Hey everybody!  Finally finished my dry set up for my MAME and have a question re CHD files...  Problem is, when I try to play the CHD games i.e. Blitz and such, the games plays really slow and drags like crazy.  I really don't think it's because of lack of processing speed on my computer as I'm running it on my forensic box at work which is a dual Xeon processor (3.5 GHz) IBM computer with 4 GB of ram...

What's up with this>?

Thanks

Marty

Anybody???

I dont know exactly why, but i know i read that those games were very power hungry and would not even run full speed on a high end Pentium 4..

So i dont think its your setup, i just think the hardware used for those games is hard to emulate at full speed.

Yep some heavy game with chd's are not fully emulated it's just a begining..  

What graphics card is in that computer?  I believe that those games try to use DirectX for displaying the 3D so you need something that does decent DirectX acceleration (but then again that should not be too hard since a 5 year old graphics card should still be able to run faster than the old 3Dfx card in those machines did).

Any notes in the MAME version to see if there are speed or limitation issues with Emulation for those type of games?

Yeah I have done some experiementation with CHD based games and a good portion of them are just not emulatable regardless of hardware.  Also MAME does not support more than one cpu so dual proc setups arent much more effective than single proc.

Also graphics cards don't really help much with the 3d-CHD games either because they didn't have accelerated GPU's so much and just used single high clocked CPU's to do everything and emulating a high speed RISC CPU is a not an easy task.

Point about MAME not using Dual CPU well agreed on.

jokker, I am not too familiar with what MAME is doing with CHD games Emulation but the original games like NFL Blitz, Gauntlet Legends, etc used a 3Dfx card inside the machines.  This was a GPU before it was actually known as a GPU and was responsible for providing the 3D engine/setup/vertex and rasterizing and effects such as Alpha Blending to offload the CPU from doing it.  And so the graphics card in your current PC should make a difference (unless MAME does some primitive job with these type of games but it must be calling Direct3D perhaps).  But yes, at the time, a lot of floating point calculations such as the Transform and Lighting was indeed done on the CPU and not inside the GPU (like the case is with today's cards - now as advanced as Vertex and Pixel Shaders)....

Quoted from jokker

Yeah I have done some experiementation with CHD based games and a good portion of them are just not emulatable regardless of hardware.  Also MAME does not support more than one cpu so dual proc setups arent much more effective than single proc.

Also graphics cards don't really help much with the 3d-CHD games either because they didn't have accelerated GPU's so much and just used single high clocked CPU's to do everything and emulating a high speed RISC CPU is a not an easy task.

(DISCLAIMER) I'm no expert... far from it... but according to Wikpedia,
"MAME emulation is very accurate (in many cases pixel- and sample-accurate), but system requirements can be high. Since MAME runs mostly older games, a large majority of the games run well on a 2 GHz PC. More modern arcade machines are based around fast pipelined RISC processors, math DSPs, and other devices which are difficult to emulate efficiently. These systems may not run quickly even on the most modern systems available; some working games have been estimated to require a 10 GHz processor to run at full speed."
I hope this helps a little.

mfl

I guess the MAME Emulator creators for these type of games should not have made the effort if even the fastest AMD64 processor couldn't emulate these games at decent speeds.  Maybe we need a Blade Server from IBM with the new Cell processor then.  

Well i just think it's to make amilioration on the 3d acceleration on mame

Just think at the game that run at full speed on ZiNC and on mame they run at the quater.. (1/4)..