MAMEWorld Forums - Programming - Re: Raspberry Pi 2 and mame

> My question is how well would mame run on this?

Piss-poor.

> How do you port a version of mame optimised for the rpi2?

With difficulty.

> Does mame support multicores?

Sure, but not for any driver that would remotely run on the Raspberry Pi or the Raspberry Pi 2. I'd say the best way I've heard it described as it relates to emulation for anything other than the most inaccurate or old of emulators, is that at least it's not "What the fuck are you even thinking," but it's still "There, there, maybe you read the specs wrong."

The ARM series doesn't appear to have remotely the same instructions-per-clock throughput as Intel, even with mobile devices are barely pushing the 2GHz barrier, to say nothing of the fact that your average $50-range development board is not going to have remotely the same sort of performance as said mobile devices. Christ, the RPi2 is even still using ARMv7, that architecture has been dated for years in anything resembling a modern device.

Look, I know it seems to be a popular thing now to see how ancient of a version of MAME people can shoehorn onto a device to see how well Pac-Man and the other five games that version ran on a Raspberry Pi, but if you care even remotely about accurate emulation or about hardware preservation, you would realize that you get what you paid for. An ARM-based development board that costs an order of magnitude less than the CPU for a reasonably modern PC is not going to give you decent performance as far as a modern version of MAME is concerned, Ebon Upton's apparent reality-distortion field notwithstanding.

People keep getting this idea in their heads that a codebase with piss-poor modularity and almost no generic core code whatsoever is somehow superior because it runs well on their 66MHz 486DX, but the reality of the situation is that abstraction costs CPU cycles, and additional features cost the same. People like that aren't unique to MAME, roughly 5 percent of the userbase of the PC edition of Minecraft still runs it with GPUs that only support the fixed-function OpenGL pipeline. Older emulators or older versions of modern emulators might run faster than more modern incarnations of both, at the cost of features and/or game compatibility. At the end of the day you're still pounding your hand angrily on the dashboard of a Ford Model-T and demanding to know why it doesn't have power steering, ABS, and an iPhone dock connector.