Hi, long time lurker, first time poster. Anyway, I finally got myself some mame (shmupmame 2.2 and mameuifx32) and it's great and everything but I noticed some games requiring the st-v bios (cotton 2 for example) ran incredibly slow. Shmupmame doesn't even recognize them and mameuifx32 is just a terrible emulation. I found some forums talking about st-v emulation being choppy back in 2005. Are there any fixes for this today or is st-v emulation still terrible?
(not directly shmup related, moved to hardware /nZ)
st-v games slowdown on mame
Re: st-v games slowdown on mame
ST-V emulation would indeed have been choppy back in the era of Sempron, Athlon 64, Pentium 4, and Pentium D. Here we are, seven years later, and CPU technology has moved on. So has MAME.
There are two obvious possibilities: The first is that shmupmame is old and outdated, and was focused mainly on reducing input lag for 2D games. We recently discovered that some users found that some apparent in-game slowdown in Layer Section from Shmupmame disappears in the newest MAME. So the first thing you should try is a new version of MAME. You should try the newer MAME (version 145 and above) anyway, since there have been some recent improvements and you might be happy with it as a general solution for lag problems in older MAMEs.
The second is that your system isn't good enough for ST-V. If you would share your computer specs (mainly your CPU) with us, we could tell you more.
I recall being able to play ST-V games pretty well on my Core 2 Duo (from 2006) and my Core i7 920 (the basic model from the end of 2008) runs ST-V games well. On the other hand, Hyper Neo Geo games don't run well (or at least Beast Busters: Second Nightmare doesn't run well, though that might be a case of it doesn't work).
There may be a "fix" for you that allows you to bypass MAME altogether - if the game was ported to the Saturn, you could play it on a Saturn emulator - and SSF, which I think is still the best Saturn emulator and is still being developed, has ST-V support of some kind, though I'm not sure how to use it.
There are two obvious possibilities: The first is that shmupmame is old and outdated, and was focused mainly on reducing input lag for 2D games. We recently discovered that some users found that some apparent in-game slowdown in Layer Section from Shmupmame disappears in the newest MAME. So the first thing you should try is a new version of MAME. You should try the newer MAME (version 145 and above) anyway, since there have been some recent improvements and you might be happy with it as a general solution for lag problems in older MAMEs.
The second is that your system isn't good enough for ST-V. If you would share your computer specs (mainly your CPU) with us, we could tell you more.
I recall being able to play ST-V games pretty well on my Core 2 Duo (from 2006) and my Core i7 920 (the basic model from the end of 2008) runs ST-V games well. On the other hand, Hyper Neo Geo games don't run well (or at least Beast Busters: Second Nightmare doesn't run well, though that might be a case of it doesn't work).
There may be a "fix" for you that allows you to bypass MAME altogether - if the game was ported to the Saturn, you could play it on a Saturn emulator - and SSF, which I think is still the best Saturn emulator and is still being developed, has ST-V support of some kind, though I'm not sure how to use it.
Re: st-v games slowdown on mame
I downloaded mame145 with the same issues so I think it's just my crappy little netbook that can't handle the games. I'm using an acer aspire one with an amd dual core c60
Re: st-v games slowdown on mame
Yeah, no surprise that a little c60 can't run these well. Sorry about that!