Whoever told me DOSMAME is better than Mame32 had better take a long jump off a rather short pier.

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Alrighty now, I finally got myself a DOSMAME client, 36b2, so I could enjoy the new games. (Super Hangon, Outrun, RELIEF PITCHER, Sunset Riders (Somewhat) and the Simpsons) But, this emulator seems to auto bubble frameskips down to a frameskip of 8, even on my 350 machine. I thought it was just the new games that were causing it, so I went and started the DOSMAME with Ms Pac-Man to verify my conclusion. To my shock, it played Ms Pac-Man on a Frameskip of 8 as well. Before people say so, NO IT WAS NOT SET ON A FRAMESKIP OF 8, it was on auto frameskip of whatever worked the best. Same machine, 2 minutes later, on WinMame, Ms Pac-Man runs nicely on Frameskip of 0! Why is DOSMAME soooo bad if you all seem to cheer it every chance you get?

-- Chris Parsley (cparsley1@hotmail.com), August 12, 1999

Answers

jamon, it's bad. janeow... janeow.. and the whole world wants to tell you right now... who's bad!? couldn't resist.

It's all in the properties of the dos window you run it in, the main reason the dos mame is bettter is that it usually makes better recordings and thus you can actually play things back more often if you use the dos version to record and playback. also before i thought win32mame performed better (i.e. F10ing plays back faster at a higher % frame rate) but now it seems the dosmame gets the higher frame rate.

Also hitting up arrow,return with doskey is soo much nicer rather than hitting alt-F,r or clicking on the record button in win32.

It may take a while to get the settings right (not that i remember what i did to get mine to work) but it is worth it to try. Maybe you have frameskip set to 8 in mame.cfg? win32 doesn't use that but dos does.

-- Chad (churritz@cts.com), August 12, 1999.


Before I get more of these with preset to frameskip 8, let me once again say it is set to AUTO FRAME SKIP, it just bubbles itself down to a frameskip of 8 before it finds a stable place to run the game.

-- Chris Parsley (cparsley1@hotmail.com), August 12, 1999.

Chris,

I'll ask the dumb question now.... are you running Win95/98 or are you running WinNT ?!

If you're running WinNT then forget about trying to run the DOS version of Mame unless you're prepared to do some tweaking with your Commander settings for Mame..... and even then it will probably not run as well as Mame32. I always use Mame32 on my WinNT machine and I always use MameDos on my Win95 machine.

If you are on Win95/98 then you probably need to start looking at your settings as everyone I've talked to once they've figured out their best settings for MameDos find it faster on most games than Win32 Mame.

BeeJay.

PS: Use the standard soundblaster option not AWE even if you have an AWE card. That often makes a big improvement to speed for those with AWE Soundblaster cards.

-- BeeJay (bjohnstone@cardinal.co.nz), August 12, 1999.


Let's get the crazy answers out of the way. Win98 350mhz 64MB Ram Sound Setting #1 Soundblaster Any other ideas?

-- Chris Parsley (cparsley1@hotmail.com), August 12, 1999.

Do you have something running which is using the PC while MAME is trying to run? It may be that something is fighting with MAME for the processor, and slowing it down. I've found that DOS MAME runs slowly if I'm running some other programs at the same time, but in general it's faster than MAME32.

-- Zwaxy (zwaxy@mail.com), August 12, 1999.


Try MS-DOS mode. You should get a noticeable speed boost there. For me, The Simpsons runs at 100% with no frameskip. VESA modes are the fastest, use those if possible. Even better if your video card works with Scitech Display Doctor. Oh yeah, my PC is a PII-233 with 64MB RAM and up until yesterday had a Cirrus GD5465 AGP card (I got a TNT2, yesterday).

As a comparison, MAME is the fastest, with MAME32 and X/MAME (SVGAlib) close behind. Although my new TNT2 may provide better results with MAME32, but I haven't tried it yet...

- Barry Rodewald

-- Barry Rodewald (bsr@hn.pl.net), August 12, 1999.


Here you go Chris :)

The ANSWER: Time sharing. The autoframeskip adjusts every time MAME can't display a frame at exactly the right time. This works perfectly in straight DOS, but in windows the very short calls from minor programs (like ICQ) make the DOS box pause slightly so MAME raises the frameskip when it's not neccessary. This is also why I do not like recording in windows, even though it's feasible with my current machine :)

HOW TO FIX: Hit F11 to display the frameskip during your first game. Use F8 to find a skip setting that MAME reports as hovering around 100%. For later games start off with the -frameskip X switch so it doesn't use the autoframeskip.

ie. mame mspacman -frameskip 0

You can change the MAME.CFG file so it starts with frameskip 0 (or whatever you need most of the time) instead of autoframeskip. It's something like FRAMESKIP=-1

Have fun, Aqua

-- Aquatarkus (aquatarkus@digicron.com), August 12, 1999.


To continue as I told gb, when I did so Aqua, the computer virtually froze. Max speed when I did that was lucky to run at 5%. Next suggestion, as I don't see WinMame32 coming out soon...

-- Chris Parsley (cparsley1@hotmail.com), August 13, 1999.

Three step solution

1. Sledgehammer 2. Return pieces for refund 3. Use refund for new PC

Aqua

-- Aquatarkus (aquatarkus@digicron.com), August 13, 1999.


I think I'm the only one who really understands your problem...and guess what....I really know your ansewer too.....You need to dounloadhttp://www.mameworld.net/dosmame/exe/get_hv_verbose.zip and copy the cwsdpmi.exe to your dmame file....and presto!!! you've never seen mame run so well!

-- Dominick (dblacklab@netzro.net), July 28, 2003.


Chris, you need to adjust your attitude. These people are trying to help you, and all you do is get testy and show no gratitude. That's poor, man.

-- Jake Malow (bluebic999@hotmail.com), January 30, 2004.

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