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stunstall
Posts: 9
Joined: Sun Apr 09, 2017 1:10 pm

Speeding up MAME build with Visual Studio 2015

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.
smf
Posts: 4
Joined: Thu Nov 06, 2014 1:34 pm

Re: Speeding up MAME build with Visual Studio 2015

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.
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stunstall
Posts: 9
Joined: Sun Apr 09, 2017 1:10 pm

Re: Speeding up MAME build with Visual Studio 2015

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.... !
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stunstall
Posts: 9
Joined: Sun Apr 09, 2017 1:10 pm

Re: Speeding up MAME build with Visual Studio 2015

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.

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