Posted by Howard Casto on 24, 2001 at 1:36 AM:
In Reply to: Re: Let me butt in on this one :) posted by Tony C on 24, 2001 at 1:13 AM:
There's mixed feelings about that one, but as a rule of thumb if your machine has enough ram and resources to run windows smoothly and still run most games in mame without slowdown, then you won't get any real performance boost running mame in dos mode. Although win takes up a pretty big chunk of your ram, it only takes up about 2-5% of your processor power when in idle. Since ram is so cheap now it shouldn't be a real issue.
And it's very possible to replace the win gui with a front-end.... I don't know the specifics by memory, but there's an entry in the win.ini file that set's the "shell" value... point that to the exe of your choice and it boots up instead of windows explorer. This does make it quite difficult to browse folders though, but there are ways around that.
The ultimate goal of the front-end I'm developing is to do just what you said....
Eventually you'll be able to boot into it... run anything you want... be able to get back to windows for "maintenance" and it will shutdown windows upon exit.
I just released a new beta tonight...
go check it out
I hate to keep up all the shameless self-promotion, but somebody has to.
;)
: Thanks for the helpful info. The big question though... Does either DOS or Windows perform better than the other? Based on what you've said, I would lean towards maybe a Win98 install, unless the DOS version was a little quicker. Has anyone ever benchmarked the two to see which is faster? Also, is it possible to replace the Windows shell with an emulator frontend? I'd like to avoid it "looking" like Windows if possible.