Home Page Forums MAME Non-Windows MAME Support SDLMame Live CD 64-Bit

Maybe you want to try the new 64-Bit Live CD for AMD64/EM64T it is called ZXMameCD-64. There is a 32-Bit version, too.
ZXMameCD-64 + ZXMameCD

There are several updates for the 32- and 64-Bit version.
You could use the sdlmame modules for slackware based distributions, too.

Make a PPC64 version for the PS3 now. :-] I said NOW! Hehehehe!

IIRC ppc64 is in most cases slower than ppc.

PPC64 is only really useful if you need massive address spaces, or have lots of functions that take 64-bit arguments - otherwise it's just slower because it's pushing more data around.

Remember that a 32-bit program can access just as many registers as a 64-bit program on PPC, and can use any 64-bit instruction it wants without any expensive mode switches, so you don't get the big improvements that AMD64 gets you by providing more, bigger registers. The calling conventions are register-based in PPC32 and PPC64, too.

The PPC64 I refer to is the Cell BE CPU, and it is like ten times faster than a PC. The problem is that Sony has not released the full API so a PS3 Linux install of SDL Mame is notably slower since there is not currently any 3D acceleration on the PS3 Linux platform. It will come eventually though.

Just search on YouTube for PS3 and you can see some CELL demos that show its power capabilities.

The PowerPC portion of the CBE is severely crippled by comparison to a standard 970/G5 CPU: no out-of-order execution or any of the other fancy tricks that make CPUs fast. IBM made the same tradeoffs with it that Intel did with the Pentium 4, and we all see where that went. (And lest any fanboys get too excited, the X360's CPU is crippled in exactly the same fashion).

All this means that rather than "ten times faster than a PC", for MAME purposes it's equivalent to a PowerMac G5 at about 1.5 GHz, which is pretty bad. Cell thrives on highly parallelizible floating point tasks, something which is relatively common in games and scientific work and something which almost never happens in emulators. You are *never* going to see MAME significantly faster on that platform - even hardware OpenGL would merely make stretching the screen free. Do make sure you play the new Ratchet and Clank demo to get an idea of the true power of the system on software designed for it though :-)

My point about PPC64 being slower still stands. There is no penalty for running PPC32 code on a Cell, PPC32 code can access all the registers and PPC32 code can use any 64-bit operation. The only time you actually get any gain out of running PPC64 code is if you need a massive address space, or a significant proportion of your function calls are passing 64-bit parameters. In all other cases, PPC32 code will run faster.

@ Garoro
Here's a link to probably more than you'll ever want to know about Cell BE. I found some of it interesting and most of it way over my head. The info is from a PS3 Multicore Programming class at MIT.

@ mamez
I would check that out on my AMD64 system, but I have an ATI X1600 card. I saw the note: "sorry - no ATI driver for 64-Bit at this moment"

Thanks, that demo is on my list. But yeah... those realms are whit it is for. Emulating a Z80 doesn't get sped up much by that.