First post. ?'s about my system

[Deadeye008]

I am running the latest version of MAME on a Dell Inspiron laptop that I picked up for nothing. It runs ok but the the audio seems to stutter a little bit. My laptop has an Intel Pentium III 848Mhz processor with 320MB of RAM. The audio device is an ESS Maestro 3. Does anyone know why the audio is stuttering? I'm using this laptop exclusively for my MAME machine so there are no other programs running while MAME is running. Any help is appreciated. Thanks

[FatTrucker]

Firstly newer builds of mame are far more system intensive than older builds and that laptop will struggle to run a lot of games in mame.

The sound stuttering issue could well be a symptom of the laptop not being up to spec to run the emulator, however there is also an issue with mame running on fixed refresh displays. Any game that tries to run at or above 60Hz will cause sound stuttering on a display fixed at 60Hz or below.

You can either go into the mame settings and force the refresh to 59Hz or you can try enabling Triple Buffering which will hepl with the sound issues but will also make it more processor intensive.

I would recommend using a version of mame <0.106 on that machine.