MAME the new generation

Deadly

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Times have been slow here at work so I thought I'd do a little Mame'ing at work ;)

I built a lowely little system consisting of:
Intel Q9550 2.83 ghz Quad proc
2 gig of ram
Intel motherboard
Crappy Nvidia 6800 (not that it matters)
Windows XP Pro 64bit

Now it gets good
I put the OS on an Intel 40gig SSD drive which boots up (to the point of actually loading everything) in 15 seconds. Usable time is 10 seconds.
I used (3) 80 gig SSD drives and put them in RAID0. Anyone that has a full MAME set knows how freaking long it takes to rebuild your sets with a rotational drive ...... time to go mow the lawn and it might be done when you get back right? I just ran a first time scan with CLRMAMEPRO on a full set and it freakin did it in 15 seconds. Holy shit!!!! This is ridiculous lol.

Not to get off my own subject but what I also find amazing is everyone pushes for that 4ghz barrier. I've always felt the "majority" of stuttering issues are merely IO issues. Now that I have the hardware around me time to do some investigation work. I was able to play a couple games "quickly" that are typical stutter'ers and every great once in a while there will be a small quick hickup in audio. Video wise pretty damn good so far. I'm going to run some benchmarks and see what I can make out of this whole "4ghz needed" area.
 
Heh - I already have a 4 player MAME cab. Just figured I'd do some super sluething work. I highly doubt MAME devs will want to spend money - but it'd sure be nice to have an alternative option for enhancement.
 
Times have been slow here at work so I thought I'd do a little Mame'ing at work ;)

I built a lowely little system consisting of:
Intel Q9550 2.83 ghz Quad proc
2 gig of ram
Intel motherboard
Crappy Nvidia 6800 (not that it matters)
Windows XP Pro 64bit

Now it gets good
I put the OS on an Intel 40gig SSD drive which boots up (to the point of actually loading everything) in 15 seconds. Usable time is 10 seconds.
I used (3) 80 gig SSD drives and put them in RAID0. Anyone that has a full MAME set knows how freaking long it takes to rebuild your sets with a rotational drive ...... time to go mow the lawn and it might be done when you get back right? I just ran a first time scan with CLRMAMEPRO on a full set and it freakin did it in 15 seconds. Holy shit!!!! This is ridiculous lol.

Not to get off my own subject but what I also find amazing is everyone pushes for that 4ghz barrier. I've always felt the "majority" of stuttering issues are merely IO issues. Now that I have the hardware around me time to do some investigation work. I was able to play a couple games "quickly" that are typical stutter'ers and every great once in a while there will be a small quick hickup in audio. Video wise pretty damn good so far. I'm going to run some benchmarks and see what I can make out of this whole "4ghz needed" area.

If $5k is what one 80GB SSD drives cost then I doubt anyone would do this "for fun". :)

http://www.buy.com/prod/sandisk-sdacc-080g-000000-ffd-uata-80gb/q/loc/101/209738866.html

I am figuring these aren't the drives. Found some other ones for $300-500. Still a bit pricey at this point.
 
Killer Instinct 2? Pfft... weaksauce. Run Propcycle...or Time Crisis...or any of the namcos22.c games.
 
I've run KI2 on all of my 2.8GHz P4 machines with no problem... no joke I have the pictures to prove it (since it is my favorite CHD game....)
 
I've run KI2 on all of my 2.8GHz P4 machines with no problem... no joke I have the pictures to prove it (since it is my favorite CHD game....)

Yeah your machine would run it - pictures don't show movement ;)
Just joshin

Well I got buried with work after this post - had enough time to fire up Gauntlet Legends. I enabled mult threaded in Mameui64 otherwise default settings. It stuttered - not hella bad like a rotational drive but enough to say it would be annoying to play. It simply warrants running a benchmark on the SSD's and then ghosting the image onto a rotational drive and benching again. The outcome will certainly be entertaining. And let me say the ONLY reason I did RAID0 was to obtain enough storage space for the entire MAME collection. Honestly one SSD drive floods the boards bus. It is POINTLESS to run SSD's in RAID0. I have RAID0 running on my I7 gaming rig with two SSD's as well. Bah - what a waste ;) Hopefully I'll have more time to bechmark these tomorrow.

But I will say SSD's for a quick booting, quiet and super seemless MAME machine and/or especially loading virtual pinball or Future pinball tables is the freaking best. I would say for Virtual Pinball it's mandatory.
 
I can play Gauntlet Legends on my MAME rig with very minor stuttering. I do believe that most of the data is loaded in to RAM before the game actually runs so I am not really sure the benefit of your SSD setup over a standard HD. Laser disc games are the exception as the video data is streamed off the drive... but even those games play fine with a decenly powered rig and a 7800 RPM drive. I have a couple Raptors sitting here doing nothing... if you can prove that running off those SSD drives vs a regular 7800 RPM HD is significant, I may actually consider dropping these 10,000 RPM drives in the MAME rig.
 
What a fascinating experiment!

I/O bound vs CPU bound MAME tests -- very cool! Carry on!
 
I can play Gauntlet Legends on my MAME rig with very minor stuttering. I do believe that most of the data is loaded in to RAM before the game actually runs so I am not really sure the benefit of your SSD setup over a standard HD. Laser disc games are the exception as the video data is streamed off the drive... but even those games play fine with a decenly powered rig and a 7800 RPM drive. I have a couple Raptors sitting here doing nothing... if you can prove that running off those SSD drives vs a regular 7800 RPM HD is significant, I may actually consider dropping these 10,000 RPM drives in the MAME rig.

I'm glad I read through the whole thread before hitting reply, because this is exactly what I was going to post. I wouldn't expect much hard drive activity with any of the standard ROM's.

I don't really play many of the CHD games to know if they access the drive frequently, but I think they'd benefit more from adding RAM than faster drives especially since you're using a 64 bit OS that can take advantage of lots of memory.
 
GL requires a core2duo... it's all about CPU horsepower baby. It went from a mess (maybe 5 FPS if I was lucky) to completely playable by swapping from an AMD XP3200+ to a Core2Duo running 3.5ghz...and going from Windows XP to Windows XP x64.
 
It doesn't work well on a 3ghz core 2 duo on 32-bit XP... I think you're right, going to the 64 bit version with its vast address space probably helps the most.
 
Blitz (same engine) was unplayable with my core2duo with Windows XP. Going to 64-bit pushed it over the edge and now I get a sound hiccup every once in a great while.
 
I assure you going to X64 (IF your hardware supports it) is well worth the money. The performance benefits is outstanding.

I'm trying to run some benchmarks here today (and just got slammed with more work ugh). The first (and only) run I did using Blitz comparing it to MAMEUI's benchs. Considerably lower. Not suprised considering I'm using a 2.83 where as those bench's were like a 3.4ghz proc. Anyway what we're after is the posssibility of IO differences between a 7200 rpm rotational vs an SSD and if so how much. When I get more time I'll post the results.

Can anyone tell me how many cores/threads MAME will actually utilize? I'd love to see how a dual XEON based I7 I have here would fare lol.
 
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