Pretty specific MAME question

[Tain]

I'm not really confident I'll get an answer here, but can anyone tell me why the two vertically oriented Sega System 24 games (Gain Ground and Scramble Spirits) run very choppy no matter what machine they're on? MAME reports full speed, yet the game seems to run at 30fps.

Thing is, videos and MAME 0.99 have shown me that Gain Ground is definitely a 60fps game. And weirdly enough, Bonanza Bros in the latest MAME has smooth scaling backgrounds, yet choppy sprites. Is System 24 in a weird state right now or something? Because I just realized how awesome the original version of Gain Ground is and I really want to play the arcade version without ancient MAME or weird home ports.

[Frogacuda]

It's a 57.5Hz game, and MAME runs it full speed for me with no dropped frames. Have you checked the game specific options and made sure the throttle is set right?

Now if we're talking about the game's native framerate and not the emulation framerate, that's another thing. I don't think that ever did run at full refresh rate. But the emulation is.

[Tain]

It's a 57.5Hz game, and MAME runs it full speed for me with no dropped frames. Have you checked the game specific options and made sure the throttle is set right?

Now if we're talking about the game's native framerate and not the emulation framerate, that's another thing. I don't think that ever did run at full refresh rate. But the emulation is.

Nah, I'm on top of that. Both with throttle on or with throttle off + Sync to Monitor's Refresh on (playing it at 104% speed on your typical 60hz LCD). The issue I'm having is that recent MAME "says" that the game's native framerate is either 15 or 30 (I'm leaning toward 15), where MAME .99 clearly has the game natively running at 60fps. Well, 57.5.

Furthermore, the other vertical game, Scramble Spirits, is definitely meant to natively run at 57.5. MAME right now makes the player's ship invisible when it respawns, though. Logically, it should be flickering.

This is the only time I've seen anything like this, it's kinda weird.

[Frogacuda]

Odd... Seems fine with me, but I'll fuck around with Scramble Spirits since I didn't have that one downloaded.

Obvious thing you probably already checked: You know how to cycle frameskip rates with F9 and F10, right?

[Tain]

Yup. Also, with Scramble, the ship is sometimes invisible when it should be flickering, sometimes visible. Must depend on the frame.

All of this made me wonder if it's just something about the way MAME displays medium resolution stuff, but I'm pretty clueless.

[arjue]

I'll just chime in and say that Gain Ground is balls awesome.

[Bojack]

Hell, I'll jump in and ask a specific MAME Q also,

I play DoDonPachi on mame and when shit gets real hairy there is slow down, just a bit. Is slowdown built into DDP or is the game too tough for my laptop to mame?

[epmode]

Slowdown is actually built into just about every Cave game ever. Your laptop might be making it worse but I doubt it.

[Frogacuda]

Hell, I'll jump in and ask a specific MAME Q also,

I play DoDonPachi on mame and when shit gets real hairy there is slow down, just a bit. Is slowdown built into DDP or is the game too tough for my laptop to mame?

Hit F11 to see MAME's framerate. If it's dropping frames and such, then it's MAME. But it's probably not, because MAME gets real choppy before it gets actually slow, and you'd hear the music chopping up too.

Anyway, I tried Scramble Spirits, and Tain is right, it's only rendering every other frame, even though MAME is running at the full framerate. I would report this to MAMEtesters if you want it fixed.

[Tain]

Yeah, submitted. Just wanted to be sure I wasn't overlooking something or not understanding something beforehand.

Also, I went back a little and found that the games work fine in 0.129, which is plenty recent enough (newer renderer and I can use my 360 arcade stick without joytokey). So I'm pretty set!