Worth switching to a Coinops Xbox?

[sdweim85]

I currently have a mame arcade setup with a Dual core PC.  It runs fairly well, but  it's annoying to update drivers, and maintain it.  Sometimes things go corrupt for no reason and what not.  Normal Windows XP issues.

Would it be worth it to just sell the PC and get a modded original Xbox with Coinops on it?  I don't do anything fancy on the arcade, its just a 2 player 6 button fighter setup with no spinner, trackball, or lightguns.  With a LCD monitor. 

[Generic Eric]

If you wanted to do that just as an exercise; not selling your current set up, that would be OK. 

Otherwise, you'd need new controller boards, and a video converter box to hook up your xbox to a LCD monitor, our one that had rca/svideo input. 

I couldn't find any local, so I spent about $9 for each controller and $24 for a video converter.   

I don't think its worth abandoning a working PC.  Plus, I found coinops4 to be slower than my experience with mame when launching games.. *shrug* YMMV. 

edited for a coherency

[Cynicaster]

I currently have a mame arcade setup with a Dual core PC.  It runs fairly well, but  it's annoying to update drivers, and maintain it.  Sometimes things go corrupt for no reason and what not.  Normal Windows XP issues.

I don't get it--what's to maintain or update on a dedicated MAME machine? 

Mine is a crappy old XP machine that I bought in the local classifieds over a year ago for cheap, and I'm pretty sure the XP license isn't even legit, but it hardly matters, because in my eyes it's not a PC--it's a MAME computer.  I just dropped in my MAME/MaLa directory structure, wired the power button up to my cab, and boom, done.  I haven't done a single update to it, and 1.5 years later I can still get from power on to insert credit in about 15 seconds.  Runs like a champ--even CHD games like SF3 and Simpsons Bowling.

Seems to me the XP machine is the ideal MAME solution for any average Joe Blow that doesn't have some sort of irrational aversion to Windows PC's: availability for next to nothing, the scalability of power to meet your personal emulation needs, the wealth of knowledge in the online community that by and large uses PC's, the software support, etc.  Maybe I'm missing something, but sounds like a no brainer to me.

[jammin0]

Not to mention that coinops will take hours if not the better part of a day just to transfer the files to it after you've got the thing networked up.  The one and only advantage I see to a modded xbox is that they are dirt cheap. 

[Dawgz Rule]

 

What he said.  After the initial install, why update?  What type of normal Windows XP issues are you seeing? 

[rCadeGaming]

Yeah, XP can be made pretty rock solid.  Once everything's set up, you can leave it as is.

You know you can turn off auto-updates right?  Do you even need it connected to the net?  Cutting that off can simplify things.

[sdweim85]

yea I guess I don't really maintain it or anything.    I just hit the power button I wired from the PC to the outside of my cab and it boots directly into Maximus arcade.  Randomly though the games will start to just not work.  I haven't figured out why.  I'll put a fresh .zip of Mvsc and after about a month it will start to say files are missing and I'll have to re-download it.

[rCadeGaming]

Bad hard drive?  Shaking it around with a subwoofer or something?  Haha.  Buy a solid state drive.

[jammin0]

Trojan or spybot?  Disconnect the Internet as suggested would be my first thought.  See if it still has trouble.

[paigeoliver]

My mame cabinet is running on an XP install that I installed in 2006. It isn't connected to the internet. I haven't updated anything on it and it has given me zero problems in the last 6 years.

[ark_ader]

While I love playing with CoinOPS, it is a complete PINTA to get a controller hacked, unless you have a X-Arcade sitting around, or like soldering.  I picked up two ITX Celeron 1.5 for £20 and they run everything at full speed, add a £5 PSU and you have a great starter for small or large projects.  I use TinyXP or MicroXP and link it to the Network Server.  As long as you are not connected to the web it is a great arcade cabinet OS.

CoinOPS 5 does take a while to download, and I wouldn't bother if you have version 4.  I know I have about 25 games I play regularly, so a lite installation would work out great on a stock hard drive. The DVD version works great too and has all the console cores.

Reading on the console forum about the capacitors leaking on the Xbox PSU is another reason to go the PC route.  Besides I would go the P4/Celeron 1.5 route than an old P3, and I am sure you get a free old PC on craigslist or freecycle. 

Don't get me wrong. I think what BP has done with CoinOPS is a fantastic achievement, but without a cheap encoder product, (hint hint) the the limited capacity of the processor/memory, the PC option is the easiest.   

[Cynicaster]

Yeah, XP can be made pretty rock solid.  Once everything's set up, you can leave it as is.

You know you can turn off auto-updates right?  Do you even need it connected to the net?  Cutting that off can simplify things.

Stupidly, when I first set up my cabinet, I had a USB wi-fi adapter plugged into it so I could access the internet.  A few months later, I had a problem similar to what the OP is describing--games just wouldn't load. 

Then, I bought the cheapo used PC I mentioned earlier, kept it isolated from the internet, and it has run like a dream since without any issues or degradation in performance. 

I think the moral of the story is to keep the setup of your MAME PC as simple as you can bear.  There really is absolutely no reason why an arcade machine needs to connect to the internet, other than to have its owner say, "hey look, my arcade cabinet connects to the internet!"  The complications it brings are just not worth it--use your other computers for the internet. 

I know it's nice and convenient to be able to download stuff right to your cabinet (new ROM's, emulators, etc.) but there are other ways to handle such things that don't expose you to risk.  The most obvious is to transfer stuff to the MAME PC with USB drives and the like.  That's probably sufficient for most people--after all, how often do you really need to do such things?--but I have more of a lazy man's solution implemented at my house.  I happened to have a spare wireless router kicking around, so I used it to set up a second wireless network.  This second network is not connected to the internet--it's just a "floating" router that broadcasts a second SSID into my home.  Essentially, it works like a wired LAN; I use this network to transfer data wirelessly to and from my MAME PC using my main home computer.  Easy-peasy, and the best part is, my MAME PC stays free of cyber-clap.