tcdev (./1):
Hi fellow developers,

Just wondering if any of you had experienced different behaviour on your homebrew efforts under MAME vs real hardware?

At this early stage of my development I'm not overly concerned, but I am a little surprised that I do see a number of differences. I won't bore you with details but I do, for example, suspect VRAM accesses are (significantly?) faster under MAME than real hardware?!?

I also see a few other minor behavioural differences, but I can't rule out the possibility that my code isn't following the rules. Regardless, I'd expect an accurate emulator to behave the same way.

Interested to know if you have similar observations?

Hey Mark,
no real hardware here yet, but had a go on the AES/NeoSD combination a friend of my owns. And I had problems with the offsets of graphics. Speed seemed to be okay.
I have a rather good grasp on coding the 68k with asm, and know where to scale my engine in that regard.

In my experience so far, excessive VRAM access usually just shears the image, but doesn't slow down.
Imo, most of these slowdowns one might see on the NG in various games just happens because of massive computations, probably mostly collision detection. That kind of stuff can add up fast because it usually scales not linearly.