PC for an Arcade Cabinet

[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    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]

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.

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.

[Diet_Pepsi]

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.

+1 -- One option that has worked for me was to go down to my IT department and poke around -- in my company its a graveyard and my IT guys are happy to give 4-5yr old PCs away to employees for home use.

[404]

As many have said here, you do not need a high powered system to play most mame games. There are those few such as 3d games which require better specs. Those games however, tend to still suffer from poor emulation with graphics and sound glitches.

As someone who has dealt with Shuttle branded PC's in my years I would like to give you a piece of advice. Avoid shuttle at all costs. Their motherboards tend to be plagued with problems. Simply put, their boards are just not reliable enough.

[kahlid74]

Here is what I use for my MAME PC's now.  Affordable and not too large.

[wizkid32]

If you want something really tiny (and cheap too!) you could look at a Raspberry Pi.

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=117319.msg1255884#msg1255884

Not sure if it's powerful enough for your project, though I'm pretty sure there is a Linux port of MAME.

[Mysterioii]

As of last week the raspberry pi's weren't even shipping yet, and there was some suggestion that they wouldn't be for a while.  There was a guy who I believe had MAME running on a virtual machine emulating a raspberry pi but I don't think the hardware is in their hands yet.

[kahlid74]

The raspberry PI has certainly shipped and is now in the hands of element 14 for qa testing.  The arm build of MAME shows promise but we won't know til we get our hands on it.

[darthpaul]

+1 -- One option that has worked for me was to go down to my IT department and poke around -- in my company its a graveyard and my IT guys are happy to give 4-5yr old PCs away to employees for home use.

That is exactly what I'm using in my cabinet as well as a 21" CRT Monitor.

[MTPPC]

Here is what I use for my MAME PC's now.  Affordable and not too large.

Would this setup run hyperspin smoothly?

[Cynicaster]

I’ve got a 7-8 year old single core PC with 1GB RAM in my cabinet; I bought it used in the local classifieds for dirt cheap.  Unfortunately, contrary to what the seller told me, it doesn’t have a legit copy of XP running on it, but that doesn’t really matter because it is strictly an emulation box and fully isolated from the internet.  It boots up almost as quickly as an iPad, and it runs every game I give a crap about without breaking a sweat.  It even runs Tekken 2 at what feels like full speed—I’m sure the purists would point to all the ways it is emulated incorrectly but I can’t tell. 

[Mysterioii]

The raspberry PI has certainly shipped and is now in the hands of element 14 for qa testing.  The arm build of MAME shows promise but we won't know til we get our hands on it.

I meant shipping to customers not to distributors.  Not sure if non-US customers are getting them yet though.  Moot point for me, I have too many things on my plate right now so I won't be getting one to play with anytime soon.

[Mister Hat]

If you want something really tiny (and cheap too!) you could look at a Raspberry Pi.

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=117319.msg1255884#msg1255884

Not sure if it's powerful enough for your project, though I'm pretty sure there is a Linux port of MAME.

Yes, there is definitely a port of MAME on Linux. There are also emulators for each of the consoles the OP mentioned .

[rCadeGaming]

My current desktop, which I use to play with MAME, has a 2 gig AMD Athlon and a GeForce 3.  This was pretty hot when I got it, BUT THAT WAS TWELVE YEARS AGO!  It still plays 99% of what I want in MAME at 100% with no frameskip or anything else like that.

These are pretty much the only things it can't handle:
Asura Blade
Cruis'n USA
Gradius IV
Mr. Driller
Puyo Puyo Sun (borderline, just needs a little more power to avoid frameskip and audio issues)
Radiant Silvergun
Rival Schools
San Francisco Rush
Street Fighter III: Third Strike (same as puyo)
Strider 2

The thing is that these kinds of games (as well as a lot of games not yet working in MAME) are from the era getting toward the late 90's, when it became commonplace for console ports to be far superior to the original arcade game anyway.  Soul Calibur comes to mind.

I will be putting a fast new dual-core intel into my cabinet, but it's more for the benefit of fast start-up and loading times.  A solid-state hard drive is important for this too.  Another thing about a solid state hard drive is that unlike traditional hard drives it won't be harmed by a subwoofer shaking the cabinet.

[DEL 707]

In the end I went for the shuttle
2.9Ghz Pentium
8gb RAM
500gb HD

I know I didn't need to get those kind of specs, but it seemed silly not to upgrade some of the specs, difference between 4gb RAM and 8gb was less then £10 
Nothing wrong with a little future proofing, plus I can take it out and use it for other crap if I need to 

Hopefully my speakers will arrive soon, just need to figure out how to cut and install the bezel and I might actually have a working cabinet some time over the weekend.

[amheck]

Are the G Series Sandy Bridge CPU's pretty good for a MAME setup?  I not only want to run MAME but Golden Tee and Tiger Woods PGA Tour online, too.  I've found some Dell 620s slimtowers in the outlet with the G630 CPU for around $375 and just want to make sure this are ok for what I want.

[rCadeGaming]

Supposedly the price difference on an Intel processor vs an "equivalent-speed" (in gigahertz) AMD is worth it.  As to which specific Intel is best, I think it doesn't matter much, whatever is fastest.  I think there's always a sweet spot in the price curve where price and decent speed intersect.

Depending on what MAME you're running, multicore CPUs don't do a whole lot.  A single threaded application can only run as fast as one of the cores.  It's still good to have a dual-core, as they're not expensive and other background processes can run on the other core, but beyond two there's not much benefit.

[Afterburner]

My full size cab has a full tower PC.....Athlon XP 1600 with 1GB RAM.  No problems running any of the games I play.

I have a 3yr old laptop that is my racing cab (not yet built) and it works fine too.

[MacGyver]

I just wanted to chime in with a "don't turn on scanlines".  I have a Quad-core i5 running at 4ghz with 8gb of ram and an SSD, and it stutters on Players-Choice 10 games with scanlines turned on.  I paid way too much money for my setup, and didn't think anything could make it stutter, so make sure if you go with a smaller setup, that you make sure you try every setting before thinking you need a faster setup, it could end up you are only one setting away from being perfect.

[Mysterioii]

That seems odd... I've never noticed stutter on playchoice 10 games on my 8-year-old single-core 3GHz machine when scanlines were on... 

[MacGyver]

Sorry, I meant scanlines from hlsl through a shadow_mask_texture under 0.145.    I posted just to show how important settings were.

[micahman33]

Just throwing in my $.02, I would strongly suggest looking for something on craigslist or local seller. You really dont need anything too speedy to have Mame and other older emulators run well. The cabinet I'm building is being powered by a Dell Mini 9 netbook and an external hard drive...so far in my testing im getting great speeds on everything...97% of full speed on Street Fighter III Third Strike without frame skipping as an example...

[rCadeGaming]

I think everyone needs to evaluate what games at what settings they want working, to know how fast of a PC they need.  Third Strike is one of my favorite games, so I need something that can run that well.  I certainly would not consider 97% acceptable, because that game has bad audio stuttering if it isn't running consistently at 100%.  Also, the timing needed to play is hard to maintain when it's not running at a consistent speed.  Games generally won't hold steady at less than 100%, it will bounce around and mess you up.