Too close for comfort? the revival?

[Korszca]

*edit2* at the end of a level in MAME there is a circle containing graphics, this is currently getting blended to almost solid white for quite a long time before fading down, is that also a bug? If you play it you'll see what I mean.

Thanks for the heads up, I didn't even check. That graphic is totally wrong, do you want me to make another video?

[IseeThings]

*edit2* at the end of a level in MAME there is a circle containing graphics, this is currently getting blended to almost solid white for quite a long time before fading down, is that also a bug? If you play it you'll see what I mean.

Thanks for the heads up, I didn't even check. That graphic is totally wrong, do you want me to make another video?

Yes please, it's probably the same underlying issue so feel free to add it to the same report.

[Korszca]

*edit2* at the end of a level in MAME there is a circle containing graphics, this is currently getting blended to almost solid white for quite a long time before fading down, is that also a bug? If you play it you'll see what I mean.

Thanks for the heads up, I didn't even check. That graphic is totally wrong, do you want me to make another video?

Yes please, it's probably the same underlying issue so feel free to add it to the same report.

OK, give me an hour or so and I'll get it up.

Edit: OK - it's up.

[terrybogard]

even using mame_slowpoke_edition most of the games say missing files... im assuming that my roms are not to date but im not sure everywhere i look has the same ones im using. am i missing something... thanks! i also cant even find muchi muchi pork or pink sweets roms anywhere... just saying not asking for them

[null1024]

Mmkay, using Metallic's build on my netbook [not expecting miracles, and I'm too lazy to reboot into Windows on my proper laptop]...

Ibara gets 50-80%, frameskip 10 [eww], and is otherwise unplayable on it [remember, netbook]. Framerate seems barely correlated with the amount of stuff on screen -- at random I will get a very smooth framerate for a tiny bit, and then it chops back up again, although in general, I never reached fullspeed during say, the death animation.
Futari 1.5 gets a beautiful 70-95%, frameskip 6-10, and is almost playable. Framerate is very correlated to what is on screen from what I've seen.

Note that I tested these for all of say, 5 minutes a piece, so I don't know how later in the game goes [and a lot of that time is loading+ me configuring controls for yet another MAME build ]

So, going to test these on proper-spec hardware... later. Honestly, I never expected to be able to even play these, although I said that about Ketsui and DOJ, and we have them finally.

@terrybogard
They're probably misnamed, I had that issue with Futari, renamed u2 to futari15_u2 and whatnot. Just look at which files are missing. The checksum mighn't match what MAME wants, but it runs just fine anyway.

EDIT:
More testing [still on the netbook], and added the -mt flag for multithreading.
I noticed that Futari runs amazing [100%, frameskip 4!] ingame... as long as I am not firing. Absolutely no issue until I press that button. Then I go as low as 60%.

[Korszca]

EDIT:
More testing [still on the netbook], and added the -mt flag for multithreading.
I noticed that Futari runs amazing [100%, frameskip 4!] ingame... as long as I am not firing. Absolutely no issue until I press that button. Then I go as low as 60%.

I think you've discovered a great new way to play Futari
At least until you have to fight a boss.

[kevenz]

guys...... turn the frameskip off..... it actually slows the game down instead of speeding them up.

create a mame.ini, frameskip 0, triplebuffer 1, multithreading 1, keepaspect 1, throttle 1, priority 1,

[null1024]

Ooh, you are right, frameskip isn't providing any benefit here, still getting the same range of speed percentages, except now everything is smooth. Thought you were bullshitting when I read it, but nope.

[also, gah, Ibara is slow always, and seems to hate the thought of me putting a coin into it, 2/3 of the time it barfs up a coin error message and I have to reset]

[joeboto]

Ooh, you are right, frameskip isn't providing any benefit here, still getting the same range of speed percentages, except now everything is smooth. Thought you were bullshitting when I read it, but nope.

[also, gah, Ibara is slow always, and seems to hate the thought of me putting a coin into it, 2/3 of the time it barfs up a coin error message and I have to reset]

coin error might be because you throttled/fast foward during insert coin.

[BeruBeru]

For Yagawa games don't use coin1, use service1 instead

[emphatic]

Or turn free play on in the service menu.

[Vamos]

Ooh, you are right, frameskip isn't providing any benefit here, still getting the same range of speed percentages, except now everything is smooth. Thought you were bullshitting when I read it, but nope.

[also, gah, Ibara is slow always, and seems to hate the thought of me putting a coin into it, 2/3 of the time it barfs up a coin error message and I have to reset]

Why would he be bullshitting? and why are you even bothering testing this on a netbook what results would you expect honestly? . BRB testing mame64 on my spectrum zx

Or turn free play on in the service menu.

Aye this is the best solution for the yagawa games.

[autumndrone]

create a mame.ini, frameskip 0, triplebuffer 1, multithreading 1, keepaspect 1, throttle 1, priority 1,

I am almost positive that triple buffering introduces additional lag, not as harsh as vsync though. I guess playing Quake competitively for more than a decade made me oversensitive to input/output lag :) Almost every game feels unplayable when you get used to 120fps / monitor @ 120hz / mouse 125/500/1000hz.

[Stevas]

Okay, strange goings on last night.

Firstly, anyone else have issues with mame saving highscores to the nvram when using HLSL?
If I use HLSL I get an error whenever I exit a game. Doesn't matter which game. (It's an ACCESS VIOLATION ERROR.)
I can click past it okay, and then the emulator comes back, but whatever is causing the error seems to be locking the emulator from accessing the nvram on exit (and therefore stopping it updating the highscores)? If I DON'T use HLSL, I don't get the error. No idea yet if this means it IS saving highscores to the nvram mind (aint checked that yet).

Secondly - and it could be related I guess - my Nvidia Control Panel just won't open any more. Just hangs there indefinitely. Strange, as I say, because it worked long enough for me to go in and check my maximum pre-rendered frame value (which was indeed set at 3). I think it worked a few times last night, but then suddenly decided it wasn't going to, no matter what. I rebooted, reinstalled drivers, and even did a diagnostic on my RAM. No dice.

Is HLSL just a bit flaky or something? I've never used it before, see. Should I just not bother with it at the moment?
Also, is the Nvidia CP just a piece of shit also? I've rarely bothered to go in there. Typically, soon as I decide I need to use it a bit, it goes tits up.

[BPzeBanshee]

As for the subject of slowdown, it's been mentioned a dozen times in this thread already - there isn't any, with the rare exception of places where the code is deliberately slowed down (after bosses). I think Metallic may have put in some kind of rudimentary slowdown thing because some places slow down a little more than what I remember from it running fullspeed before sound was implemented, but from my experience with the ports its nowhere near accurate (I think Deathsmiles US pre-patch may have more slowdown than in MAME ).

If what we have discussed with MetalliC et al. in IRC is still relevant, this is the result of the overclocked blitter (the GPU, basically). Most of the slowdown happens when the amount of pixels from every rendered object goes over a certain value, which is blitter's fillrate. These values are most certainly different for every game—I'm pretty positive Cave has purposefully reduced it when going from Futari 1.0 to 1.5, and then again from 1.5 to BL (since slowdown happens all the damn time even in BL Original). I don't think anybody here knows them exactly, so the fillrate is either unlimited for all SH3 games in MAME, resulting in no blitter-induced slowdown, or still too high. The default value in Demul's latest test build that I have is, IIRC, 70,000,000 pix/s, which is still higher than needed (I've only tested Futari BL as the most slowdown-tastic Cave game).

Please correct me if I'm wrong here.

That's basically the idea I had as the current state of MAME, but since you're testing in-house builds for the Demul team you know more about the details than I do.

In terms of testing games for slowdown I'd be having a go at Deathsmiles - there's very distinct points in the game in the earlier stages where it lags which can reveal the accuracy of whatever value you use for the blitter fillrate. For Metallic's build of MAME with this supposed attempt at figuring out the fillrate, it's still way off but I did notice the forest stage boss lag on its second phase (but I can't tell if that's how it was before in official builds because the builds never ran fullspeed for me before till now).

[IseeThings]

Okay, strange goings on last night.

Firstly, anyone else have issues with mame saving highscores to the nvram when using HLSL?
If I use HLSL I get an error whenever I exit a game. Doesn't matter which game. (It's an ACCESS VIOLATION ERROR.)
I can click past it okay, and then the emulator comes back, but whatever is causing the error seems to be locking the emulator from accessing the nvram on exit (and therefore stopping it updating the highscores)? If I DON'T use HLSL, I don't get the error. No idea yet if this means it IS saving highscores to the nvram mind (aint checked that yet).

Secondly - and it could be related I guess - my Nvidia Control Panel just won't open any more. Just hangs there indefinitely. Strange, as I say, because it worked long enough for me to go in and check my maximum pre-rendered frame value (which was indeed set at 3). I think it worked a few times last night, but then suddenly decided it wasn't going to, no matter what. I rebooted, reinstalled drivers, and even did a diagnostic on my RAM. No dice.

Is HLSL just a bit flaky or something? I've never used it before, see. Should I just not bother with it at the moment?
Also, is the Nvidia CP just a piece of shit also? I've rarely bothered to go in there. Typically, soon as I decide I need to use it a bit, it goes tits up.

Yes the HLSL code is very flakey, Mooglyguy / Ryan Holtz / Just Desserts / whatever he wants to call himself these days wrote it but has yet to fix a whole bunch of stability bugs with it, eg it will crash when changing from windowed to full screen, rescaling the window, or sometimes on exit as you say, there are also still some visual issues such as duplicated pixels on 2 of the sides. It's worth using if you like the effect, but it's far from being good code at the moment. No doubt it will improve, but it really is the project of a single developer so don't expect too much support here. You should probably report any actual crash bugs on Mametesters if they're not already there.

The Nvidia control panel is also a piece of shit

[Stevas]

Hah, thanks for the assurances, man! I was going round in circles last night for hours. Feel better now.

It did seem strange to me, though, that nobody else noticed that using HLSL doesn't let you save your highscores...

Guess I'll just go back to bilinear and scanlines for now then!

Oh, is there some way of me accessing what the Nvidia CP does through another means? Seems like the laptop is doing everthing it should, directx is clearly working, etc. But now I can't access stuff like that pre-rendered frame value? Not sure what else there is in there I need worry about, if I'm honest.

Finally, keep up the good work, chief. The shit people like you (and that thoroughly decent Metalic chap) figure out /lip wobble/, well, dammit... it makes an old man (who society deems should know better by now) very happy, and... hang it all... now look what you made me do, doexcusemethere'ssomethinginmyeye

[IseeThings]

Hah, thanks for the assurances, man! I was going round in circles last night for hours. Feel better now.

It did seem strange to me, though, that nobody else noticed that using HLSL doesn't let you save your highscores...

Well that's only because it's crashing for you before it actually saves the nvram, for most people the crash on exit only happens in a select few games, so the majority probably aren't seeing it with these Cave titles. That's another reason it's a bit of an issue, the guy developing the HLSL code doesn't see any of these crashes on his setup.

[Stevas]

Right, yeah. The lone developer not even being able to reproduce the error aint going to help much.

Course, I could try some of the other games I have (that aren't so CLOSE), see if I get the same shit going on. Might well be, as you say, that these new games cause the issue because they're so CLOSE.

And I'm pretty sure the reason I get the crash is down to me using M+GUI (which was built around that slowpoke exe posted earlier). I think the conflict is actually with the GUI.

Any recommendations for any other GUIs I could try out that do HLSL to eliminate/confirm this theory?

[BPzeBanshee]

Try IV/Play. Requires .NET Framework 4 and something else if memory serves but its meant to be pretty good and minimal.

[Stevas]

Thanks man, I'll try that over the weekend.

[Ex-Cyber]

If what we have discussed with MetalliC et al. in IRC is still relevant, this is the result of the overclocked blitter (the GPU, basically). Most of the slowdown happens when the amount of pixels from every rendered object goes over a certain value, which is blitter's fillrate. These values are most certainly different for every game—I'm pretty positive Cave has purposefully reduced it when going from Futari 1.0 to 1.5, and then again from 1.5 to BL (since slowdown happens all the damn time even in BL Original). I don't think anybody here knows them exactly, so the fillrate is either unlimited for all SH3 games in MAME, resulting in no blitter-induced slowdown, or still too high. The default value in Demul's latest test build that I have is, IIRC, 70,000,000 pix/s, which is still higher than needed (I've only tested Futari BL as the most slowdown-tastic Cave game).

I'm not much of an expert with these kinds of systems, but I think this description smells a bit too much like there's a missing variable in the slowdown that can be affected by how the host code uses the blitter, such as a cache in the blitter, a lower fill rate for certain operations (e.g. semitransparent rendering can be expected to be slower because it must read the buffer first), bus contention, etc.. However, since it's in an FPGA it's true that they could have played with the internal clock(s) quite a bit simply by altering the HDL code.

[kevenz]

I've been using HLSL since may and I don't think I will go back. It never crashed on me.
Games without HLSL feels very washed out and pixelated... it's my opinion

[null1024]

coin error might be because you throttled/fast foward during insert coin.

Nope, I'm at sub-100% here. Gonna just set it to freeplay. There's a tiny window for how long the coin button has to be held down for it to register: too early and nothing happens, too long and it errors out.

Why would he be bullshitting? and why are you even bothering testing this on a netbook what results would you expect honestly? . BRB testing mame64 on my spectrum zx

Er, I dunno, because frameskip usually pulls the speed closer to 100%, which has been the case in everything in MAME for me until this, which appears to only slow it down because unlike normally, the graphics operations aren't what is slowing down on my machine.

Also, remember the guy who tried to run OSX in QEMU on a 68k era Mac? Yeah, doing this is a bit like that, except there's also the possibility of it actually working at a reasonable rate in this case.

[Stevas]

I've been using HLSL since may and I don't think I will go back. It never crashed on me.
Games without HLSL feels very washed out and pixelated... it's my opinion

As I say, I suspect the issue I have is more with running this mame.exe through mamepgui on win 7.

What just occured to me is that, instead of going through mamepgui, I could have just ran the bloody slowpoke exe from within the mamepgui folder. The ini was already set to enable HLSL, for the... love of god.

You know, despite the evidence to the contrary, I am actually quite intelligent.

Um.

[shmuppyLove]

I've been using HLSL since may and I don't think I will go back. It never crashed on me.
Games without HLSL feels very washed out and pixelated... it's my opinion

As I say, I suspect the issue I have is more with running this mame.exe through mamepgui on win 7.

What just occured to me is that, instead of going through mamepgui, I could have just ran the bloody slowpoke exe from within the mamepgui folder. The ini was already set to enable HLSL, for the... love of god.

You know, despite the evidence to the contrary, I am actually quite intelligent.

Um.

This is what I've been doing. I've generally used MAMEUI32 for the last several years, and I have settings, ctrl files, folders, etc set up that I like to carry forward. If you drop a mame.exe into the main MAMEUI folder and run it, it will pick up the mame.ini and whatever else it recognizes from that.

And what's nice is you can use MAMEUI to configure settings instead of manually editing mame.ini.

Once you get used to using the command-line version it's not so bad. Obviously you can't browse thorugh collections of ROMs, but if you're just running a handful of games you'll remember the names quickly enough. And once it's launched you can always switch to another game from the in-game menus without having to exit and relaunch.

[Uzumakijl]

I have a question for somebody who actually knows about this stuff...

Seeing that my pc (Celeron E3400 2.6 Ghz x 2) can run the games at 100% on the slowpoke edition (With the exception of the Yagawa games which tend to run a bit slower at times but at 100% for most of it)

I'm wondering the games will run this good when they are properly emulated within the same specs range.

[Stevas]

Ha, yeah, was thinking just exactly that: screw the GUI, just keep it there for maybe quickly changing settings and defaults. As you say, for what I'm using it for (what, ten games), no need for it.

Now I just need to figure out what the issue is with my Nvidia rubbish...

While I'm here, is it worth me even bothering trying to look for:
futariblk
guwanges
pinkswtsa
pinkswtsb
???
(I'm aware I've probably got the names wrong.)

Like, is guwanges even that much different from guwange? pinkswtsb, pnkswtsb, pinkswtb... does it even do anything over and above pinkswts?

[AntiFritz]

futariblk

Simple answer, yes

[terrybogard]

got everything working perfectly....

imac 27" running bootcamp windows 7 64bit
mame plus extended
3.1 ghz quad core
16 gb ram
2gb ati

thanks for everyones help who sent me pms on getting this tweaked....