MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: Contradiction in Mame?

Your thought process is flawed.

The “Fast Forward” feature as implemented in MAME is not inaccurate emulation. All it does is cut out delays to keep emulated time in sync with the wall clock and skips uploading video output to your GPU. The full emulation is still running. It doesn’t overclock the emulated CPU(s), it’s not like a fast load hack that bypasses emulated disk accesses and copies data directly into RAM or anything like that. It just runs the full emulation as fast as it can.

If you want to automatically fast forward over slow loading processes using MAME’s implementation of the “Fast Forward” feature, you’d need a way of detecting a loading process and activating “Fast Forward” automatically. That’s not what MAME does – MAME tries to be agnostic about what the software is doing, and just emulate what the hardware would do.

However, you’re free to write a Lua plugin that detects loading processes and automatically unthrottles the emulation for software you like to run. We have a rich scripting interface that lets you implement all sorts of things on to of MAME, from sophisticated cheats, to input macros, to integration tests, to alternate user interfaces. We’re not going to do it for you though, as that’s not what we do – we just provide the tools.

If what you really want is a fast load hack that bypasses emulation of the loading processes and replaces them with high-level simulations, we’re not going to do that, although you might be able to achieve it with Lua scripting if you’re creative enough. Once again, it requires being aware of what the software is trying to do, but the triggered actions would be a lot more complex.