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.
Last edited by =CO=Windler; 11/17/21 08:37 AM.
