PC questions.

[EvilstEEEvE]

I'm going to start getting all the stuff together i need to build myself a cabinet, but first I am going upgrade some of my computer hardware.  I need some help figuring how much RAM should I have for everything to run like butter and which video card out there works the best?

[Lilwolf]

Take the size of the largest rom you want to run and multiply it by 3.  128 should do it, but the prices of ram these days just go with 512 or 256 just to be sure

[Howard_Casto]

for just mame and mame alone 128 might do it but if you plan on running anything else go ahead and get 256+  Depending on your vid card the mk and other demanding games won't run well with only 128.....  

Sound processing take a butt-load of ram, which I don't think alot of people realize.  You see you vid card has it's own ram and processors to deal with graphics but unfortuantely, even the best sound cards only have and encoding/decoder chip with no ram.  

How a sound card works is it allocates a big portion of your system ram to do all of the calculations/decoding via your sound card drivers, calling the onboard sound chips when necessary.  Now add the fact that your doing this twice (once for real and once to emulate the sound chip on the original arcade board.)  and this takes alot of ram.  This is why the newer neo-geo and some of the newer miday games take so much processing power and ram, not for the graphics but for the sound decoding.  That's why the mk games are perfectly playable on really old machines if you turn the sound off.  

Why did I bring this up?  No real reason except that the newer games which aren't emulated in mame yet have far more advanced sound processors even though the graphic load is always going to remain the same on a 2D game. Plan for the future, get way too much ram.  It won't seem silly a year or two down the road.