Ok so despite going back to OS 0.3, I tried your install method and it worked BUT, when I try to launch a “normal” game, its very slooooow. I tried In the Hunt (inthunt.zip) from Romset 0.211 and its unplayable. Also, I am unable to use the Laucher file. I modified it correctly to reflect my folders and all but it just do not work. I launch game using ./mame inthunt while my roms are in the roms folder of MAME2011b to make them lauch.
Of course Pacman or MSPacman work flawlessly but it does not reflect how stable the StandAlone version is since most games need more power that these.
Update: 1943 work very very well, the aspect ratio is PERFECT! Man… I would love to see slightly bigger game work.
I am back in force!
So…MAME… It play well for most games but very bad for others. Its funny because some games that work flawlessly on cores, have trouble on this.
Also, the display is weird, its like there is no shaders and its way to crisp for a small screen. I have looked on the MAME wiki on how to apply those but can’t get it to work.
Weird. Mine worked with the .bdc file. I tried Atarian Extended and found it harder to read (for me). I renamed my old file to ui.bdf and that worked too. It was way smaller than that (and impossible to read) without the font file at all.
Yeah, there’s no filtering. But that’s intentional to get a bit more speed out of the thing. If you want the nicer display effects it’s going to run slower. I still haven’t reflashed mine back to vanilla 4.0, so I haven’t seen how Lima responds. It’s possible with Lima that the filtering/smoothing could be turned on. Probably worth messing with the video rendering option in the MAME config too.
Another thing that may affect speed is that the latest version of MAME may be slower for some emulated systems. Their goal has always been to document the games as accurately as possible, and originally many of the games (in older versions of MAME) were running via hacks and guesswork. Turns out some of the hacks made the emulation run better, so when they fixed it to be more accurate, there was a performance hit and things slowed down. Most of the retroarch MAME cores use older versions of MAME, which are probably faster for that reason, at least for some games.
It probably makes sense to choose at least two versions of MAME to use on GameShell. An older, more optimized one probably would cover the “classic” games well up to the early 90s or so. In some cases you might be trading accuracy for speed, but it may not even be noticeable. The latest MAME would be for trying newer games with support released or fixed since the older release. Of course, ROMs would need to be separated out into two (or more) locations too.
