Should this PC be able to play Tekken, Soul Calibur, etc with MAME....

[FALSE]

Old PC I'm using to set up MAME....
3.06 Ghz P4
1gb Ram (could upgrade to 2 gig if it would help)
geforce 5200 vid card, 256mb ram pci

Tekken runs at 50-60% or so.
Is it even worthwhile to try to tweak my system to run these games in MAME?
Would putting another gig of ram make that much of a difference?
Is there another emulator that can run these games at a more playable speed on my system?

Thanks for any advice!

[Jack Burton]

You might be able to get away with PS2 emulation on that setup.  Tekken 5 has an arcade history mode that includes Tekken 1,2, and 3.  There's also Soul Calibur for PS2.

Yes, you'd be running an emulator within an emulator.  

What kind of setup are you running? Is this in a cab?

[FALSE]

Thanks for the response.

Long term goal is to build a cab for a game room in my future house.
Short term for my small condo I'll be building an arcade control panel to sit in my lap or on my coffee table and play on my big ass TV.
I'm currently setting up Mala as my front end, slowly but surely creating gamelists, than on to setting up a layout to make it look nice.

This may not be the pc I use for a cab but it's what I'm using for now...
Do you think dreamcast is possible on this setup?
Would another gig of memory be beneficial?

[Dexter]

You could definitely use ePSXe to ru the first few Tekkens and the original soul edge. You may even get away with the DC/Naomi version of soul calibur by using nullDC. It will take a bit of work to set up but you'll also have access to the full PSX and DC library running at full whack.

[wizkid32]

Are you using the PC for other boring tasks?  (Like, say, taxes?  )  If not, you could do some system tweaking and get your emulators to run loads faster.  Also, extra RAM does help.  A lot.

For tweaking, try adjusting the process priority of the emulator under the task manager (set it to high).  Defragment your disk, clean up some disk space, etc.

[Jack Burton]

You can definitely play dreamcast games on that setup.  You probably won't need the extra stick of ram, but it's so cheap you might as well get it anyway.  

I can run DC emu's 100% on my setup:

AMD Athlon 64 3000+
1.81 Ghz
2.0 GB RAM
Nvidia GeForce 7600 GS

If you upgraded the ram and the graphics card I don't think you'd have any problems playing any of the emulators out there.  The only reason why games like Tekken run crappy in MAME is because they are all software dependent.  They don't utilize your graphics card in much of any way.  There are emulators out there that let you do that though, and they usually run much faster.  

Personally, for a fighting games based cabinet I'm console all the way.  Emulators aren't allowed in tournaments, and have input delay/bugs that interfere with the experience. 

[FALSE]

wizkid, this pc is strictly for emulators. 
I started with a freshly formatted had drive and clean install of xp so  I shouldn't need to clean anything up as far as the drive goes.
I'm definately open to any optimization tweaks anyone has.  Cant seen I've seen any posts on optimizing your pc/windows for a cab...

Jack Burton, I'm considering other arcade emulators for 3d games but have not started seriously researching mame alternatives yet, could you recommend any specific emulators?

I do plan on upgrading the ram, just a matter of when.  Extra money is hard to come buy since my wife and I have a new baby!  Original DDR ram is suprisingly expensive compared to ddr 2 and 3 lol.

Not really planning a fighting game cab and I'm not into fighting tournaments or anything like that.  I do want to be able to play some of the 3d games as they were always enjoyable to me.

Thanks for the tips and please anyone share your wisdom if you don't mine!

[wizkid32]

Once you've got everything on there, run the Disk Defragmenter.  This will allow the PC to run faster by grouping like files on the drive.  The process priority thing is guaranteed to help!