> What? Not sure I follow. With the merger with MESS, there are plenty of systems that
> do just that. In MAME. Right now.
>
> Edit: I was thinking more along the lines of computer systems... But even arcade
> machines have been categorized into systems (cps2, etc...) since forever and in
> several cases, simply dropping in the .chd info is enough to play new games. So still
> confused... ╿︡O͟-O︠╿
In MAME, x86-based CPUs are emulated. This inherently has significant overhead.
In MAME, the video processors and sound processors that PC-based arcades have would also be emulated. This also has significant overhead.
Just for point of reference:
At the moment, the most performant game-oriented PC emulator is probably PCem. It is capable of emulating (approx.) a 333 MHz Pentium II based PC (with a Voodoo2 and/or S3 graphics) on a 4.0 GHz Intel i7 processor. MAME could possibly be in this ballpark performance-wise, if Win9x-era PC emulation was a focus right now. And we're talking _barely_ full-speed, probably some frameskipping.
Some of the "PC-based arcade hardware" we're talking about is more in the 1.0GHz or 2.0GHz range for their original "host" CPU. To emulate this in MAME's style would never be playable, now or in the immediate future.
The only way to make 1.0GHz or 2.0GHz processor "emulation" be playable, now, is simply not to emulate at all but execute natively, either by using a virtual machine with hardware virtualization support, or simply to write a filesystem loader and run the games natively in a derivative of their host OS.
The MAME framework does not currently allow (nor is likely to allow) for native execution, which would be the only way to get "playable" speeds. This might include virtualization type technologies like Intel VT and AMD-V virtualization hardware extensions. The MAME framework will NEVER allow for "loader"-type native execution, because it's not portable, and doesn't match our design goals.
Even if you got that far, there'd still be significant hardware changes from the original "arcade PC" hardware. The graphics card wouldn't be the same, the sound card wouldn't be the same.
What CTOJAH is asking about is more like a loader (like exists for the Taito Type X hardware). This would not be "accurate emulation" as MAME considers things. It would also not be portable to various CPU architectures and platforms (such as ARM/Android). It would be designed quite differently to MAME. Therefore it would never be part of MAME or called MAME.
Hope this helps.
- Stiletto
Edited by Stiletto (05/24/17 07:26 PM)
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