Still watching the frameskip, but it's so much easier now....
Aqua
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