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My old MAME rig finally died... Questions about using new vs old MAME version
danny_galaga:
I am using V.78 with Mala. I am quite happy with that (",)
gonzo90017:
You can create custom lists with Mamewah. All you need to do is upgrade to a newer version. I'm currently using 1.62b13.
goldenageofarcade:
So a few months later and I think I'm dead in the water. I wasn't able to locate my old ROMs so I had no choice but to go with the current version of MAME, which involved me having to track down a much larger HDD to carry all 80+ gbs (not easy to do on an IDE machine). I spent time relearning how to configure MAME, and got it working great on my laptop via a 500gb USB drive holding the ROMs and all that stuff, I spent a week or so moving it all back to my primary MAME computer (an old Optiplex 270 or something like that) and just tested it now for the first time, every single game plays absolutely horribly. I guess that old P4 with 500MBs of RAM just isn't going to cut it. Which sucks, as I have 2 cabinets set up with similar hardware (the other one failed a year or so ago, but it was only a vertical machine, so I converted it to a JAMMA horizontal for temporary use), so I have 2 AGP ArcadeVGA cards that I won't be able to use any longer...
Unless someone knows of a decent machine I can look for that will run current MAME and also has an AGP slot?
I guess it's not the end of the world, I got 10+ years out of them, just sucks that I'm forced to spend some cash on more powerful hardware to do the same thing I was doing before with old clunkers.
Gray_Area:
You need 2 gigs of ram. (TinyXP wouldn't hurt, either.) My P4 2.8ghz runs anything not 3D just fine in current MAME, with basic HLSL on.
nitz:
--- Quote from: goldenageofarcade on April 21, 2013, 05:52:24 pm --- just sucks that I'm forced to spend some cash on more powerful hardware to do the same thing I was doing before with old clunkers.
--- End quote ---
There are definitely benefits to upgrading and using new Mame. I love the HLSL effects, and emulation on a lot of stuff has improved greatly since 0.72.
Having said that, no need to drop the cash on new hardware if you don't want to. Download a rollback set of roms and use clrmamepro to revert your set back to an older version.
Mame 0.106 would be a good candidate as that was the last version before the video rewrite, so it should run way faster than current mame, plus it should play nice with most FEs I would think.