| TrevEB |
|
Brokering peace between the collectors and the Mame Community
|
|
|
|
|
Reged: 03/11/05
|
|
Posts: 770
|
|
Loc: Oakland, CA
|
|
|
|
Send PM
|
|
|
Midway Thunder Titles
#382774 - 06/16/19 09:09 PM
|
|
|
Are the hurdles still to plentiful or perhaps the ports were just to good?
Really the star of the group is HydroThunder but Off Road and Artic had appeal. Artic mainly just the cool factor of riding a snow mobile.
The Dreamcast port was outstanding. I don’t know the game well enough to know if there was anything left out compared to the arcade version.
My benefactor had as many as 6-7? at one point. Enough that a glich in scoring came up that was unresolved.
Surprisingly the home PC version was terrible and of course now is unplayable on Win10.
Is the hardware similiar to anything else that has advanced since 2010? Are they similiar enough that efforts with one would pay of threefold.
Or Dreamcast and Xbox versions pretty much sum up gameplay and nothing beats sitting in the real thing so there are more pressing needs elsewhere.
|
|
|
|
Re: Midway Thunder Titles
[Re: TrevEB]
#382776 - 06/16/19 10:19 PM
|
|
|
> Are the hurdles still to plentiful or perhaps the ports were just to good?
>
> Really the star of the group is HydroThunder but Off Road and Artic had appeal. Artic
> mainly just the cool factor of riding a snow mobile.
>
> The Dreamcast port was outstanding. I don’t know the game well enough to know if
> there was anything left out compared to the arcade version.
>
> My benefactor had as many as 6-7? at one point. Enough that a glich in scoring came
> up that was unresolved.
> Surprisingly the home PC version was terrible and of course now is unplayable on
> Win10.
>
> Is the hardware similiar to anything else that has advanced since 2010? Are they
> similiar enough that efforts with one would pay of threefold.
>
> Or Dreamcast and Xbox versions pretty much sum up gameplay and nothing beats sitting
> in the real thing so there are more pressing needs elsewhere.
Given that the x86 emulation is now at the level of being able to boot an XP PC (albeit without any real PCI video cards etc. yet) I imagine they would be possible. Somebody would have to emulate the specific chipsets if they're not emulated tho.
However, performance would be abysmal (~400Mhz Celerons are not cheap to emulate in the MAME architecture) you're definitely not going to be *playing* them in MAME anytime soon.
|
|
|
| TrevEB |
|
Brokering peace between the collectors and the Mame Community
|
|
|
|
|
|
Reged: 03/11/05
|
|
Posts: 770
|
|
Loc: Oakland, CA
|
|
|
|
Send PM
|
|
|
Re: Midway Thunder Titles
[Re: Haze]
#382779 - 06/17/19 01:46 AM
|
|
|
Can an i7-6700 do the job or are you talking the new
Ryzen 9 3950X
Come on AMD! GO GO GO!
|
|
|
|
Re: Midway Thunder Titles
[Re: TrevEB]
#382780 - 06/17/19 01:47 AM
|
|
|
> Can an i7-6700 do the job or are you talking the new
> Ryzen 9 3950X
> Come on AMD! GO GO GO!
I'm talking CPUs that probably won't even exist 15 years from now.
A recompiler might help, but there isn't one, and even then 400Mhz is higher than anything that runs at playable speeds in MAME right now, and a far more complex architecture.
|
|
|
| TrevEB |
|
Brokering peace between the collectors and the Mame Community
|
|
|
|
|
|
Reged: 03/11/05
|
|
Posts: 770
|
|
Loc: Oakland, CA
|
|
|
|
Send PM
|
|
|
Re: Midway Thunder Titles
[Re: Haze]
#382782 - 06/17/19 02:43 AM
|
|
|
Ooof, that hurts.
I suppose then the only way to do it would be to somehow utilize the PC's intel chip directly, rather than emulating itself.
But then that wouldn't be emulation anymore.
Thanks for the clarification.
|
|
|
|
Re: Midway Thunder Titles
[Re: TrevEB]
#382783 - 06/17/19 03:10 AM
|
|
|
The biggest hurdles (arguably) are those I/O boards that provide security and video input (to Hydro and Offroad Thunder). Arctic Thunder has its video fed directly from the video card despite it using the same I/O board as Offroad Thunder.
|
-.-
|
|
| R. Belmont |
|
Cuckoo for IGAvania
|
|
|
|
|
|
Reged: 09/21/03
|
|
Posts: 9716
|
|
Loc: ECV-197 The Orville
|
|
|
|
Send PM
|
|
|
Re: Midway Thunder Titles
[Re: TrevEB]
#382791 - 06/18/19 01:56 AM
|
|
|
> Ooof, that hurts.
> I suppose then the only way to do it would be to somehow utilize the PC's intel chip
> directly, rather than emulating itself.
> But then that wouldn't be emulation anymore.
Sure it is. You still have to emulate the entire rest of the PC.
Intel makes a nice open source library which papers over the virtualization APIs on Windows, Linux, and the Mac and there are several others sprinkled around Github. Given the collapse of Moore's Law with respect to instructions per second per thread, it's basically inevitable we'll use something of that sort in MAME.
|
|
|
|
Re: Midway Thunder Titles
[Re: TrevEB]
#382792 - 06/18/19 07:28 AM
|
|
|
> Ooof, that hurts.
> I suppose then the only way to do it would be to somehow utilize the PC's intel chip
> directly, rather than emulating itself.
> But then that wouldn't be emulation anymore.
>
> Thanks for the clarification.
If you're meaning DRC, that would most likely only apply to the x86 part of the PC - emulating the dozens of different proprietary 3D video chips made since the 90s would still be the #1 problem (and getting help from Nvidia and the like is like getting blood from a stone, especially when it comes to open source software). Not to mention every PC-based machine being completely different with hundreds of different add-on cards, CD/DVD/hard drives (and their speeds and limitations). Even stuff like memory can have a noticeable effect on the PC e.g. going from PC66/PC100 to PC133 SDRAM on a late-90s PC (if the machine supports it), assuming the memory sizes are still identical.
At least with PC-based arcade hardware, the machines should mostly be identical for the games they support, unlike consumer PCs where games have to be designed to run on just about anything (minimum specifications usually apply of course).
|
|
|
|
Re: Midway Thunder Titles: 3dfx Voodoo graphics and I/O boards
[Re: Heihachi_73]
#382795 - 06/19/19 02:38 AM
|
|
|
These games use 3dfx Voodoo video cards. Hydro and Offroad Thunder use Voodoo 2 and Arctic Thunder use Voodoo 3. Emulation for these devices work well (albeit a bit unoptimized) but it's a matter of how they are hooked to a PC driver like this as well as all the I/O boards.
Edited by Hydreigon (06/19/19 02:39 AM)
|
-.-
|
|
|
Re: Midway Thunder Titles
[Re: R. Belmont]
#382804 - 06/19/19 05:43 PM
|
|
|
What IS the current CPU king-of-the-hill when it comes to single-thread performance of the sort MAME needs?
|
|
|
| TrevEB |
|
Brokering peace between the collectors and the Mame Community
|
|
|
|
|
|
Reged: 03/11/05
|
|
Posts: 770
|
|
Loc: Oakland, CA
|
|
|
|
Send PM
|
|
|
Re: Midway Thunder Titles
[Re: jonwil]
#382813 - 06/20/19 06:04 PM
|
|
|
Please correct me if I am wrong but I would imagine an overclocked i9 processor is the king.
That will likely change next month when the latest Ryzen chip becomes available.
Cores help with dimishing returns per core. Clock speed remains the most important.
Thoughts:
Could Mame run faster if optimized for multicore processing? As in more than 2-3 cores?
I know thats a major deal. I can only think of ArchiCAD as a program that truly uses all cores available.
Does Mame take advantage of large amounts of ram when available?
There use to be versions of Mame specifically for the AMD cpu.
Any point revisiting?
Has there been any attempts more recently to utilize the GPU instead by Mame or other emulator projects?
HLSL uses the GPU, right?
|
|
|
|
Re: Midway Thunder Titles
[Re: TrevEB]
#382831 - 06/21/19 10:32 AM
|
|
|
> Please correct me if I am wrong but I would imagine an overclocked i9 processor is
> the king.
> That will likely change next month when the latest Ryzen chip becomes available.
> Cores help with dimishing returns per core. Clock speed remains the most important.
>
We'll see, so far no AMD has been able to match the Intel chips for top-end MAME performance, not even been close. If that happens it will be the first time in about 20 years.
> Thoughts:
> Could Mame run faster if optimized for multicore processing? As in more than 2-3
> cores?
The more you thread the less reliable / accurate you become, or the more overhead you have on thread management and copying of states around for the threads (which then becomes the bottleneck instead) Emulators for the more modern platforms get away with it because most of the games are built to run on consoles which are doing tons of background tasks anyway, so are tolerant (to a degree) of things happening at different times and differing from run to run. (even then there are games that aren't tho, there are PS3 games that will glitch / crash on original hardware due to timing, eg. if a trophy award/popup background task takes too long, which happens with large trophy libraries)
>
> Does Mame take advantage of large amounts of ram when available?
>
It will use the RAM it needs, no more, no less. RAM isn't something you magically take advantage of.
> There use to be versions of Mame specifically for the AMD cpu.
> Any point revisiting?
>
All those optimized versions gave marginal differences anyway, usually with extra bugs because the optimization stage of a compiler is often where bugs get introduced, and those CPU specific codepaths are less tested.
> Has there been any attempts more recently to utilize the GPU instead by Mame or other
> emulator projects?
> HLSL uses the GPU, right?
HLSL uses the GPU. Keep in mind that in general purpose application GPUs are only suited to certain tasks, essentially they provide a LOT of cores, doing many tiny parallel tasks. Emulation is inherently a serial task, so you're back to the above problem of there not being much suitable to execute in parallel; you can't emulate CPUs that way, and those are often the main bottleneck. There is talk of doing software rendering on the GPUs at some point which should free up some CPU cores.
|
|
|
|
Re: Midway Thunder Titles
[Re: TrevEB]
#383052 - 07/12/19 01:47 PM
|
|
|
The Midway Arcade Treasures Deluxe Edition ports were naff, but the Eurocom ported version of Hydro Thunder (on Sold Out Software on PC) is great; you can also use dgVoodoo2 to upscale it to HD, here's an 1080p screenshot:
http://i.imgur.com/CiHtXvK.jpg
|
|
|
Index 
Threaded 
Midway Thunder Titles
Reply
[Re: 
