MAMEWorld Forums - The Loony Bin - Re: running of course MAME (illegally)

> ChoccyHobNob did some benches about a year or so ago so you can see the scope of the
> problem: https://choccyhobnob.com/mame/benchmarks-for-mame-on-raspberry-pi/
>
> - Stiletto

yeah, especially if you look at the 'real' column, which is what I was comparing benchmarks with for my old 3Ghz Core2 that I picked up almost 10 years ago.

The Core2 was 6 times faster than the Pi 'Real' values.

The values for the Pi mean it would have been considered grossly obsolete hardware even 10 years ago.

The old versions are fast basically because they use 8-bit modes (so half as much data being thrown around) and have things like dirty rectangles, and entirely separate codepaths for vertical / horizontal orientation (so they don't have to rotate a buffer after rendering) Also things like executing code directly from pointers rather than going through memory system; we've got cycle accurate cores doing realtime decryption in many cases now, a complete opposite. The hardware really seems so weak it does actually need these ugly 'solutions' that plagued MAME in the late 90s to perform at all.

The removal of this kind of thing is what has actually allowed the project to move forward as they got entirely in the way of progress, requiring people to code around MAME's limitations, and have knowledge of the games themselves and how they were most likely to do things. Having to manually managing palettes, dirty rectangles, patching code / memcpying data around just to handle the countless 'code execution across page boundary' cases etc. meant that the emulation in those old versions was never reliable.

I'm not honestly convinced you can get hardware that weak to do anything useful with modern versions without seriously compromising the project, there are better boards available for not much more which might be more realistic to optimize for.

Of course that applies to the really old versions, anything that's capable of running 0.139 at an acceptable rate in the first place is obviously already capable of doing a lot of those things without hacks and per-game knowledge.