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Faster, Soul Master
I like to call it "software SLI":
>set OSDPROCESSORS=1
>mamepm blitz -nothrottle -video none -nosound -str 90
Average speed: 47.37% (89 seconds)
>v64mame blitz -nothrottle -video none -nosound -str 90
Average speed: 59.33% (89 seconds)
>set OSDPROCESSORS=2
>mamepm blitz -nothrottle -video none -nosound -str 90
Average speed: 63.88% (89 seconds)
>v64mame blitz -nothrottle -video none -nosound -str 90
Average speed: 79.31% (89 seconds)
In terms of actual performance on my 2.4GHz Core 2 laptop (64-bit version
for obvious reasons), Wayne Gretzky's 3D Hockey now runs 100% except
for the occasional zooms. The Carnevil clown is close to 100% as
well. San Francisco Rush gets about 40-50% in-game, and Gauntlet
Legends runs at about 50% speed. Rather playable, in fact.
Sometimes You Get Lucky
Just got back from California Extreme and spent today poking at various
things that have been on my mind. One of these things is the video timing
for the Midway MCR games. The video timing is controlled by a set of PALs
that to date have not (to my knowledge) been dumped. So I recently found
somebody who had a non-working Kick board and bought it off of him with the thought
of reading the PALs.
Well, reading the PALs isn't going anywhere (don't know how to dump a 20X10
PAL or how to ID some of the others yet), but I did dump the ROMs. Turns
out that not only is it a different set than is currently supported, but
it is one that actually shows "Kickman" on the title screen! Frankly, I
had believed that the "Kickman" variants were all gone, but it looks like
that wasn't the case! Definitely worth the few clams I dropped on the board,
even if I don't figure out how to read the video timing PALs. :)
Upgrade Time
Finally time to upgrade my site to the latest WordPress. Sad thing is,
I had changed quite a bit of the layouts to make it mesh with my previous
site, and boy what a pain it was to re-create that. It's still not 100%
back to where I'd like it, but that's all the stylesheet hacking I can
handle. If someone with more HTML experience is out there and can help
me figure out how to make the navigation class work properly on the archive
pages, please contact me. I've had enough. :)
New Computer
I recently upgraded to a new laptop, a Dell Latitude D830 (Santa Rosa chipset) running a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM and a new DX10 video card, the nVidia Quadro NVS 140M. I went ahead and installed Vista 64-bit on the machine, in order to be able to take full advantage of the 4GB of RAM. Since I do most of my MAME development on this machine, compliation speeds for building MAME are of utmost importance.
Below is a summary of complete build times for MAME using both my previous laptop (Dell Inspiron 8600 running a 2.0GHz Pentium-M with 2GB RAM) and the new one. I tested both debug and optimized builds using both Visual Studio 2005 and gcc.
| Old System | New System | Improvement | |
|---|---|---|---|
| CPU Cores | 1 | 2 | +100% |
| RAM | 2GB | 4GB | +100% |
| Build with VS2005, DEBUG=1 SYMBOLS=1 | 9:38 | 4:15 | -56% |
| Build with VS2005, PM=1 | 11:27 | 4:42 | -59% |
| Build with VS2005, PM=1 MAXOPT=1 | 20:48 | 10:51 | -48% |
| Build with gcc, DEBUG=1 SYMBOLS=1 | 10:20 | 5:02 | -51% |
| Build with gcc, PM=1 | 17:05 | 6:49 | -60% |
Since the new machine is a dual-core system, I was curious to find out if running a make with -j3 was better than running with -j2. I had heard that it is best to run make with a -j parameter equal to the number of CPUs you have available, plus 1 to help take advantage of extra CPU power while waiting for I/O to complete on other threads. Using the Visual Studio 2005 SP1 build as a test case, it turns out that -j3 does win slightly over -j2, producing a complete MAME build in 4:15 (-j3) versus 4:25 (-j2). Interestingly, when I tried this on my old single-core machine, it was slightly slower to use -j2 versus -j1.
I was also curious to see how much slower it was to do an optimized build using the Visual Studio compilers. A basic optimized build is not that much slower than an unoptimized build (4:42 versus 4:15). However, turning on link-time code generation -- which reduces the final output EXE size by a large amount and provides a marginal additional speedup -- more than doubles the build time to 10:51.
Comparing Visual Studio builds to gcc builds, it seems that the difference is not as pronounced as the last time I measured it (5:02 versus 4:15 for the debug build). This is partly due to the extra overhead of Visual Studio 2005, which is noticeably slower than Visual Studio .NET 2003, which I haven't tried installing under Vista. In the end, it doesn't much matter since debugging with Visual Studio is a huge win over trying to debug with gdb, so I'd still use it a lot even if it were slower!
Concert Review: Rush
It's hard to believe I used to not like these guys. Back when I was a kid, my best friends were all aspiring rock musicians (I was too for a while). And if you were an aspiring rock musician in the late 70's/early 80's, you just had to be into Rush. I think I was mostly just trying to be different, but I resisted all attempts by my friends to get me hooked on the band. Then I went to college and met this very nice girl — who was totally into Rush. Well, geez, once a girl is involved everything changes. (And seriously, how many girls are really into Rush?)
I caved.
I spent most of my college years getting acquainted with their back catalog, listening to them while I shelved books at the Crerar Science Library. I think I ended up being a bigger fan than even the girl who finally turned me onto them (turns out I married her).
So, with that background out of the way, Vera and I travelled down to White River Amphitheater to check out Rush on their latest tour in support of the Snakes & Arrows album. It was quite the ordeal to get down to the venue on a Friday night, heading through some of the worst congestion in the area. Adding to the fun was the weather, which had turned rainy and nasty — thank god we didn't have lawn seats. So by the time we finally got there, three hours after I left to pick up Vera from work, we were really hoping it was going to be worth all the effort.
Thankfully, if there's one thing you can count on, it is an awesome show from Rush. The opened on a decidedly crowd-pleasing note with "Limelight", followed by "Digital Man" and the first surprise of the evening, "Entre Nous". With a catalog as deep as these guys have, it is always a great pleasure to see them not just play the same greatest hits each tour. This time around was especially cool because they ended up playing fully 2/3 of Permanent Waves, which is definitely one of my favorite Rush albums. Another surprise from the first half of the concert was hearing them play "Circumstances" from Hemispheres, another classic I hadn't seen them play live before.
The high point of the first half of the show (or was it the second half?) was definitely "Subdivisions". I can't get enough of that one. Watching it live you are able to really see each band member contribute to the overall song (especially since they had three giant screens above the stage that would often split their focus one for each band member so you could watch them play). This time, I was particularly struck by just how exquisite the drumming is in that song. It is so fundamental to the pacing and urgency of the music and yet it really is quite intricate. I still get chills just thinking about it.
Another high point of the first set was "The Main Monkey Business", the new instrumental from Snakes & Arrows that gave everyone in the band a chance in the spotlight. Finally, they closed the first half with "Dreamline" off of Roll the Bones (another personal favorite) and left for a 25-minute intermission.
I noted to Vera during the intermission that they had so far only played a couple of tracks from their new album. They must have heard me mentioning it, because when they picked up again after the intermission, they immediately launched into 5 straight songs off of that album. I was particularly struck with how concert friendly they all were. They all had great hooks and kept the crowed interested, even though I suspect that a lot of people weren't yet that familiar with them. In particular, "Far Cry" was a great opener for the second half, and "Spindrift" rocked.
After all that new material, the band decided to trot out of a couple of classics that I don't think they've played as much recently. First, we got an incredibly intense rendition of "Natural Science" from Permanent Waves, which was the closest we got last night to any of their monumental multi-part songs of the 70's (yes, there was no "2112" or "Xanadu" in evidence). And then we were treated to a nice pyrotechnic opening to "Witch Hunt" from Moving Pictures, which was an unexpected but welcome surprise.
Neil's drum solo was next. Having heard many of the same bits and pieces over the years in concert and on live albums, I was expecting it to be pretty uneventful. Thankfully, I was wrong. It was pretty much a completely new set and further elevated my opinion of his awesome abilities. When you watch him (or any of the guys in the band) play, it's hard to believe they're all 50+! After the drum solo, Alex got a chance to solo by playing his new piece "Hope" from Snakes & Arrows on acoustic 12-string.
Heading into the final stretch, we got "Distant Early Warning" from Grace Under Pressure with an awesome light show. And then you knew that "Tom Sawyer" was coming on to finish things up, but we got an unexpected and hilarious opening to that song thanks to the kids from South Park. (I suspect that must have come about due to Geddy and Alex playing "O Canada" for the South Park movie.) For an encore, we got "One Little Victory" from Vapor Trails, followed by another surprise, "A Passage to Bangkok" from 2112, and then "YYZ" finished things off.
In the end, it was over 3 hours of music. The band was having a great time playing together, and sounded incredible. The crowd was really into it. Sure there were some songs I would have loved to see them play (one guy on the bus back just wouldn't shut up about them not playing "Working Man"), but at the same time I can't think of anything from the show I would have wanted them to leave out. You can tell these guys are complete pros who know how to put on a great show.
Oh, and since I complained about poor merchandise in my last concert review, let me state that these guys got my money. In fact, there were so many cool designs it was hard to pick just one. I could tell by watching some of the other people that I was not alone in this opinion. :)
Overall, a truly awesome experience.