MAME game limitations
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Generally speaking does anyone have a decent idea of which MAME games are too much for Pi to handle? I know Killer Instinct is on of them, but what about the MK’s or some Daphne/Dragons Lair games? Looking at MAME only, not the console versions.
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The list would be pretty long. To me, it seems that any title released past 1994 is increasingly less likely to perform well, with titles reaching into the early 2000s being highly unlikely. However, there's always exceptions. I recently put together an ES collection of Atari arcade titles and was surprised to find that many graphic-intensive games from the late 90s performed perfectly. There's also a handful of two-dimensional fighters that span into the early 2000s that fair pretty well.
Edit: Also, games that utilize CHD image files seem to almost always be too much for the Pi, but again, I'm sure there are exceptions.
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I have a spreadsheet but I can't remember where I got it from. It lists all the lr-mame2003 games and whether it works ok on the Pi 1,2, or 3 , has issues, doesn't work, etc, etc.
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Stupid question but why is the trend with Pi to limit to MAME 2003 / 0.78?
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Out of all the available libretro MAME cores, 2003 is the least taxing on the Pi. Ever since Advance Mame has been optimized, I'd take the Pepsi challenge that it's now on equal footing as far as performance, but then there's also the advantages that come from utilizing RetroArch, such as shaders, netplay and a unified control scheme.
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@chigundo Because they have a better balance of accuracy/speed than the newer MAME versions, which are more focused on accuracy and more resource demanding for small systems like the PIs. Note that Mame is not the only Arcade emulator - there is also FBAlpha with its libretro core (lr-fbalpha) and you can also install the latest Mame/Mess versions from source if you'd like or you're running on a more powerful system.
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I recommend this thread also, for info about the different MAME versions on RetroPie, which games run best at what core, etc.
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