May I ask of some asistance?

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Stupid question. I just never messed with it before... But can someone explain how to use frame skipping in hopes of allowing certain games to run better? Also, if there's any other commands I can use either in dos or in windows please let me know. I'm running some games with half screens, and some games just won't run at normal or close to normal speeds. Like MK, it runs so dam slow! and I'm using a pentium 233? Some games also have slurred speach and game sounds as well.

Regards, Steve Krogman

-- Stephen Krogman (skrogman@concentric.net), January 14, 1999

Answers

You sure can

I'm not sure about win mame as I never use it, but there are ways in dos of speeding up games- but remember that nearly everything you do to speed up a game will result in a loss of overall game quality of some sort, be it no sound, jerkiness or color/picture loss.

Pushing F11 while the game is running displays the speed at which the game is running. If its running at under 100%, push F8 to increase the frameskip value by 1. Or use the -frameskip command when you start mame, the value can be from 1-12. Pushing F10 throttles the speed, this is useful when playing back replays to save time. MAME 035b1 uses auto frameskipping as default, this can be a bit of a pain but you can turn it off by entering frameskip = 0 in the cfg file. MAME also uses the depth 16 command as default. This is used to get accurate colors on games that use 65k color modes, but it can also slow emulation down. You can try entering depth = 8 in the mame cfg, it may speed a few games up.

With the sound & speech problems, there's not much you can do about it, sound is often incomplete in many games as it is hard to emulate perfectly while maintaining a decent emulation speed, and external samples are not usually of a high quality. Games which use either the ym2203 or ym3812 soundchip like Gemini Wing or Rygar can be sped up with the command ym2203opl or ym3812opl in the cfg file. This uses the Soundblaster's OPL chip for music emulation, and while it it sounds a little different to the original music, it usually results in a speed increase. You can also decrease the sample rate in the mame file or turn stereo off for increased speed, but at a loss of sound quality.

As for the half screen games, mame checks your vid card and decides on a resolution for it *if* resolution is set to auto in the cfg file. It may be your vid card lacks certain displays, or vesa modes. Downloading Scitech Display Doctor is a good start as it enables your vid card to display various resolutions and vesa modes that your vid card may not have. Or you can muck around with the resolution settings in the cfg file, like 320x240 or 512x384.

With newer games like MK, the only real solution is a speedy PC, there's no way a P233 will run it at full speed, even a P2-450 can't run it 100% with sound enabled and no frameskips.

Phew.. I hope that helps your need for speed!

JSW

-- JSW (jwilson@sv.net.au), January 14, 1999.


Need more speed & autoframeskip

A couple of extra tips:

Turn of the sound or lower the resolution to 11025hz. On my P200, turning off sound on the Capcom CPS-2 or Sega System 16 games improves speed by about 20% and reducing it to 11025hz gives me about an extra 10% speed.

Use the DOS version in pure DOS mode, not through Windows. I've not tried it but I hear it makes a significant difference.

JSW, why don't you like autoframeskip? I think it's the best thing to ever come to MAME, if everyone was to use it then there would be no slowdown cheating. With autoframeskip the speed doesn't drop below 100% until the frameskip reaches 12 and by this point the game is so jerky that it is unplayable. So rather than the game becoming easier on a slow PC, it becomes harder. I just set every game to autoframeskip and if it's too jerky then I turn off the sound and just about about everything runs fine on my P200 - apart from the Midway games (MK, Smash TV, etc). But the Capcom CPS-2 and Neo-Geo games are fine - and I get a better frame rate than I was getting in m0.34.

Dith

-- Dith (dith@europress.co.uk), January 14, 1999.


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