Shmupmame 4.2: Lagless Mars Matrix, Strikers 1945, Galaga 88

[CloudyMusic]

Is windows 10 still freezing while using shmupmame?

I've never seen this problem with W10 and Shmupmame 4.2, but no idea if it's limited to a specific hardware configuration or anything like that.

[svensonson]

I am just about to set up a new mame machine and I am wondering which version is currently the best for shumps (incl.CV1k Games)
Of course I will try to get best hardware as possible for this project. G3258 or 4770k maybe!?
it seems that the new cv1k driver in groovymame does support multi-threading that might benefit of using the 4770k for emulation. this is something I read in one of the posts that Haze wrote last year in the other forum.

so what do you guys think? shmupmame or goovymame both with good hardware for acceptable cave emulation?

[tomwhite2004]

Just go for a Skylake or Kabylake i3, any will be better than the g3258 at stock clocks and run the CV1k games without breaking a sweat.

But if you really want to play cave stuff then buy a Japanese Xbox360 and forget about mame...

[svensonson]

Just go for a Skylake or Kabylake i3, any will be better than the g3258 at stock clocks and run the CV1k games without breaking a sweat.

But if you really want to play cave stuff then buy a Japanese Xbox360 and forget about mame...

obvisouly I am not going to run any of the cpus on stock speed

I already have a ntsc-j 360 and we all know that the ports on it are not mindblowing...okay to play with but its not the real thing....I also think that there might be some missing titles for the 360.. I guess .. so this is not an option

[Bananamatic]

cv1k emulation is way worse than the ports lol

[tomwhite2004]

Even a heavily overclocked g3258 will give worse performance than a modern i3 at standard clocks.

And mame is about as far away from being "the real thing" as you can get when it comes to these games, just stick to the ports.

[Xyga]

Better double-check with them but I think the Cave Collection box is still available new at solaris-japan, and maybe some other shops dunno.
1000% the best thing to buy as it's got all the DLC codes and is overall much cheaper than the total of all individual games.

Maybe it's trickier to find a Japanese 360 though, I don't know for how much those go today.
And certainly the most difficult step is finfing a good lagless stick like the Hori VX at a price that's not a joke.

I won't mention the display part even though it's imortant for better enjoying those ports.

If you're short go rob and old lady or something.

[svensonson]

guys, I am not exclusively asking for cv1k games more for the entire shmups library for mame.
I know that the cv1k emulation ist not pcb like but it seems that the devs did some nice job past year getting really close to it. at least it seems to be playable. or are you telling me that all other shmups prior sh-3 hardware are not playable with either shmupmame or groovymame as well? again, not asking for cave games only.
thanks

[Xyga]

No when it comes to shmups (well those titles people are interested in at least) it's mostly the cv1k games that suck in MAME whatever build, because of the wrong timings and lag. I haven't heard about the past year progress you're talking about, the biggest issues are still there.
Although GM and Shmupmame can reduce the lag a bit it's still a fact that the games play mostly at the wrong speeds in many, many places, worse accuracy than the ports.
A select few like Futari can somehow get closer when tweaking the blitter slider to 63% or something, but for the most part most games run wrong and that it.
IIRC the reason is that what's needed to make them run closer to the real deal hasn't been implemented in MAME and cv1k driver at all, also even that won't be completely satisfying because some things happen simply because of the bad hardware and optimization from the devs, things that would have to be simulated rather than emulated, and that's another barrier to accuracy.

If you leave those cv1k games out of your cpu purchase plan, you don't need a monster at all, with a G3258 you can already emulate most already available and decently working shmups in MAME.

[svensonson]

Thanks man!! you helped me a lot to decide which route I should go for

[tomwhite2004]

As an aside, is there any benefit to using groovymame on an LCD over standalone?

[Xyga]

Well yes, lower lag (if you use the d3d9ex build) and it's better than Shmupmame because it doesn't screw up the sprites (and hitboxes?) timings within the games, it just reduces the video lag as much as it is possible to on a Windows system, which is sometimes not just a tiny bit, check the most recent measurements by oomek: http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.p ... 434.0.html

[tomwhite2004]

thanks, will have to hunt for a few install tutorials and see how it goes...

[Xyga]

That's the tricky part, I don't believe there's an up-to-date tutorial or anything like that, but with some basic settings you should already play with a lag overall lower than with th other builds.
Start by creating an .ini file through command line, then you'll learn about the various settings specific to GM on their forums, good luck.

[OmegaFlareX]

I was under the impression you needed an adaptive sync monitor to benefit from GroovyMAME. Is that not the case?

[Xyga]

A g-sync/freesync monitor is better with any MAME build, but GM is better wether you have one or not because it achieves lower lag anyway.

It's by design, because it supports d3d9ex which has the shortest buffer method on Windows to begin (starting w/ Vista up to 10), and the built-in SwitchRes allows to 'work' on the only video buffered frame by not being vsync-locked but rather tweaking it using frame_delay and sync_offset as much as individual drivers, cpu, and monitor specs allow.
So even on your average 60Hz monitor GM is beneficial vs all other builds still using regular D3D, BGFX or even OGL from what I got.

Though after some time I've realized that GroovyMAME is so poorly advertised and explained, that a lot of people still don't get it. I don't always get what's going on either when they make some changes or whatever, sometimes on their forums it's like they're all insiders having a conversation and if you ask a noob question you can die here drying to dust.
If it wasn't so 'manual', convoluted, niche and with extremely scattered or outdated settings and configuration information, I'd bet it would easily be the most popular build.

Still, not even going through the advanced trouble of tweaking each and every driver for your particular setup (it's heavily recommended though), even the simplest and fastest 'lazy' settings (only using d3d9ex with forced vsync for rendering) already grant lower lag vs the other builds. If you force sync only on the games that do not deviate too much from 60Hz, say 2~2.5Hz, the change in speed is unnoticeable to barely noticeable even to expert eyes, and for the ones that deviate too much a la Irem or Seibu you can set SwitchRes to automatically use its own triple buffer, which is again less laggy than the regular triplebuffer used w/ the regular D3D.

[tomwhite2004]

Yeah after spending a couple of hours with it can see why you said good luck, its a pretty huge learning curve and there are so many things in the .ini that should be changed to a very specific value yet no documentation to give any idea what they are or the accepted values it will run with. Think I'm just going to spend the next few evenings trawling the forums and hope I can piece it together enough to get it running in a basic state at least.

[Xyga]

It could be different today but last time I've tried to get it to work right on a lcd those were the starting basic things to do (I think):

Code: Select all

#
# CORE PERFORMANCE OPTIONS
#
...
autosync                  1

Code: Select all

#
# CORE SWITCHRES OPTIONS
#
monitor                   lcd
...
sync_refresh_tolerance    2

Code: Select all

#
# OSD VIDEO OPTIONS
#
video                     d3d

- Note about the video option: it is unclear why and there hasn't been any particular explanation but it seems that since 0.179 or 0.180 just writing 'd3d' will make it use d3d9ex anyway (as long as you're using a 'd3d9ex build' like those uploaded by keropi with almost every update)

- Note about sync_tolerance: I usually set it to 2.5 to make the sync locked mode include 1st gen Cave games and many more, this give you smooth scrolling along with the low lag.

Also there's the new PORTAUDIO section to reduce sound latency but I haven't tried that yet...

[tomwhite2004]

Great post, thank you...

[OmegaFlareX]

A g-sync/freesync monitor is better with any MAME build, but GM is better wether you have one or not because it achieves lower lag anyway.

This is good to know. I was looking into getting one for my upcoming new PC build, but it will have a Nvidia GPU and a Gsync monitor is significantly more expensive than the other kind. Plus I assume getting a 144hz monitor means 3D games have to run at 144fps to vsync properly? Or can that happen at any refresh rate with adaptive sync?

What is d3d9ex, do you need special GPU drivers for that? And if I have to tweak every single driver in .inis, I'm probably not going to bother, that sounds like a pain the ass.

[Xyga]

G-Sync or FreeSync both are good, no need to force the games at a fixed refresh rate, no need for vsync, yet you get correct speeds with no tearing, that's what it's all about.

If your monitor doesn't support adaptive sync it's not as fancy of course, but yes you can still benefit from GM without a specific gpu or drivers, just Windows (not sure Intel HD igpu's are okay with d3d9ex though), no need to force 144Hz either just specify your monitor should run a 60Hz mode in the mame.ini, like ****x****@60

Then if by chance your 144Hz monitor supports LightBoost (check blurbusters website) you might be able to take advantage of that high-refresh panel. If not maybe try the black frame insertion with RetroArch.
I haven't tried these 'tricks' personally nor own a 144Hz monitor myself so maybe there's more stuff you could do, dunno, some people here certainly have an experience.

EDIT: actually regarding the correct settings for a 144Hz monitor; you might have to change the lcd range option from auto to 50Hz-145Hz;

Code: Select all

lcd_range                 50-145

Otherwise you might get an error message.

[Raytrace]

sorry for being very late to ask this - is there any advantage to the 64 bit version?

[Despatche]

Typically, 64-bit programs will give a nice speed boost because they have access to more resources. I don't know the particulars, but MAME 64-bit builds are pretty good in my experience.

[evil_ash_xero]

Have there been any updates to this? Or has it been abandoned?

I was really hoping for a build with zero lag on the Raizing games (I know that one version does, but I can't get it to work).

Also, it would be pretty sweet to get some more "new" games on there.

[donluca]

GroovyMAME is the way to go.

If you have a very powerful setup, you can have theoretical 0 lag.

If you don't you'll have just a frame of lag.

If you're using a CRT of course.

[evil_ash_xero]

GroovyMAME is the way to go.

If you have a very powerful setup, you can have theoretical 0 lag.

If you don't you'll have just a frame of lag.

If you're using a CRT of course.

I don't have a powerful setup. But I'll check it out.

[waiwainl]

What is considered a 'powerful setup'? Need to invest in a new PC.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[donluca]

MAME works on a single thread, so a modern, very fast CPU will do, don't need 7238975 cores.

G3258 has been a favorite one and for a good reason: cheap to boot and OC's up to 4.8Ghz with stock cooler, even beyond with a aftermarket one.

A cheap H81 motherboard, Intel G3258, 2GB used ram, any Radeon card (HD5xxx recommended) and any Hard disk and you're good to go. My setup costed me 160€ iirc and I can play any game full speed.

[Xyga]

G3258 has been a favorite one and for a good reason: cheap to boot and OC's up to 4.8Ghz with stock cooler, even beyond with a aftermarket one.

The recently released G4560 is the new budget wonder apparently...socket 1151 though.

[donluca]

I'm not sure that's unlocked. You should harvest some information.

I've heard good things about the i3 as well.