I have been working hard to get a good Pengo score up lately, and along the way I happened along a possible bug in Mame 37 beta 7 (the most recent beta on Mame.net, to my knowledge)

It seems that each time I start, the pitch of the music/sound effects is noticably different - Sometimes it's normal, but about %75 of the time it's raised 1 or 2 steps above its normal pitch.

Now once, only once, when I started the game, the pitch seemed lower than normal, and the game seemed like it may have been running at less than %100 speed. I played through the first two levels and did pretty well, and then I quit to see the FPS, and indeed, they were still up near 60/60 fps.

I'm running Mame37b7 on a Pentium II 266 mHz with 64 megs ram with an Ensoniq Soundscape. SO my question is, is the game speed actually changing each time I start up Mame, or is it just the pitch of the sound? Has anybody else noticed this? Should I use a different version of Mame? I ask not only because I may be accidentally playing the games faster than the intended speed, but also because it seems people could possibly exploit this bug and upload recordings which were played at less than the intended speed.

Okay I'm done now!

-- Aaron Pieper (apieper@vt.edu), October 04, 2000

Answers

I have indeed noticed this phenomenon, though not with m37b7. A long time ago it used to happen to me with mame .35 final (I remember because the pitch would occasionally change in Money Puzzle Exchanger for T1). These days I no longer hear any changes despite using the same version from time to time, so I'm led to believe that it has something to do with your computer. At the time I had pitch changes I was using a Pentium II 300 MHz, 32 megs of RAM, and a Sound Blaster 16.

Cheers, Brian McLean

-- Brian McLean (bmclean84@hotmail.com), October 04, 2000.

I've also noticed this problem. Each time i accounted it as being "windows" reboot time, and after words (after rebooting) the game would play alright from a fresh reboot. i've encountered all of the problems i could remember with spacefb. of course i've never had this problem with xmame, but in window$'s defense, i haven't used xmame as much as the MSmames.

-- Chad (churritz@cts.com), October 06, 2000.