Emulators and 64 bit pc?

[mgb]

kind of a vague question, but I'm building a new pc that will be a Windows 7 64 bit machine. Its gonna be bassically an htpc and it will run hyperspin with a bunch of game emulators (Mame, Fceux, Zsnes, Stella, Fusion, Winvice, Mess and possibly others)

I have never gone the 64 bit route yet so I'm just curious if I will run into issues with some emulators or not.
Any advice would be great.
thanks

[404]

kind of a vague question, but I'm building a new pc that will be a Windows 7 64 bit machine. Its gonna be bassically an htpc and it will run hyperspin with a bunch of game emulators (Mame, Fceux, Zsnes, Stella, Fusion, Winvice, Mess and possibly others)

I have never gone the 64 bit route yet so I'm just curious if I will run into issues with some emulators or not.
Any advice would be great.
thanks

the simple answer is. no.

There are many emulators already pre-built for 64bit machines. Every 32bit emulator i have thrown at all of my 64bit rigs run just fine.

[BadMouth]

I haven't run into any problems on the software end.
Using the 64-bit version of MAME results in a noticeable performance boost on certain games (NFL blitz for one).

If you have really old accessories, 64-bit drivers might not exist for them.

[theonegoku]

I have ONLY built my systems with 64 bit, and I have never had any problems with the emulators (except this one program i tried a couple years back to turn a .bin to a .iso and it was 32 bit only) but if anything I would say that not only will u not have any problems, but it would definitly be wiser.  Every time I play something that is just barely hitting 100% I always think "thank god for those extra GB's of RAM" or something to that extent

[mgb]

Great,
 Thanks guys. I'm really looking forward to this pc build.
I won't have any issues with old accessories because this is a new build and its not going to be another cab. It will just be a HTPC with lots of emulation. Hooked up to a 32" hdtv.
 I've been gathering all the parts and pieces.
Its an Asus mobo (hdmi) with an AMD A8 APU, Windows 7(64bit), 8G Ram, 128GB SSD for OS Drive and 1TB Storage drive (where all my emu stuff will reside).
 This machine will be used for typical htpc tasks, old school emulation and somewhat modern pc games.
I plan on using usb adaptors for playing consoles with their original controllers.

[theonegoku]

Great,
 Thanks guys. I'm really looking forward to this pc build.
I won't have any issues with old accessories because this is a new build and its not going to be another cab. It will just be a HTPC with lots of emulation. Hooked up to a 32" hdtv.
 I've been gathering all the parts and pieces.
Its an Asus mobo (hdmi) with an AMD A8 APU, Windows 7(64bit), 8G Ram, 128GB SSD for OS Drive and 1TB Storage drive (where all my emu stuff will reside).
 This machine will be used for typical htpc tasks, old school emulation and somewhat modern pc games.
I plan on using usb adaptors for playing consoles with their original controllers.

Sounds like the exact opposite of what im doing, ive just had my pc with lots of emulation hooked up to my 47" and now I WANT to turn it into a cab .  What Asus mobo did u go with? (the sabertooth z77 is a beast), I took the i5 route since my older processor was an amd athlon, and do u have 4x2gb's of ram? or a different combination.  I got one 8g stick for now, but nothing feels more powerful than adding more and more ram

[mgb]

I went with an Asus F1A55-m/csm micro ATX. It's going in a Thermaltake Lanbox lite. The mobo fits the bill because I wanted the versatility of on board hdmi, dvi and vga.
I went with 2x 4G sticks because the board has 4 ram slots and I figure ram is so nice and cheap right now that I can always add 2 more 4G sticks down the road.

I have a cabinet that runs and (shameless horn toot) looks great. My control panel is not huge and my monitor is vertical (27" trisync crt) so console emulation is not really worth it on it.
besides me and my son love to lounge on the couch while enjoying a little Friday night Bomberman.

[MacGyver]

I would make that 1TB a set of two 1TB, and RAID them.  Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy.  Drives fail, and backups on external USB drives with NTFS, will eventually write-fail, lose sync, and then poof, it's gone too.

[404]

overkill IMO. I've enjoyed pretty much everything mame has to offer with a dual core 64bit processor that doesn't hovers around the 3ghz range

[theonegoku]

overkill IMO. I've enjoyed pretty much everything mame has to offer with a dual core 64bit processor that doesn't hovers around the 3ghz range

Although it is true that all of ours are way more than what is needed to run a male, u have to realize that make is a gateway drug, then u want to play games that make doesn't do very well, so u start delving into emulators, then dreamcast emulators ecome ps2 emulators, then some games with a lightgun are still glitchy so now ur using full blown pc games to play house of the dead three, so I don't think its overkill, its just right

[mgb]

It may be overkill for just Mame but I also wanna use it for some other pc games and what not.
Plus I'm just enjoying the actual process of obtaining parts and making it all work.
Really most of what we do here is kinda overkill, I know a few people who are quite content to play Mame on their pc using a keyboard or cheap gamepad.

[shponglefan]

The only issue I've run into was trying to run some old NES emulators.  I had about 4-5 different ones that were fairly old  (problaby 5+ years) and only one of them worked.

I haven't run into any other issues though.

[mgb]

The only issue I've run into was trying to run some old NES emulators.  I had about 4-5 different ones that were fairly old  (problaby 5+ years) and only one of them worked.

I haven't run into any other issues though.

I was just running into issues with Nestopia loading from Hyperspin while I'm still setting up on a 32bit system so I ended up going with FCEUX which I think is somewhat newer, but I'm not positive.