Classicamiga Forum Retro Edition
Thread: Zinc
Harrison 02:04 10th December 2010
I hadn't run Zinc in quite some time and stumbled across my rom set for it the other day, so thought I would give it a play.

Last time I was running it was soon after its release in early 2005, and I think initially I might have been running it on an Athlon XP system, and then on an AMD64. I remember Zinc managing around 30-40fps a lot of the time during emulation (60fps being full speed), so there was some slowdown and stuttering, but the quality of the emulation was good.

You might know that Zinc's development stopped because its code was integrated in MAME and all Zinc's games are now supported and emulated by MAME. However MAME's focus is on accuracy of emulation of the original machines, so the games still don't run as well or as smoothly as they did in Zinc, so there is still a place for it.

Anyway... I fired it up on my main PC and I was pleased to discover that Zinc runs perfectly on newer systems. And it didn't have any framerate issues compared to the hardware I was running it on originally. All games ran at 60fps without a single dropped frame and the games all ran as they should. Great fun to see the arcade originals of games like Soul Edge and Tekken 3 running perfectly.

If you still have Zinc somewhere give it a run on your current PC. Definitely worth it.
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Demon Cleaner 05:59 10th December 2010
I only ran it on a P4 2.8, and it's really a bit slow, mainly the beat'em ups, Xevious 3D is running smootly though.
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Harrison 15:55 10th December 2010
Your P4 is about equivalent to the AMD64 system I originally ran Zinc on, and I had similar issues. You should try it again on your new PC as it should easily run it without any slowdown. I was surprised how well the beat 'em ups actually run. A couple have issues with sound, but that is the emulation, not the system.

Xevious 3D does run well as you say, and the original was always a favourite of mine. Its the game I ended up playing a bit of when I tried out Zinc again.
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Demon Cleaner 16:07 10th December 2010
Zinc doesn't include many other games than beat'em ups, that's why I never used it much, not being a fan of those kind of games.
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Harrison 16:32 10th December 2010
That is true. The original Playstation 2 based arcade hardware was developed mainly with beat 'em ups in mind. Personally I'm still a big fan of the original Soul Edge (Soul Blade) and all the Tekken games, so find emulating their original arcade versions great fun... but I can see it not being that interesting if you don't like the genre.

Still, it is great to see that current hardware is now finally fast enough to run more demanding emulation at full speed. I've also not tried any of the 3D and CHD MAME games out for some time. Really must give them a go next week. I've wanted to get VirtuaRacer running properly for a very long time, as well as some of the racing CHD games that used to struggle on older hardware.

I might have to look into upgrading my emulation PC's hardware... to date my emulation PC has always been my last main PC, downgraded to that role when I build a new main one.
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Demon Cleaner 13:22 11th December 2010
Virtua Racer is even running smoothly on my P4, problems are with the Naomi ROMs and that stuff, like Ikaruga has a horrible framerate, and is quite unplayable.
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Harrison 19:43 11th December 2010
I actually used to have the opposite problem. Ikaruga ran fine with just a bit of slowdown/stutter in the transitions, but Virtua Racer would lose the graphics or slow to 1fps. Really will have to load them all up again this week.
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