After some advice on Model 2 Emulator

[Mr Thunderwing]

Hi, I'd be grateful if anyone out there could give me a little bit of advice.

I've recently dowloaded the Sega Model 2 emulator from the following link (http://nebula.emulatronia.com/) and successfully got a couple of roms up and running. The trouble is though they all suffer from terrible slowdown and are only just about playable (Frameskip doesn't seem to make any difference). I've used Regcure to try and speed things up, with no joy, and I've got the full version of AVG, so pretty certain my computer's spyware free. My stats are:

Windows XP 2002
Service Pack 2
Intel(R)
Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz
3.00 GHz 1.00 GB of RAM

I'm not sure if it's just that my PC isn't poweful enough to handle the ROMs or if there's just too many other processess going on in the background (When I check the windows task manager the CPU usage shoots up to 100% when I'm running the emulator). I'm reluctant to try and stop any of the background processes (not least of which is because I don't know what a lot of them are doing) as I always get a message saying that it can cause undesirable effects including loss of data and system instability.

Is there anything I can do to speed these bad boys up? I'd love to be able to play Daytona as God intended in full 60 fps mode. At the moment it looks more like the 1st Sega Saturn version.

[FatTrucker]

A 3Ghz P4 with 1Gb of ram should run M2 without any issues at all (I have it touching full speed on my mame cab with an old 2.2Ghz Athlon).

What graphics card are you using?. Unlike Mame the M2 emulator is GPU dependent and the most recent version only supports certain chipsets.

[Mr Thunderwing]

Thanks for the quick reply. I'm using a NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200.

[FatTrucker]

Latest versions of the emulator require Pixel Shader 2.0 cards. The 5200 is pixel shader 2.0 compatible but only just. Looking at performance benches I would say that that's the weak link. You could try an earlier version of the emulator before they introduced the PS2.0 support.

[Mr Thunderwing]

Thanks, I'll give that a go. Do you know what version I should be looking at giving a try?

[FatTrucker]

The new stuff was added in 0.9 so I presume 0.8 if you can find a source for it.

[Mr Thunderwing]

I tried downloading some of the earlier versions from the Nebula homepage (V6 & V4) and still had the same problem and with ropier graphics. Short of getting a new graphics card is there anything else I could try? If I were to get a new graphics card (and this is a big if - I hadn't originally planned on shelling out any cash on this) what would you recommend that would get me up to full speed and not break the bank?

[FatTrucker]

TBH if money is an issue I wouldn't shell out on a new card just on the basis that I think that's probably the cause of your problem.

Better to find a mate that will lend one or try one out to check beforehand. I would be mighty p*ssed if someone on a forum got me to shell out for new hardware and I still had the same issue. ;)

[Mr Thunderwing]

Cheers again for the advice :thumb_up:. I'm pretty sure you're right about the problem though, I've just checked out some YouTube vids of someone with a slower CPU than me, but using a GeForce 8800GTX running what looks like a practically arcade perfect version of Daytona. I'm hoping my brother-in-law might have a better graphics card I could give a trial (he's a lot more computer savvy than I am). It's funny though, as I originally just downloaded the emulator for a bit of a laugh, but when I realised that a practically arcade perfect version of Daytona might be possible (Man, the Dreamcast version looked nice, but the handling was just terrible! No amount of tweaking could sort it out), I suddenly started taking the whole thing a bit more seriously (as in suddenly prepared to chuck a bit of dosh at it!)

Thanks again for the advice, think it's certainly got me on the right track :D!