Home Page Forums MAME MAME Spy Hunter arcade bad sound emulation

I think nobody here cares very much that your 15 year old potato computer cannot run games at full speed anymore.

If you want an emulator that runs on that piece of junk, I guess you will have to write it yourself

Indeed, please do that – I don't get to read this board that often, but I do take action when stuff is reported to me.

I do not condemn precise analogue modelling of sound hardware. It is progress to solve the puzzle of understanding the inner working to add realism.

But that is to say, it is untypical for retrogamers to use a modern "gamer PC" for MAME. Very often old PCs get reused to run emulators instead of ending up as e-waste, which is an act of sustainability for preserving the planet. Hence at a point where analogue modelling suddenly starts to consume ridiculous amounts of CPU power (particularly in ratio to other MAME games of its era with similar sound complexity like Donkey Kong or Q*Bert) there needs to be a bypass switch for simpler audio rendering. In comparison, the video rendering in MAME still can be detailedly tweaked by the user to match given hardware, and nobody would request to buy a higher resolution TFT monitor instead of the installed CRT.

And my laptop is definitely less than 15 years old, however it is one of the last repairable models that got not mined with a lurking unremovable lithium incendiary bomb and permitted physically removal of the wifi plague. It is ok that Hard Drivin plays a little choppy, but a computer that can run Win10 is not junk and needs to stay supported in MAME at least for 1980th 2D and sprite zoom games.

A 1.6 GHz Core 2 Duo? Granted, it's a laptop, but my Core 2 Duo E7400 desktop of 2009 vintage is almost double that clock rate, I'm sure you could find something just a little bit quicker in the e-waste pile. Does it absolutely need to be a laptop?

Yes, I have my fair share of potato PCs too, case in point a single-core AMD Sempron 140. It's absolutely useless for anything quicker than PlayStation 1 hardware in MAME (it fails my Tekken 3 test e.g. can't even reach 100% even in 240p mode, let alone 480) and looking at MAME benchmarks, it might even be slower than a Raspberry Pi 4, which is just embarrassing. That said, I'm sure the crappy integrated Nvidia nForce 630a GPU is also helping it to be such a slug.

But that's not what MAME is. MAME is about accuracy.

Well, it is an archeological project. So I do not complain that my laptop e.g. reaches its technical limits at Sega polygon games or some barely optimized parallax scrolling sprite zoomers.

But with these 8bit games it simply feels terribly wrong to add a such enormous CPU consumption footprint for a minor sound improvement. It is like seeing your neighbour replacing his compact car with a Hummer that now occupies 2 parking places and protrudes onto half of the bicycle track, and the only answer you get is "Hey, I got this vehicle officially registered as a passenger car, hence I now can park here." When many people with moderate hardware can not realize these games anymore (at least without additional installation of old MAME versions in different directories) this also increases their risk of getting forgotten (even though they stay technically preserved). So please add an alternative simpler sound mode with less CPU consumption.

To me it is even hard to understand why this is a so much bigger CPU hog than other netlist analogue sound games. May there be an obscure bug that clogs the FPU? E.g. AMD K6 CPUs had the bad habit of switching the FPU suddenly into another mode when numbers (e.g. as result of repeated dividing) grew too small and hence switched the internal binary number format to keep precision. But because this special mode used lengthy microcode instead of hardware for calculation, it ran 100 times slower. There was an opcode to turn this off to live with reduced numerical precision in favour for full speed, but software that did not know it (e.g. "Visual Pinball" when balls rolled very slowly) ran into a swamp of syrup and so often got stuck like flies on a flypaper (e.g. during sound decay of a softsynth) for no obvious reason.

> To me it is even hard to understand...

So, you don't understand the goals of MAME. Fine. But nobody is forcing you to use the newest version of MAME. If you are fine with playing a bad/incorrect version of your favorite 8-bit game, by all means, use MAME 0.34 or something else. Just don't try and get support for that here (or anywhere, for that matter).

Samples will not be coming back, and everyone is happy that they won't (well, everyone except you). Just get a better computer

In case it really hasn’t dawned on you, what you think doesn’t matter. Your analogy is stupid, too. We aren’t going to add samples back, because it would complicate the code and add a maintenance/testing burden by having two implementations. We’re already short on developers. Really, you’re as bad as the spyhunter guy, posting long-winded rants about stuff you already know the answers to. The only thing you might succeed in doing is pushing people away from this forum.

There is nothing fundamentally wrong with either:

• An emulator sacrificing accuracy for performance
• An emulator sacrificing performance for accuracy

That said, MAME is a huge project, and there needs to be some organizing principles. If MAME started trying to favor performance over accuracy (even on an optional basis), where would one stop? Favoring accuracy also has major advantages from the perspective of ensuring that the emulation of common hardware components are properly vetted and kept accurate.

If you don't like this, by all means fork MAME and re-add the sample emulation. MAME will continue to function as a documentation project and your fork will appease the people that want to run the games on cheaper hardware.

Co's posts are TLDR so I don't know the reason for the slow PC.*
When I was a broke student, I had a Pentium 100MHz back when Pentium 2 was out. I had an AMD K6 something back when AMD Athlon Thunderbird and the first Geforce was out. At least I had a Voodoo1 card so I could play some UltraHLE games.

I picked out emulators for their speed. Nesticle, Genecyst, older version of ZSNES, Callus instead of MAME for the CPS1 games, Raine instead of MAME for the Taito F3 games, etc.
If I was in your shoes, I'd get an older version of MAME, add the 'samples' games to that. Use a newer version of MAME for the other games. Accept that the reason the netlist emulation is slow for you is due to your old CPU.

*Ah I see, paranoia.
Wifi radiation harmful? -> disable it completely in device manager
laptop battery will explode? -> get one where battery can be removed, I have a laptop with Intel i5 and removed the battery (cause it's heavy weight and worn out anyway)