MAME for Power

[ClassicHasClass]

Maury, I keep telling you: replace the libgraphene library. I even pre-built one, just replace the older one.

It does improve the perf BUT it is still tad slower than GNOME 3.38

Well, I can't argue with that. But it's much more useable than without it.

[tle]

Good news. We've finally had the official MAME RPM packages in Fedora 36. This forum threads have finally get to the end

[markr87]

Has anyone been able to get NFL Blitz to work?  Just wondering if it is a no go or more than likely pebcak?

[MauryG5]

Well TLE, so now finally Fedora can finally use MAME too, good news I would say. As you know by now I have switched to Debian, so I don't care much about what happens on Fedora anymore, but I am equally pleased that more software is coming. Unfortunately the main problem of MAME on Power is the poor general optimization, I noticed that several games that on the X86 version are very good, I am talking about old stuff above all, I am not talking about recent things for heaven's sake, but old stuff that unfortunately runs slow on Power and unplayable. Really a shame, it would be nice to know how to optimize the code and make better use of the available hardware, it would be really very nice!

[ClassicHasClass]

Has anyone been able to get NFL Blitz to work?  Just wondering if it is a no go or more than likely pebcak?

Does it not start? What issue do you see?

I haven't thoroughly tested it (and my ROM set is for an older MAME, so it's possible I'll have some fallout migrating it from my G5 to the POWER9) but basic behaviour seems to be fine.

[tle]

Well TLE, so now finally Fedora can finally use MAME too, good news I would say. As you know by now I have switched to Debian, so I don't care much about what happens on Fedora anymore, but I am equally pleased that more software is coming. Unfortunately the main problem of MAME on Power is the poor general optimization, I noticed that several games that on the X86 version are very good, I am talking about old stuff above all, I am not talking about recent things for heaven's sake, but old stuff that unfortunately runs slow on Power and unplayable. Really a shame, it would be nice to know how to optimize the code and make better use of the available hardware, it would be really very nice!

That's expected. Lots of optimisation in many emulators are very architecture-specific. Everything needs time to build momentum, once PowerPC is more popular, those engineers behind MAME would be likely to further optimise it

[MauryG5]

I hope so much then, it would be a good thing.  But instead sorry, how should you do to keep it updated?  I have version 0.220 that comes with Debian 11 and I have noticed that if you do not advance in the operating system version first, MAME never updates ... Are there any specific repositories to install?  Thanks always.

[markr87]

Has anyone been able to get NFL Blitz to work?  Just wondering if it is a no go or more than likely pebcak?

Does it not start? What issue do you see?

I haven't thoroughly tested it (and my ROM set is for an older MAME, so it's possible I'll have some fallout migrating it from my G5 to the POWER9) but basic behaviour seems to be fine.

To be more specific it is NFL Blitz '99.  I am just wanting to see how our Power9's perform.  It loads and gives me the normal cpu, sound, ect., press any key to continue display.  I press a key and get a brief message about how there is no saved state as this would be the first time it has ran.  The screen goes blank and that's all she wrote.  I know it will take longer on the first run but I have let it sit for hours to no avail.  Also of note Esc will not respond.  Requires a reset to get out of it.  My romset and chd files are of the same version as mame.  I get the same behavior with the latter versions of the tekken series as well.

[MauryG5]

Hi markr87, sorry but how does Tekken turn to you? I tried the old 2 and it already runs very slow and therefore lacks optimization, just as I said in the previous posts, how does it turn to you? I oh noticed the poor performance on both Tekken 2 and 3 and both Street Fighter 3 ... They all run very poorly compared to the X86 counterpart ...

[markr87]

Hi markr87, sorry but how does Tekken turn to you? I tried the old 2 and it already runs very slow and therefore lacks optimization, just as I said in the previous posts, how does it turn to you? I oh noticed the poor performance on both Tekken 2 and 3 and both Street Fighter 3 ... They all run very poorly compared to the X86 counterpart ...

@MauryG5, I just tried Tekken 2 ver.B and can sadly report it is very slow, no sound and coin buttons not responding.  I didn't spend any time trying to figure out sound and buttons.  I compared it to a cheap i5 system I picked up to run an arcade cabinet I am building.  The i5 runs it at normal speed.

[ClassicHasClass]

Well, the good news is that if there's a Fedora package, then it's buildable. I bet a little LTO and -O3 will go a long way. I'll experiment when I finally migrate my T2.

[MauryG5]

Markr87 yes that's right, what I was telling you too, unfortunately several games a little less old than others, I can say, like, from the late 90s up, they have different functioning problems and that's why in my previous post, I highlighted this thing or that currently our mame does not have optimizations for our processor and therefore it goes badly on slightly more recent games and especially from the late 90s onwards ... Even today the last mame does not have optimizations that improve the situation and if someone does not specifically take our Power version and works on it seriously, we will never have improvements unfortunately ... The code must be optimized for Power ... But nobody knows how to update it and what repository is needed to do it?

[ClassicHasClass]

It depends on if it's bad build options or necessary new code. If it's unoptimized build options, it's your distro. If it's the code or stuff needs to be added, it's upstream ( https://github.com/mamedev/mame ). I don't like the MAME maintainers very much after the debacle when I tried to get a workaround upstreamed awhile ago, but they did at least look at the pull request even if they were jerks about it.

[MauryG5]

NO Classic, I'm sure the problem is upstream, both the Debian version and the Ubuntu version have the same identical type of problem, Markr87 confirmed what I said and I'm sure the version of other distros will also have the same problem. The problem will be upstream, the one who deals with the Power version must review some parts in my opinion ...

[ClassicHasClass]

Can you be specific about the games you believe are affected? I imagine it's specific drivers rather than the "whole thing."