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PC for an Arcade Cabinet
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DEL 707:
m currently building a cabinet and I'm in need of a small PC to fit inside.

I plan to use it for mame/snes/mega drive and older emulators, so I *expect* I shouldn't need something too powerful.

I was looking at a Shuttle PC mainly due to the size of it.
But I'm not sure what CPU to get or how much memory. I'm looking to through on Windows 7.
The ability to upgrade would be handy if possible, it also needs a wireless card.

Any suggestions are appreciated :)
Mysterioii:
Honestly pretty much any new PC in the world right now would be fine for most of what it sounds like you're interested in.  Is it going to be a full size cabinet?  If so, there's no real need to worry about getting a small PC.  I have a full-size tower inside of mine.

My cabinet is about 7-8 years old and I'm running on a 3GHz single-core intel processor...  nobody uses single-core anymore so I'm sure everyone is laughing at me... but my point is that everything I'm interested in within MAME works fine...  it'll have problems with 3D/polygon stuff, but I'm pretty old  :laugh:  so I'm interested in mostly sprite-based games.  Older console emulators (atari 2600, NES, SNES, Genesis, Sega CD, Playstation 1, Commodore 64 etc.) are all fine.  Most Saturn games are ok.  Wii or Dreamcast games, not so much.

But man, my machine is OLD and crappy by today's standards.  If that's the sort of stuff you're interested in, then I think you'd be hardpressed to find a PC today that WOULDN'T be ok.  If you think you might want to play the newer consoles or polygon-based games in MAME, then you might want to get a better processor now.

I will eventually upgrade, of course, but haven't really needed to yet.
bkenobi:
Your paying a premium for that shuttle case.  IMO, you could get a bare bones setup from Fry's or Newegg for a lot less.  It would be more expensive to go with a mITX, but that may be required if you need something the size of a shuttle box in your cab.  Otherwise, you may be able to use a miniATX or similar sized motherboard and save a lot of cash.
paigeoliver:
The PC I am using in my cabinet is around 7-8 years old. The vast majority of what most people want to emulate can run off the average PC one would pluck out of the trash.

The vast majority of games people want to emulate were already emulated full speed back when a 450 mhz computer was top of the line.
ark_ader:

--- Quote from: paigeoliver on March 30, 2012, 07:11:52 pm ---The PC I am using in my cabinet is around 7-8 years old. The vast majority of what most people want to emulate can run off the average PC one would pluck out of the trash.

The vast majority of games people want to emulate were already emulated full speed back when a 450 mhz computer was top of the line.

--- End quote ---

Yeah you be surprised what a main board with 2gb and an AM2 chip goes for these days. 

If you are just into retro ports consider using a $15 soft modded XBox1.
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