Video/Audio issues with Mame

OK, this has stumped my friend and I so I'm hoping someone can help.

Got a 2.4 GHZ, Pentium 4 w/512 MB RAM running Windows XP, installed a new ATI HD 2400 Pro 256 MB Radeon AGP video card.

My friend has the EXACT same specs on this computer, except he has a generic 96 MB video card.

Nearly all medium or high end games are running terribly on my machine.

I keep getting skipping video and echoing audio on many games - like NBA Jam.

Yet, on my friend's computer, they run just fine!

I'm thinking that it's my video card. I've tinkered with nearly all the MAME settings and have not had any luck increase the speed.

When I push F11, I get around 85-90% when running NBA Jam while my friends is at 98-100%.

Mine also says '254 partial updates' below it, while his does not.

Is there anything that I can do to make this darn video card work for MAME? Is there something that hasn't been turned off/on?

I've download the most recent drivers for it and for windows XP, so it's not that...

Please help!

Mame is all about the Processor and Ram, it uses virtually none of your videocards features other than to render the display to your screen so the card you have is fine for mame. If you're experiencing problems, its either due to a bottleneck in your system somewhere, your PC spec, or even the version of Mame you use.

Modern versions of mame are far more system intensive than older versions. With just 512Mb of Ram that system is pretty underpowered for newer versions of the emulator. If your PC tries to run anything else, or is using an active anti-virus monitor or something it will slow to a crawl with only half a meg of memory to play with.

Try using a version prior to 0.106 which can be downloaded at www.joymonkey.com

I also tried to stick an extra 1 GB of RAM into the machine last night, but it didn't help at all (maybe 1% or 2% up, but that's it), so I'm convinced that the 512 RAM is doing very little to slow it down for these games, particularly since my friend's machine runs perfectly smooth on 768 MB RAM.

I just formatted the hard drive so that there are no viruses/anti-virus software installed and I checked and task manager has nothing eating up any significant memory/cpu usage.

I believe I will try to the earlier version of MAME like you mentioned and see if that helps.

Otherwise, I'm out of options...

Maybe its a video synch issue. On some fixed rate monitors (like LCDs) lots of games end up with video and sound going out of synch and mame basically throttles it all to bring it back in line causing tearing/jerking/slowdown. Try enabling the 'refresh speed' option.

As a matter of interest what version of NBA Jam are you trying to run?. The choppy video and sound echo you're describing is something that a lot of the CHD based games suffer from on older or slower systems.