Posted by Commander Raven on 5, 2001 at 4:49 PM:
In Reply to: THE LACK OF OPTIMIZATION DOES NOT JUSTIFY BUYING A 1GHZ COMPUTER FOR SOME GAMES posted by Demente on 5, 2001 at 12:43 PM:
First of all didn't he ask what would run Mk2 at a decent FPS. Which requires a P3 800 at least.
Second of all unless you're so broke that a P3 800 is going to break you, why not build a machine that will do it all?
Go to www.pricewatch.com, and see that a P3 800 is like $250, and a P3 866 is $259. Throw in $36 for 128 meg of RAM, sound card, hard drive, and video card... total cost around $400-$500 for a system that will easily play any game in Mame.
As for optimization, every piece of code can be optimized. The problem is it's easy to write a piece of code to do something. It's hard to make that code small and efficient.
Raven
: How can you seriously recommend a P3 800 for MAME or Mame32? Only because Mortal Kombat 2 looses frames per second unless that you have a P3 1000 mhz??? Look Taito F3 games with sound now.. they also loose many fps with a 'low' computer with only 500mhz. So, shouldn't we demand better optimization of the emulation of these games, instead of justifying this poor performance with the need of more power. I don't know much about emulator programming, but these are old 2D games, and 500 mhz should be more than enough, by far. If the programmers aren't talented enough to emulate them at real fps without the need for more cpu power, they should leave the job for something more skillful. This kind of filosofy is usual with PC native games: if you want more fps, update your hardware, don't expect any optimization if you want modern and wonderfull 3D graphics. This nasty behaviour of PC programmers is in fact what helps selling faster and faster processors and graphic cards that cost the Earth. It would be pathetic that this applies also to the world of emulation. The only thing that can save us from this is the rivalry of Raine and Mame. Look.. the new DOS version of Raine runs those F3 games with sound at full fps, so where's the need for a 1ghz CPU? Let's hope those guys stop wasting their time emulating stupid mayhongs and get their emulator to run all games correctly abd at full fps.