We also need to clear the air in regards to recording at slow speeds (i.e., less than 90%). The answer to this one is obvious to me, but I couldn't resist seeing responses from other MARPers on this issue. And the issue...is it OK to submit scores on machines that are incapable (or have been altered to be incapable) of reasonable speeds?

Choose one that best describes how you feel on this issue:

1) I get higher scores when a game runs nice and slow...let's not mess up everything with a bunch of new rules.

2) I get higher scores when a game runs nice and slow, especially with my autofire wailing away at those pesky aliens. No new rules.

3) 90% speed or more? Well...my 486 is going as fast as it can go, so I guess that counts as 100%! Count me in for requiring a minimum speed of 90%!

4) People knowingly recording games at slow framerates should be shot, drawn and quartered! Leaving their bodies outside to dry...buzzards from their Joust games shall pop out from their monitors (slowly, of course) and begin to ravage the remains of the offender.

OK, there you have it! One of those should be agreeable with you.

Alright...now let's vote! ;)

JoustGod . . . . . . . . . . . . . pssst! (in a whispered voice)..."this post is very much tongue-in-cheek!"...translated- sarcastic.

-- JoustGod (pinballwiz1@msn.com), January 27, 2000

Answers

I'll go for 1,2 and 3. Democracy at it's best...

-- Tommi (sdkjfhsdkh@khkhkhkh.kjh), January 27, 2000.

Well - considering this would be non-sarcastic (well-knowing it isn't):

Although i think, that the 90% rule makes sense when we want to compare results i believe that there are some guys (like me) who would vote for answer 3 ... My personel problem is, that on my home P100 some games won't make it at 90% and on the other side my office P3-450 doesn't work with tgmame (Win NT !). So i won't participate on T3 and just wait for T4 to come ...

So let's say answer 2 !!! ;)

-- kiko (christian@rduch.de), January 28, 2000.

Actually none of the 4 choices quite match my view. I vote for

5) Ignorance is no excuse. Any recordings found to play at less than 90% intended speed be removed immediately. Repeat offenders are banned from MARP.

We will have problems with games that don't emulate too well but that is bad luck. If your system can't play a game at the intended speed then find another game or upgrade your machine or wait until the emulation gets better.

I'm tired of this crap where people don't check their settings or recordings before uploading or just don't care - probably the latter. The sooner we implement/enforce these rules the sooner a leading recording can be relied upon to actually be meaningful and worthy of playback.

BTW I like 4) it has the right sentiment, unfortunately it is too lenient to get my vote :-)

-- Tim Morrow (tjmorrow@bigpond.com), January 28, 2000.

This one is obvious, but i'm not sure why there are so many (5) ways to vote! Ban recordings or not that are <%90, I say ban 'em all. Of course what happens if no one records in tgmame?

-- Chad (churritz@cts.com), January 28, 2000.

I always though 90% was a little too generous. Why not 95% or 98%? Remember, a REAL arcade machine is always 100%. In any event, I'll settle for 90%, but anything below that the INP is totally worthless.

-- Pat (laffaye@ibm.net), January 28, 2000.

Oh, what a wonderful new debate! Well, I have to tell you some things... I think the problem isn't so simple, and, above all, is more general. Somebody tells we have to respect the spirit of the original real coin-ops... mmh... could you explain to me how you can respect the spirit of the original Super Sprint without a wheel? Or Crystal Castles without a trackball? Well, I tried my office 486/66, and Super Sprint "ran" at 8FPS! Of course, for T2 I played on my home P200, that didn't reach 60FPS, but was very similar, like playability, to my friend's P2/500... I simply thought it was very stupid lose hours of my time to play on a slow computer only to reach a high score! I think another thing: marpers are lovers of coin-op, and who on the contrary loves PC above all and has a supercomputer, probably prefers plays videogames like Tomb Raider, Quake and Unreal Tournament! So I think we have to reach a compromise solution:

6) Every new score must have a file .txt with description of PC features and final FPS. Score with less than 50FPS goes to general scoreboard; the others one, if with default setting, to the Official Scoreboard.

But I know: this solution has a lot of problems, too! Default setting changes, according to various mame versions... TG setting isn't always correct, I think: for instance, if I don't remember bad, for Pengo in 1984 was "3+1, easy difficult"! Surely in the arcades I have never seen "5+1", and rarely "medium difficult": Pengo, or Penta, was a difficult game for normal people at that time! The same for Scramble...

I repeat, this is a general not simple problem... I think we must have a worry above all: don't make too difficult marp for normal people: for instance, I remember only 30 participants to T2 in all the world... Maybe, for T4, 6 games (maybe every month) could be a good limit... But this is good for another debate, of course...

IUR

-- IUR DHURIN (iurdhu@hotmail.com), January 30, 2000.

OK, I am having a little problem with this here - how exactly is the speed determined. Hopefully not by the FPS figure shown when you exit MAME. The thing is what about auto frameskip. I always use this myself, and is great with games that my PC cannot quite manage 60FPS. For example, I can run Street Fighter Zero fine, with auto frameskip for the most part at 2-5 frameskip. Usually between screensthis takes a big hit, but quickly recovers. Super Sprint is the same only more so. The result of this though is an average FPS of around 30FPS. If anything, it's more of a disadvantage. Basically the average FPS figure shown on MAME's exit is not an accurate speed percentage.

My question is how exactly will the speed be determined to be under 90%? Also, many games will cause slowdown: a) during startup, ROM/RAM checks etc.., and b) between screens, fancy screen fades and palette changes. Which will knock down any average speed score.

Basically what I'm trying to say is that this will be a difficult one to prove.

-- Barry Rodewald (bsr@hn.pl.net), January 30, 2000.