Newbie Seeking Advice!

[newtothis]

Hi all,

New to the forums but having been reading over the threads the past week or so,and decided to take the plunge and build myself a bar top arcade system, Really i want to run hyper spin with mame,snes and neo geo really, where i got myself stuck is the motherboard etc,

Am i right in thinking that a atom motherboard isn't really powerful enough? something with a i3 or i5 would be better?

At the moment i have 120w pico psu and 500gb data drive to use,could i use the pico?

Any suggestions for a motherboard would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you

[Unstupid]

Intel NUC... but ya gotta wait til next month! 

[paigeoliver]

Hyperspin has really high system requirements, far more than what you need to emulate your games of choice (all of that was running full speed 10 years ago on 12 year old hardware). If you aren't married to that then you can use just about any PC. Just use an old one.

My big fat $3000ish mame setup is running on a 7 year old PC.

I would also suggest a mini cabinet before a bartop. You won't spend much more on wood, but it will seem way more real.

[newtothis]

Thanks for the Advance guys,

I think i might change the frontend i am using, Any suggestions?

Once get my budget sorted

THE BUILD WILL COMMENCE

[DrChek]

Thanks for the Advance guys,

I think i might change the frontend i am using, Any suggestions?

Once get my budget sorted

THE BUILD WILL COMMENCE

Look into MaLa. It's very flexible.

[UncleArgyle]

I would spend a little more time looking at hyperspin.

You can always strip out the animations and then add them back into when you upgrade to a beefier system. Once you have played around with the HyperTheme utility it's pretty easy.

Mike.

[shponglefan]

Look into MaLa. It's very flexible.

MaLa is fantastic.  Simple to use, easy to set up, and can look very nice.

[newtothis]

Actually, just finding out my hours may be cut at work has made me change the budget for this...but in a bit of good news,i find a pretty smart Mini itx i had
So i got a case,a hard drive,some ram just need to choose a motherboard, the case can take a graphics card too

it's this case

http://www.ebuyer.com/247134-cit-mtx-003b-black-itx-case-300w-psu-cscitmtx003b?utm_source=google&utm_medium=products

Really i am calling on your knowledge for the motherboard, Reading the threads everyone here is far more knowledge than me!

a atom board or something simliar?

Thank you

[xefned]

I am also "new to this" and can't offer any hard experience, but I'm also planning to base my project on an atom board. I feel pretty confident that it's more than capable of running mame, but I'm also completely willing to run an old version of mame to make it so.

Last time I used mame was on a 300MHz machine and it ran just fine. More experienced Mamers might be laughing at my naïveté; maybe it's more processor intensive than I realize. I'll keep my eye on this thread just in case...

[xefned]

For what it's worth, I just pulled the newegg trigger and chickened off the atom at the last minute*.

* where 1 minute = the three hours it took to assemble a new order.

In the end I went with the lowest end pentium available and a basic ($64) micro-ATX motherboard.