Question about the different kinds of Mame Emulators

[William]

So Basicaly I've played allot of Arcade games on the MAME (regular) 0.123 Win32 command line version and they al run fine. Ive also downloaded other version like
MAME (i686) 0.123 Win32 command line version (I686 optimized)
MAME Plus! 0.123 Enhanced MAME version
MAME32 FX 0.123 MAME32 variant.
just to trie them out and compare.

And to be honest besides looking slightly different there does not seem to be allot of practical difference. At least that is the way it looks to me but then again I don't know crap about the internal workings of Mame.

So I was wondering which version of Mame do you guys use and why?

[jpcline004]

So Basicaly I've played allot of Arcade games on the MAME (regular) 0.123 Win32 command line version and they al run fine. Ive also downloaded other version like
MAME (i686) 0.123 Win32 command line version (I686 optimized)
MAME Plus! 0.123 Enhanced MAME version
MAME32 FX 0.123 MAME32 variant.
just to trie them out and compare.

And to be honest besides looking slightly different there does not seem to be allot of practical difference. At least that is the way it looks to me but then again I don't know crap about the internal workings of Mame.

So I was wondering which version of Mame do you guys use and why?

I compile my own MAMEUI with diff files that get rid of the nag screens and add high score support :D

well anyway, the Plus and FX version add similar things, like highscore support and fruit games that aren't in the "plain vanilla" mame. (high score save support was scrapped in plain MAME for games that don't originally have it because its not really accurate).

I am pretty sure both of those allow the use of the game info files that show move lists and stuff for each game too. Plus they might allow a couple clones or hacks that aren't in plain MAME.

Check out the official sites for each to see what they offer.

MAME FX - http://mame32fx.altervista.org/features.htm

MAME Plus - http://mame.emu-zone.org/

[Zach]

re: I686 optimized..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I686

optimized to run with the best performance for those CPU clases.

[isamu]

Is it true that mameplus takes advantage of the gpu to emulate 3D games faster?

Also, does mame benefit from multi-core cpus? How much faster would it run on a duo-core PC instead of a single chip one?

[furrynick]

To tell u the truth about other Mame versions of the emulator, there are a few deference to start with. They made games available much sooner than the regular version plus in other cases other mame versions will support futures that the regular mame will not future, like for instant the text future where u type the name of the game, the regular mame didn't offer this future for along time, until finally they added the future to the regular mame. They will also in some cases they will support deferent CPU core as far as I understand. I haven't been able to actually confirm this CPU theory Bc to me they all run the same.