Posted by Sirwinston on 14, 2001 at 4:37 AM:
In Reply to: ArcadeOS, key remaps, win9x emus... posted by BrianB on 13, 2001 at 9:39 AM:
I experimented with ArcadeOS late last year/early this one. It is gorgeous. I wish MAME32 would look so nice, with the screenshot as the background and all.
But it just wasn't designed to run under Windows, and it shows. For one thing, under 2 of my systems it was hogging 90% of CPU time when it and no other apps except my resource monitor were running. This is with just the ArcadeOS running at idle, not executing anything.
I mentioned it on the mame.net board, and someone said that "you must not have loaded HIMEM.SYS right." Umm, sorry, but you're not supposed to have to load HIMEM.SYS in Windows. Windows will load the memory handlers it needs itself, and loading HIMEM.SYS in your Windows config files is a waste. Any good hardware optimization guide will tell you this.
So, I dropped it and went with MAME32. It ain't quite so purty, but it's made to run in Windows, and does it extremely well. In addition, despite what I've heard from some to the contrary, DOS MAME does NOT run faster than MAME32--if your machine is a recent one. Yes, DOS MAME will run better in DOS mode on a P233MMX. So, what if you have an Athlon, Duron, or P!!! clocked at about 700MHz, and 128 megs or more of RAM? Well, then MAME32 will kick MAME DOS's ass. Don't believe me? run MAME from DOS on a powerful box, and play one of the games known to play at well under full speed. Then run the same game under MAME32. You'll see the difference, big time.