by RabidYak on Wed Apr 23, 2003 3:55 pm
Emulation isnt like running a game on your PC and Console. All games are pretty much tailored for the hardware that they are designed to run on, you dont stuff a Mega Drive cartridge into your SNES and expect it run. Since the general point of emulation is to run software on different platforms to one it was originally made for, the machine doing the emulation actually has to perform all the funcions of the original platform. The way this is almost always done is by writing software which actually recreate these components when it is run, so you then actually have the original platform running on your PC to run the software on. The more complicated the components in question are, the more difficult and demanding they are to emulate.
So when you use SNES9x or ZSNES to play Mario Kart, you are not playing these games on you PC. You are playing these games on a SNES in code form which is running on your PCs's processor.
Cruisn uses a 50mhz TMS series processor, the DCS sound system and an a funky way of generating its graphics (code to CPU, CPU to bliiter chip, bliiter chip to video memory, video memory to screen). Latter TMS chips and the DCS sound systems are both helluva complicated components that need thier fair share or processing time to emulate (as demonstrated by the T, X and Wolf unit games). The real catch that totally knackers it on current machines though is the way the graphics is generated. Wheras games using conventional tilemaps and stuff would just run slower and choppier on an incapable machine, games that use this method almost become an unplayable slideshow because the 2-way communication between the CPU, blitter chip and video memory isnt occuring at the rate that it should.
MAME's purpose is to document and emulate games as acurate to the original hardware as humanly possible, hence it does everything properly via your CPU. Even if MAME did pussy out and use hardware acceleration, it wouldent make any difference to Crusin since it has no actuall 3D hardware to ram through the graphics card anyway.
Not that your missing much anyway, Cruisin is a torturously bad game anyway. There are plenty of better arcade driving games emulated, go and play one of those instead.