Hello everyone,

i would like to use and old pc as a mame machine.

I have an AthlonXp 2600+ with 1gb ram and a Radeon 9200 SE.

I'm using lubuntu 13.10 and mame 0.149

Mame runs most games i would like to play at 100% speed but only windowed when i resize the window to a low resolution (let's say less than 640x480, the desktop's resolution is 1680x1050). At full resolution the speed is something like 30% or so, and games are unplayable.

I know quality won't be that good (but when it will be ready i'll use a crt monitor that should lead to good enought for me results) but would it be possible to add a low resolution for mame? Example 400x300 and 320x240?

I have found out that with cvt 320x240 i obtain a Modeline, but i haven't found out how to use it.

cvt 320 240
# 320x240 59.52 Hz (CVT 0.08M3) hsync: 15.00 kHz; pclk: 6.00 MHz
Modeline "320x240_60.00" 6.00 320 336 360 400 240 243 247 252 -hsync +vsync

Than that i should create a new mode with xrandr:
xrandr --newmode "320x240_60.00" 6.00 320 336 360 400 240 243 247 252 -hsync +vsync

Than that i should add it:
xrandr --addmode VGA-0 "320x240_60.00"

I have choosed VGA-0 as output since xrandr reports this:

Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1680 x 1050, maximum 4096 x 4096
VGA-0 connected 1680x1050+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 474mm x 296mm
1680x1050 59.9*+
1600x1200 60.0
1280x1024 75.0 60.0
1440x900 75.0 59.9
1280x960 60.0
1152x864 75.0
1280x720 60.0
1024x768 75.1 70.1 60.0
832x624 74.6
800x600 72.2 75.0 60.3 56.2
640x480 75.0 72.8 66.7 60.0
720x400 70.1
400x300_60.00 59.4
320x240_60.00 59.5
DVI-0 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
S-video disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)


But still mame won't run at 320x240 even with really old games like for example bubble bobble and it's incredibly slow in fullscreen.

Any advice?

Thank you in advance.

The Radeon 9200 is a major problem. Slow.
If you have Athlon 2600XP you may well have agp 2x (=66 Mhz) and if there's a Via chipset, then it's 33 Mhz elsewhere. The Athlon 2600 didn't do 2.6Ghz, more like 2.078Ghz. You don't exactly have a gamer's machine.

Pick up an old nvidia card. There's MX-440s being sold for half nothing and they do respectable speeds on that sort of kit, using the prehistoric binary blob from Nvidia.

You need to be modest on your resolution expectations. You have something a little better than Ford's 'Model T' for gaming :-). I had one myself. Make sure you have a decent hdparm speed from the hard disk. It matters enormously.

Thank you for the reply.

I have tried before with an Nvidia but nouveau is far worser and the binary driver is so old that i would need to downgrade Kernel and X (in fact it's unusable!)

The hd (a maxtor eide 80 gb) shows 56 MB/s but in mame it's unused (right now, using firefox and something else, i have 751 mb of ram free).

The problem is really how to setup and use a much lower resolution.

Man xorg.conf.

Don't remember exactly where you put it but the magic is

Virtual xdim ydim
E.g 800 600? The virtual size will be set and will not exceed it. Try it and let us know what gives wrong.