duh duh duh duh duh duh duh duh dunnnnnn...

lookie who got a new win2k machine: tb 1ghz, 256ram, 40gig hd, geforce2mx, win2k...

and look what else i got: a question! how is the performance of mame32 compared to dos mame? thx

-- david oliver (pimpdavid@mail.com), March 29, 2001

Answers

DOS MAME is unlikely to wokr well, if at all, under win2k. MAME32, however, is understood to run brilliantly. Basically stick to MAME32 unless you want to dual-boot Win9x/ME with Win2K.

-- Barry Rodewald (bsr@hnpl.net), March 30, 2001.

Depends on what you mean by 'work'. You can forget about getting the sound to work in dos mame, but other than that it works fine. Mame32 on the other hand works perfectly and with sound. That for me makes all the difference. It's a bit painful waiting for that mame32 release after a new dos mame has come out though, not to mention the frustration in not being able to playback dos based recordings on MARP that have sound (recordings go out of synch).

Make sure you get the Win2k upgrade patches from MicroCrap (sorry MicroSoft) for improved game performance.

-- Tim Morrow (tmorrow@bigpond.net.au), March 30, 2001.

1: any particular patches i should download?

2: i can get a win98 bootdisk off www.bootdisk.com - if i set up sound in that and use it to boot to win98 command line mode can i run dos mame

-- david oliver (pimpdavid@mail.com), March 30, 2001.

Mame32 does seem to perform a little bit better, but it doesn't outperform the pentium compiled dos mame versions that i've tried.

the real problem is playbackability. do you want to be able to playback other peoples recordings? do you want other people to playback your recordings "100 versions" from now? If the answer to both those is yes, use dos mame and hopefuly win98 will boot on 2k.

-- Chad (churritz@cts.com), March 30, 2001.

The patches I had in mind above are the SP1 patch and Win2000 compatibility if you don't yet have them. You can get to both from Start | Windows Update. People had a lot of trouble running any PC games until these patches came out. It's not game related but I'd recommend getting all the critical updates that patch security holes in the OS.

I'm not sure whether the Win98 boot disk trick will work. I suspect it largely depends on whether your sound card is old enough to still accept environment variable strings etc. With a 40 Gb hard disk you might consider creating a dual boot system - 98 for games and 2000 for everything else. With some careful partitioning of the hard disk you can still have access to most of your data through either OS (at a sacrifice for giving up NTFS data partitions for FAT though).

-- Tim Morrow (tmorrow@bigpond.net.au), March 31, 2001.

I really don't c what the problem is??

I run DOS MAME with Arcade@Home on:

P4 1.4ghz, Gforce2, 512mb pc133, sound blaster 1024 live om ME?

Runs like a dream, I don't c why u have to restart into DOS??

Just open arcade@home from my desktop and thats it!!

GG

-- Game Guru (gameguru@cableinet.co.uk), April 01, 2001.

Game Guru has a good point. Instead of toying with a dos window and running dos mame, try a Front end program like Arcade@home that runs dos mame automatically. A very good option if you can't run dos mame from the command line, as long as it works ok on 2k and ME.

-- Chad (churritz@cts.com), April 02, 2001.