I would like everyones opinion and experience here

[Deadly]

A little off the beaten path......bare with me please. "This has nothing to do with GameEx"

I met a person last night that is opening an arcade shop here in Oregon. I was telling him how I would love to build a dedicated machine for each style of game. So I would have a stand alone machine that only had driving game son it, another one with only fighting games and another machine for shooting and so forth.

He laughed and said he's actually selling units for this exact reason.

Almost there keep reading:

This guy mentioned he had Carnevil running as his demo for shooting. I also have this ROM but the game is SOOOO friggin jerky it sucks to play. He said it was because I'm using Intel products.

I asked him about Gauntlet Legends which also runs like crap and he said it runs smooth on his lower end AMD stuff.

My config is an Intel 955XBK board with a Pentium Extreme 3.2ghz, "Which acts like 4 procs running" 2 gig of 667 ram, ATI X800GTO video card, all SATA drives and it is all liquid cooled.

I was hoping it is the sigmatel integrated audio doing this so I shut it off in the bios and stuck in a sound blaster live card and no dice...same issue. I have updated every friggin driver including the bios and firmware for the drives. Since I work for Intel I have the ability/option to swap every piece of hardware also.

The optimized P4 version of Mame doesn't help either. Tweaking XP doesn't help either ... I'm just lost and don't want to chuck my bad ass system because it runs some games like crap.

I think the guy is correct but I have no AMD stuff to play with here LOL!

PLEASE will you guys tell me what you're runnning for hardware and try Carnevil and Gauntlet legends and tell me if the video is jerky or the sound is jerky or both?

Thanks everyone.

PS Tom, for what it's worth I tried getting the guy to buy GameEx and sell that as the front end

[stephenp1983]

This guy is obviously lying as no current computer can run Gaunlet Legends at level that it wouldn't be choppy. The mamedev's estimate that it would require a 10ghz processor to run the game. I'm not sure about carnival, but the majority of CHD game are harder to run.

[Deadly]

  stephenp1983 said:

This guy is obviously lying as no current computer can run Gaunlet Legends at level that it wouldn't be choppy. The mamedev's estimate that it would require a 10ghz processor to run the game. I'm not sure about carnival, but the majority of CHD game are harder to run.

The game is CarnEVIL not carnival as a 386 could run carnival . I don't know what to believe thus the reason I'm asking the users of this forum for help and opinions.

I would like an AMD or Intel person to post their hardware specs and run Carnevil or for that matter NFL Blitz 99 to see if the sound is quirky for them also. My graphics are almost perfect but when the sound starts hosing up it really takes it's tole on the graphics as well.

Anyone else care to share?

[Atari800]

If he is local to you - go and see this for yourself

Watch the machine boot up - usually you will see the video cards bios info and perhaps a motherboard logo

And then click start -run - dxdiag

This will show the guts

Then look at task manager for monitored performance

Then look at Carnevil and Gauntlet first hand

My Carnevil and Cal Speed and Gauntlet are choppy - I can dink around with frame skipping abit on some to smooth things out but it ends up slow

Pentium 3.06

1 Gig ram

Geforce 4 video card

Windows 2003 server

Also

Pentuim 2.8

1 gig ram

Radeon X800 Pro

Also - if this guy says "oh its video card".... Aaron Guile say Mame does not take advantage of Video Hardware accelleration. He emulates each video card of each system.

In gaunltet, he emualtes a 3dfx

In Asteroids, he emulates a vector graphics monitor

In Defender, he emulates (whatever)

He cant take advantage of hardware for a particular type fo card on a pc...that why there just generic options (Direct Draw, Direct 3D, and now GDI)

Granted a HIGH ZOOT video card would help - but not like it would for "Star Wars Knights Batlles" on a Ati Rage 3d, compared to NVidia 9999 super duper liquid nitrogen cooled card. That one game to many video cards - where as mame is many games to common display

[lingpanda]

I have and AMD xp 3200+ 512 ram. I only get 16 FPS in those games. Very jerky.

[Deadly]

This is great that you guys have given your experiences and what you use THANK YOU! Actually the guy invited me over to his shop to see for myself next week so I think I will go. He swears that AMD Semprons are the way to go and these games run smooth. I dunno I guess I'll report back with stats on what I find out. I guess seeing a couple Intel systems and an AMD being jerky makes me feel better LOL! Thanks again ..... all other opinions welcome too!

[moparmaniac]

CarnEvil is one of the first games I tried when I got my new machine...an XP Dual Core 3800+. My old machine was a XP 3000+ and there was only a slight Improvement, but no where enough to run it decently.

I just loaded it and ran the frame rate...inside the game mine runs about 27-30fps out of 57fps. And the sound is all real jittery.

Gauntlet Legends was pushing 12!!!!

[Atari800]

Well lets see if Deadly witnesses the OS and motherboard/cpu combo for MAME

Sempron...research shows this as the competition to Celeron - although it beat Celeron in some benchmarks, it is still considered a low end CPU for low cost systems

*I am not bashing the product line - just my interpretation of a quote

"The new Intel Celeron D processors use a variant of the Prescott core, only with a smaller L2 cache and a lower bus speed. The Celeron D includes a 256K L2 cache (compared to 1-MB for the Pentium 4) and runs on a 533 MHz processor bus (800 MHz for the Pentium 4). This allows Intel to offer the Celeron D at high clock speeds and low prices, while not affecting sales on the higher-end Pentium 4 line. The Celeron D 335 used in this article is clocked at 2.8 GHz, and its default performance is significantly lower than a comparable Pentium 4-2.8E."

"The Sempron 3100+ is based on the AMD Newcastle core, and instead of 512K of L2 cache it has been cut in half to 256K. This is a bit better trade-off than the Celeron D to Pentium 4 comparison, but keep in mind that the original Athlon 64 core design featured a full 1-MB of L2 cache. The rest of the design specifications are consistent, and the Sempron 3100+ features an integrated memory controller capable of up-to DDR400 speeds, and uses a 200 MHz/1.6 GHz processor bus. The Sempron 3100+ runs at a 1.8 GHz default clock speed, and has very impressive performance for the class."

So it is faster when compared to a CELERON but put up against Athlon 64/XP or Pentium....

wellI dont know how a CPU reduced in horsepower can out perform the Insane Asylum machines mentioned here.

Give us a report, Deadly. Grab that DXDIAG info, look at Task Manager, etc

[Will]

As far as Semprons compared to Celeron, I would definately go with Celeron D right now. The Semprons run just as well (maybe a few percent better) but the celerons are much cheaper. A few weeks ago I bought a 3.2 gHz Celeron D for $30 on TigerDirect. The comparable Semprons were around $100. You can't argue with that. Use the extra money for RAM and you'll have a better system anyway. It will easily run all the other games. If a $1100 processor can't run those newer games at playable rates, why spent the extra cash for a faster proc???

Of course I am talking to those with dedicated MAME systems. If you use your desktop, then faster is always better

[Deadly]

I would like to mention that I am not all against AMD, but wanting all you AMD people to tell me what you are experiencing. I actually started this thread because I've heard so many people that play flight sims say, "AMD is the ONLY thing to use for gaming." Why I dunno but they all swear by AMD. Ok, that's cool maybe they're on to something. Hell I've seen it first hand that Intel can have a piece of hardware that just completely sucks ass, someone corrects a driver and it rocks. Well I suppose that holds true with any company. BUT I have tried running Carnevil on a Intel Duo Core system with 3 gig of ram and 256 DDr3 ATI card. NOPE!!! OR how about on a P4 Hyper threaded prescott overclocked to 3.8 with 4 gig of ram --- NOPE! So I was honestly hoping that for some odd reason that Mame did have some glitchy thing when it came to Intel. Computers I would suppose are like motors in the sense that, "There is no replacement for displacement." Sooooooo the more horse power the better the performance right? I would assume so, but I guess whne it comes to Mame we are all reliant upon the Mame developers "Giles" to fix the drivers so we can continue to play the games we played as kids and or the ones our kids have taught us to play LOL!

[Atari800]

Pentium 3.06 HT

1 gig ram

Nvidia 6200 (free upgrade from geforce 4 that was in there - woohoo)

Carnevil

Direct 3d

Averages about 32/57

Spiked upto 41...fell to 18 (maybe 10)

In mameplusplus - If I turned off THROTTLING and it seemed to stay up at 44

but when the Jester head was bobbing around before the game play it seems to just hover at 28

I was running a 0 frameskipping (not auto)

and the sound was "Chop-chopy-py-py"

Remember guys - turn on task manager and look at the PERFORMANCE tab and also processes

dual core/hyperthreading - you'll see only 1 cpu is used (or 50%)

Mame is not hyperthreading/dual core optimized

So even those with 32 CPUS that are liquid nitrogen cooled and got a terabyte of human blood enhanced memory...its not in the current design to take advantage of that

Now run a test of cruching a DVD to a 100 meg avi while playing CARNEVIL....there you will see a test of power

[lingpanda]

  Deadly said:

A little off the beaten path......bare with me please. "This has nothing to do with GameEx"

I met a person last night that is opening an arcade shop here in Oregon. I was telling him how I would love to build a dedicated machine for each style of game. So I would have a stand alone machine that only had driving game son it, another one with only fighting games and another machine for shooting and so forth.

He laughed and said he's actually selling units for this exact reason.

Almost there keep reading:

This guy mentioned he had Carnevil running as his demo for shooting. I also have this ROM but the game is SOOOO friggin jerky it sucks to play. He said it was because I'm using Intel products.

I asked him about Gauntlet Legends which also runs like crap and he said it runs smooth on his lower end AMD stuff.

My config is an Intel 955XBK board with a Pentium Extreme 3.2ghz, "Which acts like 4 procs running" 2 gig of 667 ram, ATI X800GTO video card, all SATA drives and it is all liquid cooled.

I was hoping it is the sigmatel integrated audio doing this so I shut it off in the bios and stuck in a sound blaster live card and no dice...same issue. I have updated every friggin driver including the bios and firmware for the drives. Since I work for Intel I have the ability/option to swap every piece of hardware also.

The optimized P4 version of Mame doesn't help either. Tweaking XP doesn't help either ... I'm just lost and don't want to chuck my bad ass system because it runs some games like crap.

I think the guy is correct but I have no AMD stuff to play with here LOL!

PLEASE will you guys tell me what you're runnning for hardware and try Carnevil and Gauntlet legends and tell me if the video is jerky or the sound is jerky or both?

Thanks everyone.

PS Tom, for what it's worth I tried getting the guy to buy GameEx and sell that as the front end

What ever happened to this carnevil cab? Was it for real?

[headkaze]

With your high end setup I have no idea why an old AMD would out perform it.

You can try a few things though, compile a P4 optimized version of Mame (mingw32-make.exe P4=1) and make sure you have the latest stable version and use the new Direct3D options (-video d3d -noswitchres -triplebuffer).

[Deadly]

  lingpanda said:

What ever happened to this carnevil cab? Was it for real?

Crappy luck so far. The guy had a few teeth pulled, the shop he was moving into fell through which is ok because he found a bigger space for less money. I am supposed to hook up with him this week ... I know I know we'll see what happens. Mean while, I have built a killer liquid cooled system:

With this: Pentium Extreme dual core 3.2 OC'd to 3.7, 2 gig of ram OC'd from 667 to 702, EVGA Nvidia 7800GT OC'd for a 20% gain "sweet heh heh" and Carnevil gets about 2 extra FPS. What a good deal huh "grumble grumble". What a joke...... it's so hard to comprehend that this much horse power is still useless when it comes to Mame. Geesh ........ sure hope the Mame Devs find a way to stabilize the dual core option so we can all play Carnevil, NFL Blitz and all the other sweet games that crap out right now.

Stay tuned....I promise I'll report back with the AMD verses Intel results. I suppose just like a motor ... there's no replacement for displacement.

[Will]

  Deadly said:

I would like to mention that I am not all against AMD, but wanting all you AMD people to tell me what you are experiencing. I actually started this thread because I've heard so many people that play flight sims say, "AMD is the ONLY thing to use for gaming." Why I dunno but they all swear by AMD. Ok, that's cool maybe they're on to something. Hell I've seen it first hand that Intel can have a piece of hardware that just completely sucks ass, someone corrects a driver and it rocks. Well I suppose that holds true with any company. BUT I have tried running Carnevil on a Intel Duo Core system with 3 gig of ram and 256 DDr3 ATI card. NOPE!!! OR how about on a P4 Hyper threaded prescott overclocked to 3.8 with 4 gig of ram --- NOPE! So I was honestly hoping that for some odd reason that Mame did have some glitchy thing when it came to Intel. Computers I would suppose are like motors in the sense that, "There is no replacement for displacement." Sooooooo the more horse power the better the performance right? I would assume so, but I guess whne it comes to Mame we are all reliant upon the Mame developers "Giles" to fix the drivers so we can continue to play the games we played as kids and or the ones our kids have taught us to play LOL!

There is no magic reason why AMD is better for gaming, but there are some reasons why their processors typically do better in games that P4s. During the race for clock speed where they both were driving hard to 2 GHz, intel started increasing the length of the processor pipeline in order to get (sort of) artificial clock speed increases. Meanwhile, AMD actually increased the speed of their processors, and enhanced the memory controllers, resulting in smaller increases in clock speed compared to intel, but the same increases in performance. So intel's 3.4 GHz processor was right in line with AMD's 2.6 GHz processor. Since AMD's pipeline was much shorter (something like 14 stages to intel's 30), smaller. quicker calculations were better on AMD chips. Video encoding and heavy duty ops worked better on intel's chips since the longer pipeline lended itself to better branch prediction, etc. So, AMD worked better for games for the money. With the new Core 2 intel redesigned their chip to a much shorter pipeline--hence the 2.2 GHz Core 2 being faster than a 3.4 GHz P4--and is neck and neck with AMD again...looks like even ahead.

The moral is that there is no "magic" setting to make either processor WAY faster than the other, but their design does lean towards certain applications.

Oh and their are certainly other factors at work here too such as memory bandwidth, controllers, RAM speed, etc, but the pipleline design is (was) the major player in answering your question!

[Atari800]

Now THAT is some good stuff

Thanks Will

[Will]

  Atari800 said:

Now THAT is some good stuff

Thanks Will

Every now and then my computer science grad degree comes in handy for things other than boring my wife

[lingpanda]

Can you have dual core, dual processor setups? Quad action?

[Nologic]

From what I understand that is coming later this year....or hell maybe already out for the Intel systems...far as using dual cores...one has already been able to run quad processor for some time now with the right hardware and OS.

Also worth noting is that both Intel and AMD have stated late next year we should be seeing quad core processors being released.

Tho it all goes with out saying that unless the software is written to take advantage of whats there...you'll see little to no gain.

Right now I'd buy a dual core AMD but only because I already have a board that supports the chips...if that wasn't the case I'd instead go with the Intel Core 2 cpu's as they are currently better and generally cheaper right now....my how the tables have turned.

I'm generally an AMD fan boy, but you'll hear nothing but praise from me over Intel getting back into the race...just have to see if AMD can hit back...ether way tho its all good for us the consumer.

[Atari800]

I have seen Windows network servers - 4 Physical CPU's with Hyperthreading show up as 8 CPU's in task manager

So YES it can be done

You *theorectically* could have 8 versions of mame running concurrently at about the same performance

Windows currently builds can support up 32 processors (maybe just server editions)

Bring up TASK Manager

Click on PERFORMANCE TAB

Right clickon any running process

If you have multiple CPU's you will see an option for SET AFFINITY click it

By default all applications are set to use multiple cpu's but...the application must take advantage of it

[Will]

Some of you won't like this, but I hate to tell you that a version of MAME that uses (efficiently) multiple cores/processors is probably a while off. Here's why...

Coding an operating system to schedule different programs on different cores to allow seamless multi-tasking is relatively easy and has been apart of Windows/Unix/OSX for a while. So right away you can see performance gains using dual cores in every day computing because the OS can make use of fairly simple scheduling techniques to keep the cores busy with background tasks, virus scanners, programs, etc. This will make GameEx scream though.

On the other hand, writing a single program to be multi-threaded (broken into independent tasks that can be completed out of order) is much more difficult. The main reason is that not all computing problems can be broken into independent jobs, and the secondard reason is that is isn't easy to do even if it can. I am no expert in the MAME area since I don't sit on the MAME dev forum all day, but I think it will be a while before some doofus with too much money gets NFLBlitz, etc running on his $10,000 hex-core liquid cooled beast. For now stick with the $40 Sempron and save your money for when it can

What is MUCH more likely is that someone will figure out a way to use a programmable GPU to run MAME's high end games and code a port. A friend of mine is currently doing research on using Nvidia 7800 GTXs (4 of them in quad SLI) to do some crazy stuff...

Anyway, prove me wrong and I'll upgrade my cabinet PC :)

[Deadly]

By default all applications are set to use multiple cpu's but...the application must take advantage of it

BINGO! Unless Mame itself is specifically written to take advantage of both cores "as you can see from my setup" it doesn't mean jack! I use Mame32 which hasn't had the Hyperthreading incorporated as of yet. Since Mamedev mentioned 10GHZ to run Gaunlet legends I was hoping the horsepower would help Carnevil thus.......the whole AMD verses Intel thing was started by me. I was hoping that there was some truth to this even though my experience knew better. I'm old school and have seen how games and such can be de-railed due to a crappy chipset and or driver. Being old school certainly doesn't mean I understand and know what the mamedev team are thinking or trying to implement but with that in mind.... maybe these guys use AMD and are trying to ramp up Mame to shine with AMD and Intel will come later??? I am NOT trying to say there is any anti Intel mamedevs, but rather you have to start some where and if improvement starts with AMD that's great. I look forward to the day when NFL Blitz and Carnevil run smooth. I would gladly go buy an AMD setup. What ever rocks - rocks. Time will tell I'm sure.

[Will]

You don't really code to a specific processor--unless (God help you) you are using assembly. Usually the compiler is where the optimizations come in. For example:

The programmer uses a high level statement like "get a mountain dew". A general compiler could say "get in your car, find the nearest grocery store, and go in a buy some". A compiler specifically for AMD or Intel would translate it to "check to see if you have some in your fridge (which i know you have, and would be quicker) and if so, you are done, otherwise go to the store".

Every x86 processor has the basic set of instructions, but can also have specific optimized ones like SSE and SSE2. The specialized compilers, or compiler options can use them.

So all a "P4 optimized" build of MAME is, is one where somone shelled out the dough for the intel compiler and recompiled the same source code (plus or minus some headers).

[Atari800]

True - the mame builds are set around MinG (something like MINimalist Gnu compiler)

because it is free to the public

Using an INTEL C compiler or AMD (if there is one, I am sure there is) requires a license to distribute....hence PAY

But if you have one of the HI ZOOT compilers and time (and brains) to alter the source code for mame to adjust/take adantage of these...there would a be a boost in performance

Those are compilers specific to the processors capabilities and can take advantage and optimize the builds even more so.

I doubt it would make California Speed run like water though

Example (no racistist intent here) but think of AMD as a Frenchmen and think of INTEL as a Russian

Now the goal here is to explain and perform making a Roast Beef Sandwich (which is actually in mame world - PLAY PACMAN)

Both guys use Bablefish to translate the instructions from English to their native tounge

They both complete after a little while then eat

But if they where given the instructions in RUSSIAN or FRENCH (compile MAME with INTEL or AMD compilers) it would get done quicker

(bad analogy...but I am hungry)

[lingpanda]

Any update? Was this bogus?