Mame2003 performance

mitu

@crossmr mame2003-plus is in the experimental packages section.

crossmr

Thanks, I just found it.

Sadly that didn't fix the problem. Tried the 2003plus rom with this and still the same behaviour. Slow, and garbled sound.

Clyde

@crossmr Since it works fine on FB Neo (which is said to be more focused on speed and playablity than the more "archaeological" oriented MAME project), an easy solution would be to just use that emulator. If you put your roms in the arcade rom folder rather than mame-libretro and fba, you can choose the emulator more freely and use FB Neo only for SOM. This way, your MAME roms and your FB Neo rom(s) would appear together in the "Arcade" system of Emulation Station.

One possible future issue with this is FB Neo's constant development, which may require updated rom files for particular games to work in future FB Neo versions. But in my experience, that doesn't happen that often and/or can be fixed by getting updated roms from wherever you get your roms with only a few very rare or new rom dumps as exceptions.

edit: If you choose this path, although just copying/moving the contents of one rom folder to one another shouldn't be dangerous, be sure to make a backup of any data that's not easily recoverably before doing it!

crossmr

Of course that's how I'm playing it now. The issue for me was more about making sure my mame2003 installation was okay in case I need it for some other rom that perhaps I can't play in FBneo. Everyone keeps telling me in multiple places (discord and other places too) just to use FBneo, but I feel like that's missing the point. I'd like to make sure I'm getting the correct performance out of the installed emulators. I may buy another SD card and write that old MLP image to it and see if I can figure out what was going on on that image to get that performance.

barbudreadmon

@crossmr MAME2003 (and -plus) should be overall faster than FBNeo due to their emulation code being written for 17 years old computer, but FBNeo has some core options that can help with performance : on a pi0 that's probably used in a handheld (or are you one of those masochists that don't use pi3/pi4 to play on a TV ?), enabling frameskip is a no-brainer tbh since it'll be barely noticeable on the small screen.
And yeah, there are games that'll only be available on one or the other of those cores.

BuZz

@crossmr maybe it overclocks the RPI.

crossmr

@barbudreadmon They're definitely not faster. I'm even using the same rom on FBNeo that I'm using on the Mame 2003 and it runs perfectly on FBNeo compared to mame. I'm actually using the pi zero w on a TV. I bought this around 2.5-3 years ago and at the time it was the only pi I could get here in South Korea, and it was originally intended for older stuff. I may get a Pi4 sometime, but for the most part this does what I want. Is there a config or something I should copy/check to see if there is something wonky with the settings of this emulator?

crossmr

Additional information here: Something definitely not quite right with the mame2003 install. It's not saving any configuration. When I open the emulator, use select and the button to open the emulator menu to configure things like audio/video/etc, the "save changes on exit" never stays to on, everything just resets.

I just wanted to try manually editing the file with the settings from here: https://www.reddit.com/r/retroflag_gpi/comments/c1kusn/mame4all_core_fastest_mame_core_on_pi_zero_info/ and I couldn't find it anywhere. I went into the emulator told it to save, made a change and came back in and found the changes weren't saved. Any idea what's up there?

mitu

@crossmr Save your configurations it as a core override, not directly . There's a bug in RetroArch that doesn't allow saving when the conf file includes another.

crossmr

Sorry I'm not quite following you. is this something I have to do manually somewhere?

mitu

@crossmr Instead of using 'Save Configuration' in the RetroArch's menu (RGUI), use 'Overrides' (accessible once you open the RGUI Quick Menu) and choose 'Save Core Overrides'.

crossmr

I found it. Well, I changed a bunch of video settings and what not trying to make this better but nothing offers any improvement. I think at this point I need to get another SD card and write that MLP image to it and investigate to see what they had set up on there. See if they were really using mame 2003 or if they had something else going on.

thanks all for the help

dankcushions

@crossmr i would suspect they were actually using mame4all-pi/pifba as these are the recommended mame emulators for pi 1/0.

mame2003 will probably be a little too much for the humble 0.

crossmr

@dankcushions I broke down and ordered another SD card that will arrive tomorrow. I think I've found a working copy of the image I had previously installed, so I'll write it to that while preserving this good image and try to check it out

crossmr

@crossmr Unfortunately I think this is as far as the test will go. I found what appeared to be the one working link to grab that image, it wrote to the SD card via etcher, verified, and seemed fine. I plugged it in and fired it up, got the initial colorful splash screen, then that was it. It's still sending a signal to the TV, but doesn't seem to be doing anything. Just a black screen. I tried another TV (newer one) and nothing. I thought it might be trying to run at a too high of a resolution.

I added a wpa supplicant file to see if it was actually booting and if I could ssh in, but it never seems to join the wifi network.

crossmr

@crossmr Turns out I had the wrong image, after hours of slow downloads, I managed to get the same pi zero w image that I had before. it looks like the rom in question was being run on lr-fbalpha, not fbalpha2012. This was a retropie 4.2 image. The performance on lrfbalpha seems slightly better than the alpha2012 that is available on 4.6 retropie but still not as good as pifba.