MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: Got a message asking me to report to mame developpers

> > MAME isn't going to work well on an Intel GMA945. It was never a good GPU, and it
> > doesn't support features MAME needs.
>
> What features? Most people either leave the games with plain stretched pixels or use
> HLSL for the aged, blurry, worn out CRT look, both of which worked perfectly well
> even before the new requirements.
>
> Better put, older video cards simply don't support the video modes that MAME
> inexplicably changed which made it incompatible with just about every video chipset
> made prior to the Windows 8 era yet the changes and video card feature requirements
> were of little to no use to most devs or users anyway. If a certain driver hadn't
> magically started booting games in 0.180 which happened to coincide with the video
> changes, I would have given up on MAME entirely and stuck with 0.179 forever.
>
> MAME, no longer filling people's hard drives with impunity, but filling junkyards
> with desktop PCs which can no longer run MAME properly!

This is simply not true. Just because you cannot (visually) see a difference, it does not mean that the (new) code is useless or just "shiny".

> GMA950/GMA945 D3D drivers don't support non-power-of-two texture dimensions. This
> requires nasty workarounds because pretty much everything MAME wants to draw doesn't
> naturally have dimensions that are powers of two. For whatever reason to OpenGL
> drivers for these cards seem to support non-power-of-two texture dimensions. You can
> use OpenGL or GDI mode on these cards, or try a Windows SDL build in SDL2 accelerated
> mode.

> No, MAMEdev decided that it's no longer worth preserving the code to work around lack
> of support for a useful feature that's been standard on every GPU for over a decade.
> This makes the code easier to read, understand, debug and maintain. It's easy for you
> to complain about it, but you aren't in the position of having to support/maintain
> this stuff.

> Such is life - PCs have limited useful life before they can no longer run new
> software. Do you expect new games and operating systems to support old hardware
> forever? The GMA950/GMA945 were already crippled cards the day they were released
> (saying this as a former GMA950 owner)

Totally agree here. I remember that change by Jezze and all i can say is, that this change accelerated "modern" video cards (not older than 10years) by 20-30%, if HLSL and shadowmasks where enabled.