Evolution of Model 3 emulation (Scud Race)

Channel:

MrThunderwing

Subscribers:

22,700

Published on August 10, 2011 7:50:16 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QbAm1Do_2A

Game:

Scud Race (1996)

Duration: 3:45

3,760 views

2

This is a little video I've slung together using a few previous bits of footage I'd made together with some new stuff to show how Model 3 emulation has evolved (for me at any rate), through improvements in emulation and eventually technology - how I went from 1 frame per second to 60. The very first time I tried playing Scud Race in MAME 0.117 - I think it would've been about 2008- it ran at about 1 frame every two seconds. I'd been sitting there slack jawed in amazement as the rom was downloading, I couldn't believe I was going to be able to play Scud Race at home. I didn't have a clue what it was going to look like on my PC though or if it would even work at all. Even when the reality of 1 frame every two seconds hit me, I was still stoked that I'd managed to get it to work in the first place. Funnily enough I never bothered making any videos of that... I think the very slow speed was compounded by other issues my old Pentium 4 was having at the time (I think the CPU may have been very prone to overheating). I eventually got a new GPU and extra RAM, and did a few other things to improve performance a bit (like actually cleaning all the crud out of the computer, re-applying thermal paste to the CPU and making sure all my drivers were up to date) This seemed to give me a bit of a speed boost (MAME doesn't use the GPU specifically, It takes the load off of the CPU which is sharing ram, which can speed things up) We were now up to about 8 fps, sometimes even 11 in the demo mode. The graphical quality actually looks a bit worse in the video due to limitations in my ability to capture decent game footage at the time and the fact it would always have to be in a low-res window to try to not lose frame rate speed. Next up is Supermodel Emulator on the same hardware, a massive improvement in speed (Scud Race would vary between 20 -25fps. Although the hardware had been upgraded, this was still essentially the same computer I'd been getting 1 fps with a year or two before. Amazing when you think about it really). Good as it was though, it still less than half the speed of the arcade machine. After 6 years of punishing it, I decide to retire my P4 and finally we have Supermodel running on Core i5, running full speed at 60 fps, looking very nice indeed and pretty much arcade perfect. It's taken me a few years, but I finally got there in the end.

Edit: There were two things I thought I should just add to this as a little addendum; I love MAME, and don't want to seem like I'm knocking it or anything, but it wasn't really designed for complex 3D stuff on the type of hardware I was using. However, back when I was still only able to play this at about 1 fps, there were people using MAME on overclocked, Quadcore beasts that could get this running at fairly decent speeds (I think in the region of 30 - 40 fps). The other thing I just felt like adding is that the Scud Race rom I downloaded at the very start for MAME, back in 2008-ish, is the same one I use today for full speed Supermodel. How cool? I did briefly use a different one when I downloaded MAMEui32 0.141, but then when I started using Supermodel I went back to my very first one.

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