Raine vs MAME

From Retro Arcade Guides

Differences between Raine and MAME emulators, as posted by Tux, developer of Raine, on Raine's Forum:

Tux: Well I don't think we emulate anything "better", but rather differently. MAME is bent on "accuracy", so even if the game had some problems because of a limited hardware, they emulate the problems of the emulated hardware to be as close as possible to the original. When the emulation could be improved, we did it in Raine. What comes to mind is these shooters which added so many bullets on screen that the animation became choppy, well it's easy to boost the emulated CPU speed to work around this, but now some people say the slow animation makes the game easier... Well, for DoDonPachi at least, more recent versions using more modern hardware got rid of these animation problems anyway!

Also features like the custom audio tracks show well the spirit of Raine, even if it started as just a crazy idea. It allows to replace the emulated songs by some external tracks you choose, something which would be unthinkable with MAME! ;-)

For Rainbow Islands, it's a paradox because it's the game which gave its name to Raine but the emulation of the c-chip is not 100% complete. I never played very much with this one so I don't know where the problems are, but when someone from MAME team came with the complete description of the c-chip, Antiriad was not interested anymore, and the driver stayed as it is... So there are probably differences with the version in MAME now.

There is also the unemulated rasters for some CPS-2 games (it's complex, very few games use them, and I don't play them, so... !).

_MADrigal: And Raine is the only emulator that supports the EmuDX format and you can play classic games with renewed graphics and sounds. Very fascinating![...]

Tux: [...]which was originally a separate emulator by MikeDx (Mike Green in real life), I just thought it was too bad to let it disappear at the time and I proposed him to merge it in Raine, and he accepted... Everything is not perfect, but at least it runs on modern hardware in any resolution using OpenGL!


Reference