Shatterhand wrote:Well, Ive someone saying that Xmame runned a lot faster than Mame32 on his laptop.
Be careful when you say "faster". MAME has 3 parts: the MAME core, the game driver, and the blitter. The blitter is the part that draws game information to the screen.
XMAME and MAME share the same MAME core and drivers. The blitters are different, as MAME uses either Direct3D or DirectDraw, and XMAME can use X11, SDL or OpenGL.
When someone says to me "XMAME is faster than MAME on the same hardware" or vice versa, I call bullshit. The cores are identical. There are no extra optimisations, unless you compile them in yourself at compile time, but these are available from places like this:
http://redump.emubase.de/mame.php
Benchmarking MAME on various systems will give various results depending on the OS and blitters you are using. If the blitter code can only update to the screen so many times per second, that will result in capping your maximum framerate.
Outside of that, assuming you are using the same MAME core (remember that MAME changes greatly between revisions, so you need to compare identical releases to get a real comparison) there are NO DIFFERENCES between versions of MAME other than the blitters you choose.
Shatterhand wrote:I am trying to compile Xmame on my Ubuntu distro, but being the linux newbie I am, it's giving me a lot of headaches
Grab the pre-compiled version from your APT repositories. From a command line:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-cache search mame
sudo install xmame-<whatever version you want>
It's much easier than compiling the code yourself if you're not used to LInux compiling. If Ubuntu don't have it in their repositores, add some of the Debian repositories and try again.
Shatterhand wrote:Is fastmame still being updated? I couldnt find not even a 0.100 version of it.
Fastmame is done whenever the guy who runs the project has the time to update it. Generally speaking he updates every 3-4 versions. The MAME team have a bad habit of releasing versions very quickly during rest times (summer holidays, etc) and easing off during the rest of the year. The Fastmame guy (like most developers) is a busy person, and updates when he can.
At the end of the day, computer gear doesn't cost much. Fastmame is nice, but you can buy an AthlonXP processor, cheap board and 512MB RAM nowadays for less than a games console would cost you, and it will play any 2D shmup fine. I've got several dedicated MAME cabs in my house, and for all of them the computer hardware was by far the cheapest bit.
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. Heres a more detailed description of my situation and problem. 
