If you have spent more than a few hours with different MAME ROMs, enjoying some of your favorite games of the yesteryear, so to say, then you have probably encountered certain performance issues that may seem strange to a layman. Namely, these are all games that were played on hardware that was light-years behind the current software and it seems somehow illogical that these games are running slow on today’s computers. However, there is much more to the emulating process than just giving you the game itself.
Namely, the MAME project is primarily a project that is supposed to show anyone who is interested how the programming was done and how these machines did their job. Therefore, the emulating that is done by MAME is as true to the real processes done by the machines in the old days. What this means is that no new developments are used and that everything is done by pure computation by your processor. For instance, the sound, the video and everything else that goes into a game has to be processed by the processor and no shortcuts are allowed which would enable these games to run much faster. It is a side effect of project MAME being as successful and as precise as possible.
The best way to overcome the issues with performance is to have a faster CPU. This is the simplest it gets. The faster the CPU, the better the times will be and the games will run much smoother. Also, you might want to improve your graphic card by either getting a better one or by updating your drivers. This can be of great help if you wish to improve the performance. In addition to this, the MAME also allows you certain things that can e done in order to improve the performance.
For instance, you should lower the quality of the sound. This is particularly important if the game is using analogue audio which involves such complex emulating that it can really slow down the performance. You can also use frameskip to skip some of the frames in the animation which is in most cases intelligible for the naked eye. If you overdo it, though, you might end up with choppy performance, so you need to be careful.
Of course, there are some games that will not work at all and these are mainly works in progress. However, there have been some games that cannot be emulated in a way that they will work and that’s that.