Stella slow ?

[maximebeauvais]

a little background:

 

I have a PIII 800mhz with 768meg

 

I'm using mala as frontend

Mame is working good

When I put stella at fullscreen, it is slow

However, if I reduce the resolution it's faster?

 

Why?

 

thanks

[+stephena]

a little background:

 

I have a PIII 800mhz with 768meg

 

I'm using mala as frontend

Mame is working good

When I put stella at fullscreen, it is slow

However, if I reduce the resolution it's faster?

 

Why?

 

thanks

There are several possibilities:

 

1) You're using a fullscreen resolution that is much too high. The standard video screen is 320x210 or so, which is scaled to 640x420 in windowed mode. If you choose a fullscreen resolution around 640x420 (or so), then fullscreen and windowed mode should have similar performance. However, if your fullscreen mode is very large, then the video will be scaled to that mode. For example, if fullscreen mode is set to 1280x1024, then the emulation will be rendering almost 20 times as much as at 320x210, or almost 6 times as at 640x480. After a point, the computer can't keep up, and everything slows down.

 

2) You're using software rendering for Stella, and MAME is using hardware acceleration. Stella also support OpenGL mode, and if available on your computer, it should give much better performance. The nice thing about OpenGL mode is that its performance is stable. That is, it essentially runs the same speed at 320x210 as it would at 1280x1024 or higher. This is because the scaling of the image is being done in hardware. Another nice thing is that you can get vsync'ed updates, which eliminating 'tearing' in the video output.

 

All options mentioned above can be modified in 'Video Settings'. Try playing with them to see if it improves things.

[Video]

Are you saying your getting diffeent speed from running full screen vs windowed? That's weird, but like the above poster said, it's going to be a matter of resolution. You're computer should be able to run it at 240 or 480 lines fine though, just stay away from the higher resolutions.

 

Also...some stuff in the work bar at the bottom will run improperly if you give full priority to Stella(or anything else really) so full screen could screw you up there (such as running, say, windows media player while playing a game, no problem windowed, but skiptastic when you run the game full screen) Try making sure you don't have anything running in the background.

 

If your using keys to change size, make sure you're not hitting a key to force pal mode or something (everything runs slower in Pal) but I don't find that likely to be what you're doing.