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MAME setup on limited resources - help!

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Tiger-Heli:
MAME is free, go ahead and try it and see what you think.

I run the latest MAME on a Pentium 200 MMX, 48M Ram, 4M PCI vid card.

I found very little speed increase going with the DOS build.  And the increase will be even less now the mamew is the default build.  Plus the win version supports USB!  The linux version is stable and should be faster, but I haven't used it personally.  Maybe you could make the machine dual boot.

On my machine, 70's games play fine!  Pac-Man, Frogger, Galaga, Pole Position, etc.  1942 and Sky Shark play well but have some slowdowns when the graphic get intensive.  OutRun is barely playable at like 75% and Frameskip 11, (don't forget you can skip frames to speed execution) but still fun.  So there are the limits.

Regarding  Atari Vector games.  Two things kill you on slow computers.  For games without backgrounds, (Asteroids), discrete sound from R37B11 on, and for games with Backgrounds, alpha blending from R36B13 on really kill performance.  I play all these games fine using R36B12.

Good luck!!!

Howard_Casto:
You can get a machine up and running to play the classics with those resources, but to be perfectly honest, I would suggest you go ahead and get a decent machine for your project.  This hobby is VERY expensive, and if you can't afford to get a good pc to put in a cab then maybe you better save up first.  What you have would make a good test machine though, if you wanted to build your machine first and then upgrade later.    

Jakobud:
Okay heres the deal:

On a faster CPU (1 gigish), a Windows Mame will be faster than DOS mame.

With your setup, Dos mame will be faster than WinMame.

I think your setup will run the older classic games of the 80's just fine.  YOu just need to download it and test it out and see what you think.  Doing a DOS boot cabinet would give you good results.

Just make sure you get a decent PCI (since you won't have AGP port) video card that has good tvout and you will be just fine.  

Ignore windows in your setup.  I won't say ignore linux, because I don't have enuf experience with it.  But I think a dos boot will work great for ya.

Jakobud:
Oh yeah, regarding the video drivers.  You just need a video card that does tvout without the need for software.  Like a geforce 2 card or something (i think you can find those PCI).  You just need to get a decent tvout card with a good tvout chipset in it (preferable Chrontel chipset).

Hmm....I just realized that you are planning on doing this thing with a cpu monitor...oops.  Well thats even better than a TV with a DOS boot machine.  I think you will not have a problem with different video modes in DOS.  Just set it up and give it a shot.  I think you will be satisfied.

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