Posted by EmuMannen on 5, 2001 at 5:37 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:
I would like to rephrase you words –"I don't know much about emulator programming". It would probably be better with something like –"I don’t know anything about programming, especially emulator related programming"! You could probably add –"I don’t know anything about hardware and the inner workings of an arcade game either". Or you could just shut up because it is quite obvious judging from your posting.
I don’t think it is the MAME Dev Team’s intention that it should be a highly optimized emulator for every game it supports. MAME is a fantastic piece of software and I don’t think you can value it enough if you don’t understand the process of software engineering, design and implementation. You should also have a fairly good understanding of how a real arcade game is designed and how hard it would be to create a generic PC based framework to emulate that kind of hardware for a large amount of games, all representing a wide selection of different hardware.
It could probably be optimized but that would make a dramatic impact on portability. It would be hard to use generic libraries like Allegro and high level languages like C. Development would be slower, fewer input peripherals would be supported, less platforms would be available etc. Adding new games would be harder so I doubt that MAME would support as many games as it does today (frame skipping or not) if your development strategy was chosen. The alternative is to use more processor power and that is getting available all the time.
And I don’t give much for your theories about "what would be enough to emulate old 2D games". What would be enough if the programmers were talented enough? Do you have a clue? Do you know anything about multi processor systems emulated on a single processor machine? Probably not! But it looks like you know that modern 3D games use specific hardware to speed up the graphics. What if old 2D games used several different processors to deal with different tasks like sound, graphics and generic calculations? Would that make it harder to emulate those systems lacking all those special chipsets? Any one owned an AMIGA or even a CBM-64 know what I am talking about and can easily imagine the task, can you?
I guess that many MAME users don’t have a clue how talented the developers of the software are and they don’t respect their work. I really start to understand talented emulator developers that do quit their work because they have to take crap from losers that doesn’t even understand the magnitude of what they are doing.
Hey wake up! MAME is a free meal so don’t complain if you are hungry. And please don’t ruin the appetite for the rest of us just because you are a spoiled brat and your not pleased with what’s on the table!
/ EmuMannen
: 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.