Some vertical games questions, please help

[IceCold]

1. Do any vertical games in MAME use an 8 way joystick?  Or just 4 way and 2 way?

2. Do any of the vertical games need a lot of processor speed?  Could I get away with like a pentium 1 133mhz or pentium pro 180mhz?  Or would I need at least 300mhz?

3.  What is the most amount of buttons used on any vertical game supported in MAME?


Thank you for the help guys.

[TalkingOctopus]

1. Lots of vertical games use an 8 way joystick.  The first one that comes to mind is 1943.

2. It depends on what games you want to play.  I think you will need more speed to play ALL of them.  However, I remember playing Galaga w/ mame on a pentium 90 - so it is possible.  Get an old version of mame and try it out.

3. You will be fine w/ 3 or 4.

[AlanS17]

I think a couple of newer vertical shooters may require a bit more juice, but the vast majority will play on an older machine. Even the most powerful will still (probably) run on a slow PIII, though.

[jerryjanis]

Use a little windows utility called "sortinfo".

http://www.zophar.net/utilities/arcadeaud.html

Just run the command "mame.exe -listinfo > listinfo.txt" from the mame directory.  Then run sortinfo, and import the listinfo.txt file.  This program will display sortable lists of all the game information including control type, and monitor orientation.

How to get a list of controls for vertical monitor games:
1) Click the Video tab.
2) Click the Orientation heading to sort by monitor orientation
3) Click the 1st horizontal game
4) Scroll down to the last horizontal game
5) Press the shift key & click the last horizontal game to highlight all horizontal games
6) Press delete key to get them out of your way

Now you have a list of just the vertical games.

1) Click Input tab
2) Click the Control tab to sort by control type

Now you will see the whole list of vertical games organized by control type!

1. Do any vertical games in MAME use an 8 way joystick?  Or just 4 way and 2 way?

More than half of the games use an 8-way joystick.  Several use a trackball, analog joysticks, spinners, steering wheels, rotating joysticks (ikari warriors style joysticks), (etc.).

2. Do any of the vertical games need a lot of processor speed?  Could I get away with like a pentium 1 133mhz or pentium pro 180mhz?  Or would I need at least 300mhz?

I don't know what speed you would need...  On a quick glance, Toobin' might be one to use as a test - I think it needs a faster computer than most.  I'm pretty sure that I can run pretty much all of those games perfectly with a pIII 500 mhz.

3.  What is the most amount of buttons used on any vertical game supported in MAME?

Again, I'm looking at listinfo.  It looks like the vast majority of the vertical games use 3 buttons or fewer...  Some use 4 or more...  I would test out the 4+ button games to see if you really need the extra buttons.  You might be able to get away with mapping the start button as button 4 in most cases.

[BobA]

I put together a vertical cab with an 8 way and 3 buttons plus coin and player 1.  It has a 233 mhz processor in it and plays about 300 of the vertical games quite well.   I use an older version of MAME in it.   It plays more 8 way games then 4 way games so I live with the action on the 4 way games.  You get used to it after a while.

BobA

[Superdude]

I have 2 verticle cabs for mame.  You need at least a P3 for the newer mame to run the games.  I tried a P2 and it was a bit too slow for alot of the games, even Galaga.  I will say there is nothing like playing a verticle game on a verticle cab.  Horizontal just does not cut it.

[Spaced Invader]

Might think about VANTAGE for this cab, that P133 is more than enough for the 80 games it supports. Link:

http://www.mameworld.net/pc2jamma/vantage.html

Just a thought...  

[SirPeale]

VAntAGE is a great program.  My site has some VAntAGE links you might find handy.