p4 @ 2.53ghz w/ 512mb ddr - which mame version?

[tony.silveira]

hi all,

recently picked up two "lil champ" arcade games that i want to convert into mame cabs for my nephews.  these machines have a dell gx260, running a p4 at 2.53ghz with 512mb RAM, onboard video, 40gb HD.

i'm currently installing tinyXP.  but i'm curious, what version of mame should i be targeting?  i'm assuming this old machine won't be able to run anything that's relatively new (nfl blitz, etc.).

anyone have any recommendations as to how far back in mame i should go?

many thanks

[Dervacumen]

I'm running .96 with a P3 800Mhz with 512RAM.  Runs the old stuff well, golden tee era has some skipping in audio, video is fine.  Anything pre-1994 seems great though.

[FALSE]

Should play all everything up to 3d games without a problem.

[harveybirdman]

I have 144u3 running on a P4, no graphics card, and a comparable amount of RAM.

3D is definitely out as others said, but you're also going to have trouble with a handful of 2D games.  I'll check my games list tomorrow to try to get you a list of my problem children.

Still I'm running over 540 games at full speed.

[kahlid74]

I use .80 on a P4 3.0Ghz and it works fantastic for most everything.  I then use .144 for anything dual core and above.

[JoeB]

I don't see why this PC will not able to run the latest MAME version, as long as you stick to the older games.  It's not like pacman is not playable on this system with the latest MAME!  If anything, if your CPU is hyperthreaded (which I believe it might be) it should run better of the newest mame.

[Hoopz]

Mame went through an audio change around .102 or .104 and an artwork change too.  I'd suggest getting an older version and running it for most of the stuff you want to play.  I have .94 running on P4 1.8 Ghz without any issues.

For games that were added in new versions, grab those roms and those versions of Mame.  It's not an issue to have different versions of Mame running on the same system.  It keeps resources lower for most of the stuff and still allows you to play any newer games that you want. 

[mcseforsale]

.143 on GX260 P4 with 512MB of ram, onboard video.  RAM won't help.  It's all proc based.

I run about 200 SNES, 200 N64, Atari 2600 and about 250 MAME games with no effect...until I get to something from Namco with polygon rendering or their 3D audio.  Then it munches.

AJ

[tony.silveira]

thanks guys!

I'll try the version I'm running and strip out the newer stuff. 

I also want to strip out clones, I think I can do this with clrmamepro?

my nephew has autism so want to make this as easy as possible for him