Emulation on top of emulation...

[Dauber]

Okay...as one of the board's few (if not only!) user of the new AmigaOne, I thought I'd share this little anecdote and see if anybody else is finding the same thing with whatever your setup happens to be...

 

For those of you not in the know, the AmigaOne is the new version of the old Commodore Amiga computer that was known for its graphics and sound capabilities and was (and probably still is) used by the Disney folks. The "classic" Amiga runs Amiga OS 3.9 or earlier, and the AmigaOne runs an unfinished (so they say -- if you hadn't been told, you wouldn't know it was unfinished!) version 4.0 of the operating system. (There will also be a version of OS 4.0 for "classic" Amigas that have been upgraded with PowerPC cards.) The AmigaOne runs on the G3 and G4 PowerPCs and is lightning-fast compared to even the fastest 68060-based system...and as such there are now several emulators available for it that can actually run things at full speed.

 

Having said that, I downloaded a Playstation emulator -- that is, the CLASSIC Playstation, or "PSX." It's basically an Amiga port of FPSE, and various users have tested close to 950 Playstation titles with it, and a vast majority work perfectly at full speed. So of course I had to run to GameStop and bought a pretty nice stack of used Playstation games for just a twenty-dollar bill.

 

Now, here's the amusing thing...I bought a couple of Namco Museum titles. The games in the Namco Museums are basically emulated. What I find amazing is that these Namco games actually run much smoother than the games in the AmigaOne version of MAME! In other words, I'm getting better results by emulating a game under emulation!

[Dones]

It's funny you go out of your way to explain Playstation as in PS1. I'll bet most people here will know what you are talking about, but you are right in thinking the majority of people would default to PS2.

 

Anyway your story is very interesting. There must be some logical explanation for it *vulcan frowns* Maybe your version of MAME is not properly optimized or maybe your computer is too slow for for it.

[Ze_ro]

Well, an AmigaOne should be plenty fast enough to handle Dig Dug and Pac-Man and such at full speed (especially since it can apparently handle PSX emulation without hiccups). I'd guessing that whatever version of MAME you have has some kind of problem with it. I have no experience with MAME on Amiga's, but perhaps there's some kind of bottleneck with video performance or something. What kind of framerate is MAME giving you? Pressing F11 should give you an FPS display (Wait, does the AmigaOne even HAVE an F11 key?).

 

It's also worth pointing out that very, very, very few of these classic compilations are actually emulated. I don't have any of the PSX Namco Museum discs, but I'm thinking that all the games are probably just ported to the PSX hardware.

 

--Zero

[+FujiSkunk]

MAME has gotten kind of "bloated" over the years. I put "bloated" in quotes because I really don't want to sound negative when I say that. It's just the programmers are getting down to the real nitty-gritty, making sure every last microchip, coin slot, LED, controller, and button get full and equal treatment by their program. Such attention to detail is bound to slow things down, and I've noticed that the later versions of MAME don't run as cleanly on some of my older computers as the earlier versions did.

 

On the other hand, the emulators for the PS1 (Williams Arcade's Greatest Hits does run emulators, and I'm willing to bet the NamcoMuseum discs do as well) had to be stripped down and heavily optimized in order to run with any appreciable speed on that system, which is comparable to a late-model 486 PC. Assuming the Amiga port of the PlayStation emulator is written fairly well, I can easily see how the PS1 emulators would run better on it than MAME would natively.

Edited August 23, 2005 by skunkworx

[Bakasama]

MAME has gotten kind of "bloated" over the years.  I put "bloated" in quotes because I really don't want to sound negative when I say that.  It's just the programmers are getting down to the real nitty-gritty, making sure every last microchip, coin slot, LED, controller, and button get full and equal treatment by their program.  Such attention to detail is bound to slow things down, and I've noticed that the later versions of MAME don't run as cleanly on some of my older computers as the earlier versions did.

 

On the other hand, the emulators for the PS1 (Williams Arcade's Greatest Hits does run emulators, and I'm willing to bet the NamcoMuseum discs do as well) had to be stripped down and heavily optimized in order to run with any appreciable speed on that system, which is comparable to a late-model 486 PC.  Assuming the Amiga port of the PlayStation emulator is written fairly well, I can easily see how the PS1 emulators would run better on it than MAME would natively.

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Well, that's the what alot MAME users complain about. "Playablity" is taking a backseat to "Accuracy". What alot people users don't realize is that MAME is suppose to accurately mimic the hardware. Any coder can just take the code and optimize it to run faster. I think it's getting to the point that players will have to stick with an older MAME just to play some games faster or get a faster PC.

[Dones]

It has been like that for a long time. You are better off running older versions which usually run faster. I am still running off version 0.80! It loads a lot faster than the current build.

 

There is a clear dichotomy between the views of the MAME developers and their userbase. It seems devs are more concerned about getting games documented into mame, while users just want to play. There is no happy medium as far as I have been able to see.

Edited August 23, 2005 by Dones

[SteveW]

As far as emulator running in emulation goes, i've got Virtual PC on my Powerbook, and i've been joking about something that I'd like to do with it. I'd like my Apple Powerbook to run Virtual PC, running an Amiga emulator, running an Atari 2600 emulator. If that wouldn't run very fast, I could always run a Sinclair ZX81/Timex Sinclair 1000 emulator. The slower it runs, the more realistic it seems! It's a set-up that I like thinking about doing, but will probably never do. Too much trouble.

[NightSprinter]

Nice Steve. I remember having ran MagiC64 (I wish there was a free and more complete C64 emu for the Amiga.. had so much potential before the site went down for good) running under WinUAE. I actually managed to get it to run at full-speed on certain configurations. CoolNESs, on the other hand, was a different story with glitched graphics across the board and generally slow emulation..