Time to upgrade?

[ssmrpopo]

My current cab has served me pretty well but I'm considering updating it. Right now I am running an old Athlon 2800, 1 gb ram, and an AGP ArcadeVGA. I have a spare E-machines from 2008 that has a Celeron 440 processor and 1 gb of ram. What benifits would I see from upgrading? Would games such as Killer Instinct, Cruisin USA, or Carnevil be playable with this system? Lastly would I have to buy a new PCI-express ArcadeVGA or does Soft15Khz work pretty well.
Thanks in advance!

[Nephasth]

I purchased 3 AVGAs in the past. I recently gave soft15khz a try, I won't be buying another AVGA. But I'm not a native resolution freak, I just want video displayed on an arcade monitor.

[Haze]

My current cab has served me pretty well but I'm considering updating it. Right now I am running an old Athlon 2800, 1 gb ram, and an AGP ArcadeVGA. I have a spare E-machines from 2008 that has a Celeron 440 processor and 1 gb of ram. What benifits would I see from upgrading? Would games such as Killer Instinct, Cruisin USA, or Carnevil be playable with this system? Lastly would I have to buy a new PCI-express ArcadeVGA or does Soft15Khz work pretty well.
Thanks in advance!

There's near enough nothing between the CPUs, at least as far as emulation is concerned, an Old 440 Celeron is several generations off doing Crusin / Carnevil at full speed, and not even a high end chip of it's generation.

[BobA]

You would have to go to a dual core to see and benefit in CPU but aside from that make sure the video works with soft 15 so you do not have to replace your AVGA.

[dholcombe]

The Celeron will likely run cooler unless the other components you put with it generate more heat. You'll also get a faster FSB and possibly faster RAM depending on the motherbaord. You also get 64-bit processing with the 440 if you use a 64-bit OS.

The processor itself I believe is clocked lower. I'm not sure about the difference in instructions per clock for the 2 processors in question as I'm not sure which architecture the 440 is based off of. It'd probably be worth installing MAME on the 440 and running a few tests before deciding to drop the box in your cabinet.

[dholcombe]

So I got to thinking and remembered there are many Athlon 2800's. Which do you have? There are 2 different Athlon XP 2800+ and at least one Athlon 64 2800+ and an Athlon XP-M 2800+ for starters.

[bkenobi]

If he had a dual processor, I think he would have mentioned it.   

As for the AVGA vs soft15k, they aren't exactly the same.  If you use an AVGA then you can have the monitor turn on at startup.  If you do that with soft15k, won't that potentially damage the monitor?  If so, how do you turn on the monitor once past post?  I ask because I have a monitor that I'd like to use if I could figure soft15k out!

[Gray_Area]

If he had a dual processor, I think he would have mentioned it.   

As for the AVGA vs soft15k, they aren't exactly the same.  If you use an AVGA then you can have the monitor turn on at startup.  If you do that with soft15k, won't that potentially damage the monitor?  If so, how do you turn on the monitor once past post?  I ask because I have a monitor that I'd like to use if I could figure soft15k out!

No. The monitor just won't sync to it

Easy. (SailorSat suggested) Using a 'dummy' pci card and selecting that as default display in the bios....or doing the same with onboard video if the machine has it.....will shunt all video before OS load to there. Make sure to set OS displays in the reverse.

[Nephasth]

If so, how do you turn on the monitor once past post?  I ask because I have a monitor that I'd like to use if I could figure soft15k out!

If you've got your arcade monitor connected to a smart strip that your computer controls, your monitor will still be warming up while your computer posts and you'll never see the image out of sync. My arcade monitors are usually warmed up and displaying by the time the Windows loading screen just starts. As far as figuring soft15khz out, the hardest part is figuring out if your video card/onboard video will work with it. I couldn't find an exact match for the card I was using, but I did find one pretty close (there is a foreign website with pics of tons of different cards that work with soft15khz), so I took a chance and it worked. Just downloaded and installed the drivers (after installing quickres and setting it to an acceptable resolution for the arcade monitor), everything worked out fine. Pretty easy.

[bkenobi]

It's actually not an arcade monitor.  I have one of those broadcast sets that are in a cube shaped cabinet designed for stacking.  I bought it cause it was cheap and local thinking I might have a use for it at some point, but have only played around with it for a couple hours.  I only had it plugged in long enough to verify that it would display an image.  Unfortunately, I failed in that regard as I was not able to get any signal out of the video card in a format that worked on the set.  It has a VGA shaped adapter that I was trying to interface through, but the adapter I was using at the time didn't sync.  I thought about using soft15k but was afraid of damaging things.  It sounds like the "damage" that I read about was a bit exaggerated, then...