Posted by Bugfinder on 18, 2000 at 9:50 AM:
Hi guys :o)
I asked on the official MAME board for opinions on how I could speed up giant games loading in MAME. I was wondering if how would be the recommended compress rate for a Zipfile to not make it too CPU-consuming when decompressing or too big to load even in a fast hard drive, like an ATA/100. Somebody suggested me to test different compressing rates until I find one that works great with most games; OK idea but I still donīt know if FAT16 will speed things up. I know this disk formatting looses HD space but thatīs no problem if speed actually increases.
Shifty from the MAMEtesters Project came up with the perfect solution: the RAMdrives. Of course I must have big amounts of RAM: only recently I learned how a RAMdrive works. To create a RAMdrive I just insert a line "device = ramdrive.sys /32767" in the config.sys (should I use devicehigh?). And it lets me to create as much RAMdrives as I want - as long as there are drive letters left! But canīt I create bigger spaces than 32 Mb, even using another MS-DOS version or another program? Anyone knows how to create a BIG RAMdrive with all spare memory I might have? In my machine initialization, Iīll include a batch file to "upload to RAM" all big games I like most and leave them there.
From my reply to Shifty: "The only problem I see is to define how much memory would be necessary to leave for the emulator and the biggest game, along with RAM space for video, scratch RAM for MAME and the game itself... I mean, if I decide to use a 384 Mb RAM machine, is it safe to reserve 140 Mb or 160 Mb for the biggest games (KOF99, Garou etc.) ? So I can use the rest for RAMdrives...
The biggest games may use up to 90 Mb to uncompress
Plus 10 Mb for MAME program
Plus ?? Mb for scratch RAM (video, work area...)
Total: how much?"
So, I need to know how much maximum memory I should leave for AdvanceMAME work after decompressed itself, the game, scratch video and working RAMs. If I put 384 Mb RAM, leave 128 Mb for AdvanceMAME, will it work comfortably with Garou, KOF99, MK3 or should I give more memory to them? Can I safely use 256 Mb to make 8 RAMdrives and "upload" the biggest games? Is there any risk on doing this? I mean, using everything already in memory can mess things? Does MAME or AdvanceMAME happens to trash memory in any circumstances? If this happens, is there high chance the memory being locked or something?
Andrea, do you think thereīs any bad thing on putting both AdvanceMAME and mame.cfg in RAMdrive to speed up its loading whenever I start a game? I intend to leave only AdvanceMENU and mm.cfg to be read from the disk, with hiscores, game configs, nvram... Small files you know. Does AdvanceMAME changes mame.cfg during normal operation? If so, it wonīt be able to save it back to the original copy, on drive C:...
I plan to let games up to 10 Mb (compressed) to be read from the disk because Iīll be using a fast disk and a very fast processor (Athlon 900 MHz, not yet bought). My idea is to build a machine that can run the most power-hungry games (apart of Race Drivinī and Hard Drivinī that are ridiculously power-hungry) at 44100 KHz, 16-bit of color and still being throttled at frameskip 0 :o)
Also would like suggestions on memory managers and the optimum autoexec.bat and config.sys with "LOADHIGH" and "DEVICEHIGH" lines that I admit I donīt understand well how they work but Iīm told they free conventional memory. Also loading DOS to Upper Memory Blocks or High Memory Area is something good? How to do? And this Norton Commander that EmuMannen says in his page, whatīs the deal with it?
Thanks for your patience reading ;o) More thanks for your reply!
Bugfinder (Filipe Estima)