You sure can

I'm not sure about win mame as I never use it, but there are ways in dos of speeding up games- but remember that nearly everything you do to speed up a game will result in a loss of overall game quality of some sort, be it no sound, jerkiness or color/picture loss.

Pushing F11 while the game is running displays the speed at which the game is running. If its running at under 100%, push F8 to increase the frameskip value by 1. Or use the -frameskip command when you start mame, the value can be from 1-12. Pushing F10 throttles the speed, this is useful when playing back replays to save time. MAME 035b1 uses auto frameskipping as default, this can be a bit of a pain but you can turn it off by entering frameskip = 0 in the cfg file. MAME also uses the depth 16 command as default. This is used to get accurate colors on games that use 65k color modes, but it can also slow emulation down. You can try entering depth = 8 in the mame cfg, it may speed a few games up.

With the sound & speech problems, there's not much you can do about it, sound is often incomplete in many games as it is hard to emulate perfectly while maintaining a decent emulation speed, and external samples are not usually of a high quality. Games which use either the ym2203 or ym3812 soundchip like Gemini Wing or Rygar can be sped up with the command ym2203opl or ym3812opl in the cfg file. This uses the Soundblaster's OPL chip for music emulation, and while it it sounds a little different to the original music, it usually results in a speed increase. You can also decrease the sample rate in the mame file or turn stereo off for increased speed, but at a loss of sound quality.

As for the half screen games, mame checks your vid card and decides on a resolution for it *if* resolution is set to auto in the cfg file. It may be your vid card lacks certain displays, or vesa modes. Downloading Scitech Display Doctor is a good start as it enables your vid card to display various resolutions and vesa modes that your vid card may not have. Or you can muck around with the resolution settings in the cfg file, like 320x240 or 512x384.

With newer games like MK, the only real solution is a speedy PC, there's no way a P233 will run it at full speed, even a P2-450 can't run it 100% with sound enabled and no frameskips.

Phew.. I hope that helps your need for speed!

JSW

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