Testing Emulators At Different CPU Speeds

[racketboy]

Since we've had a few people asking about what specs are needed for emulating different systems, I through maybe we could do a series of testing to see what CPU speeds have enough power for different systems.


Here's the CPUs I have at my disposal:

500Mhz Mobile Pentium II
700Mhz Mobile Pentium III
1.50 GHz Pentium M
1.70 Ghz Pentium M
2Ghz Pentium 4
2.4GHz Pentium 4 (w/ 800Mhz Bus)
2Ghz Core 2 Duo


I'm assuming that anything 16-bit or older would run fine on any of these (maybe some games might push it on the 500Mhz with XP -- but I could test with Win2K as well)

Off the top of your head, what emus might push the limits of any of these?
Are their certain games that might be more challenging in terms of power required for emulation?

Also, when it comes to MAME, what games from each "generation" would be good to test on each of these to see at what point they start strugling at?

Any other thoughts or ideas for testing?

Anybody else want to get involved in the testing?

[fastbilly1]

You may want to establish a testbed for the software - namely OS. All running XP or 2k sounds like a good idea - even though you can make Advance MAME run on lots of things you shouldnt be able to.

[racketboy]

You may want to establish a testbed for the software - namely OS. All running XP or 2k sounds like a good idea - even though you can make Advance MAME run on lots of things you shouldnt be able to.

I'm gonna do XP for everything initially and then maybe put 2000 on the older ones (I'm not using them for production use)

[marurun]

In NeoRageX, Neo Geo games might emulate perfectly even on the 500 mhz machine.

[D.D.D.]

Back in '98, I had a 400MHz Celeron (a friggin e-machine with a game port on the front) with 192MB RAM and it ran MAME, NRX, ZSNES, and almost everything nicely before the N64/SAT/PSX gen.

BTW, nice with the Core 2 Duo.

[racketboy]

Back in '98, I had a 400MHz Celeron (a friggin e-machine with a game port on the front) with 192MB RAM and it ran MAME, NRX, ZSNES, and almost everything nicely before the N64/SAT/PSX gen.

BTW, nice with the Core 2 Duo.

The C2D is my new laptop at work
All the others are my personal or my wife's.

[Niode]

I had a 400MHz celeron with 256mb ram that would run zsnes, neorage and gens without any problems what-so-ever.

My 2.33GHz C2D 3GB ram Macbook Pro runs everything.

[Ivo]

Racket, you have so many CPUs

I should be able to test on my machine soon enough. I assembled it yesterday, it is a Intel C2D 8200.

Ivo.

[GSZX1337]

Are you running the emulated games at the original resolution? Any filters, scanlines, etc. If the games are being run at the original resolution, are you scaling the games to fullscreen?

[racketboy]

Never even thought about that....