MAME and Tempest.. Some questions..

[Keatah]

In Tempest, is it possible the system can skip frames from time to time without reporting them in the F11 display at the top? Assume FrameSkip is set to auto. And the cpu is powerful enough to run the emulation at what appears to be 100%.

 

Also, does anyone know of any changes to MAME that would affect Tempest between 0.68 and today? I more or less went through the what's new files and didn't see anything striking. It would seem that the emulation of this game has been finished way back in the day. Not that there's anything demanding or tricky about it..

 

And what about the "Minimum rating range tied to high score" dip switch setting? It doesn't seem to do anything. What am I missing?

Edited May 28, 2015 by Keatah

[Vaughan]

I stand to be corrected here - but I think you have to be a bit careful updating Mame. Early games worked great in earlier versions, but may have performance issues with later builds as things move on. I personally gave up keeping things up-to-date. If you're got performance problems then maybe try an earlier version of Mame?

[Keatah]

I have no apparent performance issues with tempest or many other classics. But I do keep an older version of mame because it does work better on lesser machines.

 

In fact my current setup runs 2 versions. And I'm not opposed to hosting 3 versions.

[mbd30]

Try disabling any vsync and triple buffering for that one game. Some single screen games such as "Donkey Kong" have issues with vsync being enabled.

[Keatah]

I have, and my score improved.

[Arbee]

There have been several improvements in Tempest emulation over time; it contains copy protection which wasn't properly supported until fairly recently. This would cause the game to reset at random during red levels, and it was finally completely fixed in 0.153.

 

Newer versions also can use your video card to pretty up the vectors, although nothing's quite like a real X-Y display.

[Keatah]

Oh how how interesting, I had no idea tempest had CP. I always made it through the red levels seemingly ok on mame 0.68.