Really weird mame problem...

[chubsta]

am trying to set up a mame cab and have run into something i dont know how to fix!

I have copied a mame rom set from a working machine, but the new one wont play a lot of the games - neogeo is a case in point.

It works fine on my existing setup, but wont work on the new one. i have the bios in the rom folder so cannot work out what the hell s going wrong, as these are files that have not been changed in mame in ages...

I tried changing from the new mame (mame64) version i am using to the same as in the other machine 1.24, and it made no difference.

i have never had a problem like this in years of running mame.

any ideas?

[AeroCityMayor]

First off, which version of MAME are you using and which build e.g. MAMUIFX64 0.128

What was the version of your older MAME on the pre-existing box??

MAME ROMs change quite sgnificantly from onw build to another as more and more is discovered about a particular hardware system/pcb.

HTH

[cools]

IIRC there have been a lot of updates to common, older systems in the past few releases - MVS and CPS1 amongst other things.

[chubsta]

to tell you the truth i have never had a mame instalation like it - every time i have done one in the past it has worked like a dream, this is just one problem after another...

i thought i would treat myself to a nice fast processor so i got an Intel 3ghz one, and then tried running a 64bit version of vista on it. the damn thing runs slower than my old athlon 1800+! everything runs at a crawl, and the mount of extra crap in vista is astounding. I have 4gb of ram and it might as well be 256meg i think.

when i tried installing mame i found that so many of the games didnt work that it wasnt worthwhile, i have gone backwards and forwards between vista64 and xp64 and cant get anything running at a decent speed. I am now going to go back to TinyXP which although it is 32bit at least i know the bloody thing will work.

Afte spending over £250 to get what i thought would be a fast mame system i think i could have got away with a 2nd hand machine off ebay for a hundred quid and got the same results.

Dont get me wrong, im not new to mame, ive set it up for cabinets befor and have been using it for 10 years but trying to get it right this time is killing me

[chubsta]

tracked down the problem with the neogeo games - someone has screwed up in the latest build and the neogeo bios is not referenced properly - mame looks for a file called sfix.sfix whereas the file is actually named sfix.sfx. All i had to do was rename the file in the zip and it works, although it does result in a checksum error, but this doesnt stop the games playing...

still not impressed with the lack of speedboost from a xp1800+ with 750mb ram running TinyXP to a CD2 4gb running xp64

[cools]

What version of MAME were you using on the last machine? Stuff does get slower, but it shouldn't be that bad. The CHD stuff should be a crapload quicker on the newer setup.

One thing I can think of that I had a problem with - try disabling artwork/overlays. If that improves things then there's a video card/drivers problem. With SDLMAME, on a slow old 32-bit system, under directfb on linux - having them enabled would give a 10x performance hit, as all the work was being done in software. Space Invaders ran at 4-5fps. With them off - faster than 100%.

[Chi]

Indeed, MAME 0.128 has signficantly changed Neo Geo stuff (they realised they'd been using a bad dump of the BIOS, you've already applied the workaround).

[chubsta]

What version of MAME were you using on the last machine? Stuff does get slower, but it shouldn't be that bad. The CHD stuff should be a crapload quicker on the newer setup.

One thing I can think of that I had a problem with - try disabling artwork/overlays. If that improves things then there's a video card/drivers problem. With SDLMAME, on a slow old 32-bit system, under directfb on linux - having them enabled would give a 10x performance hit, as all the work was being done in software. Space Invaders ran at 4-5fps. With them off - faster than 100%.

i was using 1.24 on the old machine - a few things are faster - radiant silvergun runs at 100% for instance, but i cant even get Mr driller to run at 100% ket alone stuff like gradius4 (50%).

Im not bohtering with chd stuff as the only ones i wanted to play were gauntlet legends and that ont run on 64bit mame anyway

Im at the point nw where at least it works and im going to fit it to the astro and play what i can for a while. give it a couple of mots and ill try a new version of mame and see how i get on.

On very big problem at the moment tho, is that no roms after 's' seem to work - cant for the life of me work out why....

[cools]

Something weird going on there. I plan on getting SDLMAME working on my new machine (same CPU, onboard intel gfx, 64-bit Debian Lenny) sometime soon so I'll be interested to compare speeds.

Also, Legends should run fine on a 64-bit setup.

[chubsta]

well, ive given up -chucked the astro back in the corner and will give a while befor i start work on it again.

As i said befor, im not new to this, but this is the installation from hell - i have finally got the software running ok but the jpac doesnt seem to be sending the right signals out - not a problem with the unit itself i reckon, there must be wiring issues with this cab (although when i plug a mvs 4-slot in everything works fine...)

i am going to get a different type of keyboard encoder off ebay, a type i have used befor with no problems - and rewire all the buttons. I will use the j-pac to sort the video signal out but apart from that the jamma loom button connectors will not be connected.

So, half the games dont work - although if i run the same software on my mac using xp64 they are fine - the buttons are screwed, and i cant find out how to adjust the horizontal synch on my monitor, but apart from that everything is great!!!