I covered this in my post on RetroRGB. Older versions of MAME are faster, but are far less accurate.keilmillerjr wrote: ↑Tue May 04, 2021 1:04 pm Do the same test with mame 0.106, and my statement will hold true. Your only testing with a single newer version.
For example, there was a major bug discovered in Contra only recently, and a fix supplied by Furrtek. MAME 0.106 won't have that fix, nor the thousands of other fixes between then and now. MAME developer "Haze" demonstrated this in a recent YouTube video. Again, I linked that in my article:
https://www.retrorgb.com/raspberry-pi-m ... marks.html
MAME slows down each release because of these accuracy improvements. But conversely, hardware speeds up as time goes on. My testing shows that, clock for clock, an RPi4 is nearly twice the performance of an RPi3, and is also clocked higher so the improvements scale up from there. Of the 650 games I tested, there is a 139% increase in games that become playable moving from an RPi3 to an RPi4. That goes a long way to compensating for the slower performance of more modern MAME releases, and allows you to play far more accurate builds at the same time.
You can go even less accurate from here, and choose emulators like Final Burn Alpha, if you want. FBA will play Street Fighter III, which still won't play in MAME even on an overclocked RPi4, but the emulation accuracy is low. If you don't care about accuracy and just want to play, then that's fine too.
Neo Geo used to be totally unplayable on older Pi model 1 and 2 hardware. From 3 onwards it was fine, even on very recent builds that again have plenty of fixes not in MAME 0.106 nor FBA. (Also playable on MiSTer of course, although MAME offers emulated CPU overclocking to reduce showdown in games like Metal Slug).
So yes, older releases can be faster for plenty of titles. But a 2006 MAME build is missing 15 years of fixes, and thousands of new games and dumps. But there's also nothing stopping you running both side by side on the same machine. After all, it's just software, and you can do whatever you want.
Again, endless choices here. No point dismissing any of these options.