MAMEDEV Forum

I've managed to get MAME building with Visual Studio 2015, and am currently tinkering with the GORF arcade driver, for my own research.

I have commented out some code in the driver (the sparkling background rendering, to be exact) and even though I've only changed one file, it is taking 5 minutes at least to emit "mamevers.rc" on a rebuild.

I've got OCZ SSDs, 16GB of RAM, Quad core I5-2500K @ 4Ghz. I am surprised a single change can take so long.

If you can suggest any ways to speed up the build, apart from installing the likes of Incredibuild, I'd be grateful.


While I am here, is there any way just to build the games and not the rest (like gambling) - if there is a conditional compilation symbol to do that, I've not found it.

Thanks in advance again,
Scott.

You can do:

make vs2015 SOURCES=src\mame\drivers\astrocde.cpp SUBTARGET=gorf

It will create a new .sln file in a different directory (I don't remember off-hand so search for the file). If you build that it should be much quicker.

Correction to above post: after making a change to the code I hit "build", not "rebuild".


Update

Last night, I tried some more things to speed the build up.

I took some tips from here: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog ... al-studio/

Here's my results:

1. Precompiled headers - gave it a try (set to CREATE precompiled headers per project) even though I didn't see any reference to stdafx.h as I expected, but it's been years since I programmed in C++ so thought I'd try and see if VS would somehow work magic. Nope - loads of errors.

2. Incremental linking doesn't work - or at least not when I set all projects to use it. I get a message along the lines of "too many projects to link" and advised to disable incremental linking.

3. Minimal rebuild - tried that, don't bother with it, it disables the multiprocessor builds and slows down everything.

4. Fastlink - I tried that, but I can't actually remember if it made a difference...


I think my next steps will be to delete drivers & systems from my MAME Solution and pare it down to the bare bones, just so I can get a fast turnaround on edit -> build -> run. I'm loath to do this, because that means I need to determine the Gorf driver's dependencies.... !

smf, I'll try that - I read in the mame compilation docs about Subtargets but wasn't sure what it would build, and didn't try.

Will let you know how I get on.

Thanks for your advice.