Are there any modern computers that *can't* run most emulators/games?

[shponglefan]

I keep seeing threads where people ask if -insert modern computer specs here- will be able to run MAME, SNES, etc, games.  But are there really computers these days not up to the task?

Now there are handful of MAME games I am aware of that require absolute beast CPU power to run (i.e. NFL Blitz), but those are in the rare minority.  Every other emulator that I am aware of should be able to run just fine on a modern PC.  Personally, I've had zero issues with emulation going back to when I had an Athlon 2500+.  And this includes everything up to and include N64 and PSX emulation.

So besides the specialized lower-power, micro-style computers, are there any that won't run modern emulators?

[mamenewb100]

If your talking about the new mame versions, than I think you would need at least a 1.5 GHz single core Athlon processor to get full speed in anything other than NFL Blitz and 3D-era games. Of course most people have that nowadays unless someone is using a hand-me-down Dell computer from 10 years ago or something.

You might be able to get by with a 1 Ghz CPU on old MAME versions. I'm just guessing though, it's been awhile since I've used MAME on PCs that old.

[404]

I keep seeing threads where people ask if -insert modern computer specs here- will be able to run MAME, SNES, etc, games.  But are there really computers these days not up to the task?

Now there are handful of MAME games I am aware of that require absolute beast CPU power to run (i.e. NFL Blitz), but those are in the rare minority.  Every other emulator that I am aware of should be able to run just fine on a modern PC.  Personally, I've had zero issues with emulation going back to when I had an Athlon 2500+.  And this includes everything up to and include N64 and PSX emulation.

So besides the specialized lower-power, micro-style computers, are there any that won't run modern emulators?

I'm not a mame expert by any means but i have been lucky enough to have quite a lot of various decommissioned corporate/fleet PCs and specialty project units at my disposal since i started tinkering with mame. I can give you a short answer simply based on my small experiments and that is, no. I honestly can't see how a modern PC couldn't run most games. You really don't need a high powered PC to run most of the common games and run common classic console emulators such as nes, snes, genesis/megadrive, sms, turbografx/pc-engine, c64 etc. A number of people have already proven that you can get thousands of mame games running perfectly fine with zero frameskip set on a standard Pentium4 era socket 478 rig.

This is just my own personal opinion: I personally don't see much point in buying newer hardware to play one or two specialized games.  That's just me.