In 0.70.2b we brought you an extra 20 megs of memory, but turned off alot of the compiler optimizations in an attempt to conserve space.
After some research, opcode has found some interesting things:
1) The memory difference between optimize for size and optimize for speed is very small.
2) We can turn on some of the optimizations that I had disabled for fear of a repeat of 0.66b (no ROMs worked in 0.66b, and when I first fixed the memory bug, the same thing happend for 0.70.2b-prerelease)
3) opcode went ahead andread the docs and came across a nice command line option to give us a significant boost in speed.
The end result: fair->significant speed increases. So those games that are choppy now should be much smoother with the next release.
Since I've received a pretty astounding response to my plea for bug reports, I'm going to make another request: If you have the means to compile MAMEoX and would like to be an official tester (as a bonus you get access to the dev CVS repository, which is updated more frequently than the anonymous server), please let me know.
We're trying hard to organize this project a little better than it has been in the past, and having some official testers doing pre-release testing is the second big part (after bug reports) of that push towards overall organization.
I expect that 0.70.3b (or whatever it's called by then, the MAME guys are releasing versions like crazy) will go out towards the end of this week, probably Monday if we don't run into any major problems. I hope to have lightgun support (as listed elsewhere) ready by then, but the speed improvements make such a big difference that I'm willing to put it off for another version to get this out there for you guys
