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keilmillerjr:

Holy ---steaming pile of meadow muffin--- dude!

Way over spec'd. My 27" iMac I got for web design, which will hopefully be my full time career soon, does not have those specs. I am new to mame. I tell people running macs that with the current mac 10.8 and app requirements, 2.0 ghz core duo and 4 gb of ram is my minimum standard to not get left behind.

A solid state drive, flash or sd can cut boot time in half. This can aid in making the experience more arcade like in the fact that you can flick a switch and instantly have a game. I would also suggest against using windows, as it takes too long to boot, and always has issues. However, there is a lot of mame apps for windows only. It's retarded. I'm probably going to use xubunu. It uses lower resources, always works (unlike winblows) and should boot rather quick for being a newer OS.

There is no need for a 2tb hard drive. Every 80's and 90's arcade game ever made, held on one drive, will not fill that. And mame probably won't play them all. I'd just get what ever is within your budget and boots the quickest. I don't want my arcade machine to wait to boot. I wan't to flick a switch and start playing.

My theory is to network the arcade machine I want to build (wirelessly), so I can just transfer the roms I want to play remotely. No need to have every game ever made on it. Just the good ones. If some one comes over and requests a game, I hop on over to my iMac and "beam" a file on over to the arcade machine. Simple.

I'm still in the planning stages though. I'd take advice from some one who has recently built some of these machines as well.

smalltownguy:


--- Quote from: keilmillerjr on February 19, 2013, 08:47:12 pm ---Holy ---steaming pile of meadow muffin--- dude!

Way over spec'd. My 27" iMac I got for web design, which will hopefully be my full time career soon, does not have those specs. I am new to mame. I tell people running macs that with the current mac 10.8 and app requirements, 2.0 ghz core duo and 4 gb of ram is my minimum standard to not get left behind.

A solid state drive, flash or sd can cut boot time in half. This can aid in making the experience more arcade like in the fact that you can flick a switch and instantly have a game. I would also suggest against using windows, as it takes too long to boot, and always has issues. However, there is a lot of mame apps for windows only. It's retarded. I'm probably going to use xubunu. It uses lower resources, always works (unlike winblows) and should boot rather quick for being a newer OS.

There is no need for a 2tb hard drive. Every 80's and 90's arcade game ever made, held on one drive, will not fill that. And mame probably won't play them all. I'd just get what ever is within your budget and boots the quickest. I don't want my arcade machine to wait to boot. I wan't to flick a switch and start playing.

My theory is to network the arcade machine I want to build (wirelessly), so I can just transfer the roms I want to play remotely. No need to have every game ever made on it. Just the good ones. If some one comes over and requests a game, I hop on over to my iMac and "beam" a file on over to the arcade machine. Simple.

I'm still in the planning stages though. I'd take advice from some one who has recently built some of these machines as well.

--- End quote ---

As far as I'm aware, MAME makes use of 2 cores at present. Anything else is wasted. A 4 core CPU would give you 2 for MAME, and 2 for other processes.

4 gigs of ram is great.

I have a 1TB drive in my rig and it's half full already. You can't ignore the size of the PS2 disk images, and so forth.

I actually like using a fast SSD in my setup. I keep a small (64gb) SSD in there for my OS boot drive. The rest of my data (game roms, vids, snaps, etc) are on a 10,000 rpm 1tb drive. My system boots in 13 seconds (WinXP 64bit). I have an intel core i5 2550k overclocked to 4.8ghz. My system runs Gauntlet Legends and Blitz just fine.

If you want to flick a switch and start playing, MAME really isn't for you. Buy a real arcade board.

If you choose to network your MAME cab, you will slow the cab down by having to load network drivers and more OS services than necessary. I use an nLighted version of XP with all the timmings stripped out. If I want to add/update my rig, I'll plug in a USB thumb drive.

You can't just 'beam' over a new game when your friend requests it. If the game needs a chd, you'll need that too. Plus, you'll need to configure the game controls to work with your own controls. That's a buzz kill - you buddy's already moved on.

A lot of my info can be found at the tail end of this thread:

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=72776

keilmillerjr:

13 seconds is reasonable. Thats all I meant. I would not want a computer that takes a minute to start.

If the game needs a chd, I could just transfer that over too. You make it sound more complicated than it is.

I guess your requirements might change if you want to run 3D games vs 2d games. Also, is the original poster looking to run mame, or is he looking to run mame as well as other emulators? I was under the asumption of just mame, and storage for large ps2 games would not apply if that be the case.

Here is mame's official statement on multicore/threadding:

--- Quote ---Does MAME benefit from SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) / HT (Hyper-Threading) / dual cores?
Recent versions of MAME include a -mt switch which allows some tasks to be threaded off for use by SMP or multicore systems. Thus far the benefits from this are relatively small, because accurate emulation such as MAME strives for cannot easily be broken up into parallel subtasks (it would be like trying to have a baby in one month by impregnating nine women). There are exceptions of course, and MAME will support them via this mechanism in the future.

--- End quote ---


miniyoda:


--- Quote from: keilmillerjr on February 19, 2013, 08:47:12 pm ---Holy ---steaming pile of meadow muffin--- dude!

Way over spec'd. My 27" iMac I got for web design, which will hopefully be my full time career soon, does not have those specs. I am new to mame. I tell people running macs that with the current mac 10.8 and app requirements, 2.0 ghz core duo and 4 gb of ram is my minimum standard to not get left behind.

A solid state drive, flash or sd can cut boot time in half. This can aid in making the experience more arcade like in the fact that you can flick a switch and instantly have a game. I would also suggest against using windows, as it takes too long to boot, and always has issues. However, there is a lot of mame apps for windows only. It's retarded. I'm probably going to use xubunu. It uses lower resources, always works (unlike winblows) and should boot rather quick for being a newer OS.

There is no need for a 2tb hard drive. Every 80's and 90's arcade game ever made, held on one drive, will not fill that. And mame probably won't play them all. I'd just get what ever is within your budget and boots the quickest. I don't want my arcade machine to wait to boot. I wan't to flick a switch and start playing.

My theory is to network the arcade machine I want to build (wirelessly), so I can just transfer the roms I want to play remotely. No need to have every game ever made on it. Just the good ones. If some one comes over and requests a game, I hop on over to my iMac and "beam" a file on over to the arcade machine. Simple.

I'm still in the planning stages though. I'd take advice from some one who has recently built some of these machines as well.

--- End quote ---

Very good suggestions, and I appreciate them.  I'm leaning on "no" to the solid state drive for booting, as the system will be powered most of the time, although dormant almost always.  I was leaning on SSD only for the CHD's but it is apparent this isn't necessary.  I'm sticking to the 2TB drive, as I might install pinball emulation on it as well, and basically have one machine for everything (for now...when I win the lottery, I'll break things up into multiple systems).  I like the idea of uploading the roms as needed, but not the wait to do so, and if I have a large enough drive it won't be necessary.

Oh, as for "way over spec'd", just remember what The Mythbusters say.  If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing.    :lol :lol :lol

Dawgz Rule:

A clean install of WinXp 32 works great for mame.  Not networked is even better.  You can disable a lot of unnecessary services and easily boot into your front end in less than 30 seconds.  With a little extra effort you can pretty much hide anything everything windows related and it looks very authentic.  I agree with putting all of the ROMS on drive as you can apply filters or views to the front end to display what you want to display.

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