Is this PC adequate for a full Multicade system

[DickTurpin]

Hi Chaps

Want to run:

Arcade
Neo Geo
PS1
PS2
AmigaCD32
Super Nintendo
Megadrive (Genesis)
C64
and Amstrad CPC464

games on it. I have the original games so transferring would be roms I own legally. I want them to run nice and smooth.

What do you think ?

Dual Core 3Ghz AMD ATHLON II X2 250
8GB Ram - Currently 4
1TB hard drive
has internal GFX AMD / ATi HD3000 shared memory - But theres 8GB
Windows 7 - Currently have XP

Thanks

[BadMouth]

Probably won't do the PS2 without a video card and even then will probably only to 2D games.

It's easily enough for everything else mentioned.

EDIT: I assume by arcade you mean MAME.  It will run the 2D games in MAME fine.  It would probably run Model 2 emulator fine.  Supermodel no.  Demul, not without a video card and then it will be hit or miss per game.  I'm running the gun games in Demul on a 2.9Ghz X3 with an 8600GT, but it chokes a little bit on the shmups.

[rpgposer]

Probably won't do the PS2 without a video card and even then will probably only to 2D games.

It's easily enough for everything else mentioned.

Seconded.  I have a dual core intel 3GHZ and it does everything except above except PS2 games.  You might squeak by with a discrete video card, but some games will still have slowdown issues.

[DickTurpin]

Ok so take out the PS2.

The rest is good to go? I have a fully built arcade cabinet I can buy for £350. Which includes delivery.
Its a robust one as they use them in pubs. Its black and has a steel control panel with the button holes already cut out.

My idea is to put the joysticks and buttons in and then put my computer in as is. It has plenty of room.

Yes I do mean Mame.
I don't know if you can see properly from the photo but it has 2 player six buttons.


Edited: Demul. I have looked and I don't think I need it. I have never heard of some of the systems it emulates

[BadMouth]

You should be fine.  Sounds like your expectations are reasonable.  You'll be able to play the 2D fighters from the 90's and maybe Tekken depending on which revision of MAME you use (older ones are less demanding).  Tekken can be run on Zinc emulator (playstation based arcade hardware) if it doesn't work on MAME. ...and of course everything older than that.

You'll have a LOT for not so much investment.  Building PCs for emulation is a game of diminishing returns.  You can use what you have and play a couple thousand games, spend $500 to make it play a couple dozen more....and then another $500 to get only a half dozen more working full speed.
Gotta draw the line somewhere.

(I'm hoping to draw my next line past Ridge Racer in MAME which requires a current top shelf processor)

[rpgposer]

Demul emulates sega dreamcast based hardware home and arcade games.  *Note - none of these games run at full speed on my dual core.

[DickTurpin]

The PC itself, including Win XP service pack 3-cost me £170 New with the Cab £350 and Joysticks and Happ Comp. Buttons I think I am all in at £650 which is great. For an all singing dancing upright arcade machine. Yeah.

--- I never got into Dreamcast. In the UK it was dead before it came out.

I will be more than happy with my lot with the stuff I have working nicely in this cab with 1 switchable joystick 4/8 way on the left for old school games. One 8 way on the right. And switch to play 2 player eight way fighting games.

I could always upgrade as and when I have spare cash. Even then only if its worth it. Thanks for the advice chaps

[paigeoliver]

Console titles past the Sega Genesis often don't play well on arcade panels. At the bare minimum they will have shoulder buttons which many titles use in a directional fashion that doesn't translate intuitively to an arcade control panel (which is why the arcade version of the SNES had Gamepads on the control panel instead of joysticks). Once you get past the SNES it gets even worse, analog joysticks, dual shoulder buttons, analog shoulder buttons, dual analog joysticks, etc.

  Also, just giving you some trouble here. 

But it seems rather odd that someone with a collection of arcade games and neo geo cartridges to transfer the roms from legally wouldn't already own a a cabinet! 

[Haze]

Console titles past the Sega Genesis often don't play well on arcade panels. At the bare minimum they will have shoulder buttons which many titles use in a directional fashion that doesn't translate intuitively to an arcade control panel (which is why the arcade version of the SNES had Gamepads on the control panel instead of joysticks). Once you get past the SNES it gets even worse, analog joysticks, dual shoulder buttons, analog shoulder buttons, dual analog joysticks, etc.

  Also, just giving you some trouble here. 

But it seems rather odd that someone with a collection of arcade games and neo geo cartridges to transfer the roms from legally wouldn't already own a a cabinet! 

It depends what games you're wanting to run tho.. sure, most FPS games and action/adventure/platform 3d titles are out of the question but there are a ton of shooters and puzzle games for the likes of the PSX and Saturn where you don't need any advanced controls, especially from the Japanese market where 2D remained popular for a lot longer.

[paigeoliver]

Oh yes there are certainly a few, but the bulk of them don't work out well, getting worse the newer the system is.

Console titles past the Sega Genesis often don't play well on arcade panels. At the bare minimum they will have shoulder buttons which many titles use in a directional fashion that doesn't translate intuitively to an arcade control panel (which is why the arcade version of the SNES had Gamepads on the control panel instead of joysticks). Once you get past the SNES it gets even worse, analog joysticks, dual shoulder buttons, analog shoulder buttons, dual analog joysticks, etc.

  Also, just giving you some trouble here. 

But it seems rather odd that someone with a collection of arcade games and neo geo cartridges to transfer the roms from legally wouldn't already own a a cabinet! 

It depends what games you're wanting to run tho.. sure, most FPS games and action/adventure/platform 3d titles are out of the question but there are a ton of shooters and puzzle games for the likes of the PSX and Saturn where you don't need any advanced controls, especially from the Japanese market where 2D remained popular for a lot longer.

[DickTurpin]

Arcade games pre-Street Fighter 2.  - 3 buttons max. 4 way / 8 way. (Using switch tick)
Neo Geo - 4 ?

C64/Amiga/CPC - 1 button Joystick should do the trick. I hear what you say about old Joysticks but if I can map the keys surely it will work alright ?

I have seen people play Megadrive/Super Famicom using computer keyboards so I should imagine as long as I don't want to use the dedicated Start , Select , Pause I should be alright.

Perhaps PS1 will be awkward. I might come back to that.
I don't like systems that are newer than say 96.

[DickTurpin]

I am not into FPS beyond Quake. Doom & W3D were to dogs bollocks but apart from that there's been some awful ones. Max Payne would be good. So would Monkey Island but you have to stop somewhere. Like yer man said draw the line.

[stigzler]

Having just gone through 2 mobos and 2 CPU purchases and upgrades due to NOT deciding at the start what emuulators I want to run (ooo... I can run PS2, you say... ) I can shed some light.

Tried running PS2 Emu on Dual Core with 1G GPU and 4Gb RAM (the ram doesn't really matter - as PCSX2 is mainly CPU heavy) - can just about get it there on E8500 Overclocked to 3.7, but it is touch and go.

Demul is useful for Dreamcast, Naomi 1+2and another Sega system (which I can't recall). I tried using Demul for lightgun games on dreamcast, but doesn't run well on XP - new version needs Vista and upwards for the new direct X.

Moral - if you're looking to build a system that can play PS2 games and also accommodate future emulators (Xbox or future arcade boards) then go for newer mobo, with i5 or i7 CPU and fast RAM. If you'recontent with PS1 level games and below, then your setup should be fine.

Me, I bought an i7, new mobo and 6GbDDR ram two days ago. I want the lot! And I want the next lot! Specs here:

https://sites.google.com/site/alienarcade74/project-updates/oooops-anothervisittomrvisaforupgrade

I know I will just want to keep expanding this thing, so best to invest at the start by my reaconning.

I now have 4 spare mobo, cpu and ram combos just waiting for new cabinets!! Maybe I should sell them and try and claw some money back from this expensive adventure

hope this helps.

[lilshawn]

with all that said, a little piece of advice.

Get yourself a processor with the fastest CORE speed you can afford. 2/4/6/8 cores won't do you much good if they are running at 2.5ghz.

most emulators don't take advantage of more than 2 cores. A 3.2ghz dual core will outperform a 4 core at 2ghz in these instances.

Also check out different emulators to see what kind of multi core support you can get...the more you can spread out the load across multiple cores, the better the performance is going to be.

[epetti]

with all that said, a little piece of advice.

Get yourself a processor with the fastest CORE speed you can afford. 2/4/6/8 cores won't do you much good if they are running at 2.5ghz.

most emulators don't take advantage of more than 2 cores. A 3.2ghz dual core will outperform a 4 core at 2ghz in these instances.

Also check out different emulators to see what kind of multi core support you can get...the more you can spread out the load across multiple cores, the better the performance is going to be.

To a point...  I have a Pentium 4 3.4 GHz, and I'm pretty sure a Core based processor even at 2.66GHz would be faster just because the base architecture has improved enough.

[lilshawn]

with all that said, a little piece of advice.

Get yourself a processor with the fastest CORE speed you can afford. 2/4/6/8 cores won't do you much good if they are running at 2.5ghz.

most emulators don't take advantage of more than 2 cores. A 3.2ghz dual core will outperform a 4 core at 2ghz in these instances.

Also check out different emulators to see what kind of multi core support you can get...the more you can spread out the load across multiple cores, the better the performance is going to be.

To a point...  I have a Pentium 4 3.4 GHz, and I'm pretty sure a Core based processor even at 2.66GHz would be faster just because the base architecture has improved enough.

depends on the instruction set. if the program makes use of them, then yes, there will be a marked improvement. if not, then not really. your main improvement area would be in cache size differences and prefetch optimization between those processors.

slower processors often will have larger caches to try and make up for lousy speed making them seem fast in non-intensive situations, but fall short in heavy loads. this is what we don't want for emulation, we need consistency.

[DickTurpin]

All good advice. Thanks again.

Yeah see that's my point, I grew up in the 80s and being able to run anything upto 2000 will do me fine.

If I do go into PS2 territory. I might have to upgrade the PC. In the UK a all you can eat gaming pc will be yours for about £400 / $600.

I will have a blast for now when this is up and think about upgrading next year some time.

Sometimes I think yeah but its retro. I don't really see the point of using a all singing all dancing current gaming pc for retro gaming? Would prefer to be playing Max Payne 3 on it or the new Grand Theft Auto 5

[Felsir]

I have this setup in my cab, for about  £260:
Asus P8H61-M mainboard, Intel Core i3 3220
4GB DDR3 Kinston, 450watt PSU
Radeon HD6670
1TB harddrive

And it can run PS2 games fine (I have Burnout Revenge and SSX Tricky set up for it) also runs Gamecube games in 1920x1080 (we play mostly Mario Kart Double Dash and Mario Supercharged Soccer). I have installed a USB port to hook up game pads for those games.

For Amiga games you can reconfigure the controls per game in WinUAE (make a profile for each game), many games are more than just joystick+1 firebutton (spacebar for megabomb in many shooters for example). But usually nothing a bit of configuring can fix.
The C64 however is a pain to set up, with each game having different setups ("press F1 for 1 player game, F3 for 2 players", some games use gamepor1 others port2 for example).

[DickTurpin]

I have this setup in my cab, for about  £260:
Asus P8H61-M mainboard, Intel Core i3 3220
4GB DDR3 Kinston, 450watt PSU
Radeon HD6670
1TB harddrive

And it can run PS2 games fine (I have Burnout Revenge and SSX Tricky set up for it) also runs Gamecube games in 1920x1080 (we play mostly Mario Kart Double Dash and Mario Supercharged Soccer). I have installed a USB port to hook up game pads for those games.

For Amiga games you can reconfigure the controls per game in WinUAE (make a profile for each game), many games are more than just joystick+1 firebutton (spacebar for megabomb in many shooters for example). But usually nothing a bit of configuring can fix.
The C64 however is a pain to set up, with each game having different setups ("press F1 for 1 player game, F3 for 2 players", some games use gamepor1 others port2 for example).

Felsir. Thanks for that plenty of good info. Yeah I was forgetting that space bar bomb etc. And C64 a bit like the old Speccy where you had different joysticks.
Is there any way around the loading times? I want a quick jump in and go. I have Amiga CD32 games.

[Felsir]

Is there any way around the loading times? I want a quick jump in and go. I have Amiga CD32 games.

For C64 the way to go is to use snapshots. That way you can skip all the intro's, trainers and load times. For Amiga it's a trial-and-error with setting the diskdrive emulation to emulate speed as well. In some cases games had special disk-loaders where you will need to have 100% emulation, others are more straightforward. In my experience the emulator loads way faster than a real Amiga anyway.
Also, some games have HD installers. You can make a virtual harddrive and install games on HD0: which speeds things up as well (and is very useful in multidisk games).

[Vigo]

Felsir is spot on. He is one of the few people I know of here who put in the effort with some of those old loady systems for their machine.

I recommend reading this thread about setting up C64 on your computer. It offers a few options of routes to take.

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,121298.msg1286807.html#msg1286807

If you read reply #4 by me, I post exactly how I set up my machine to handle C64 games. Mostly on how to do snapshots to skip trainers and load time, and also on how to set custom controls. I used MaLa, but I'm sure it can be used with other frontends as well. The only thing I didn't bother with on my setup is multi-disk games, but I know there is a method of doing it.

[DickTurpin]

Thanks Felsir  . Thanks Vigo . OK. I have to admit to only dabbling in c64/Amiga emulaton. I have written games for both platforms. But with emulation I hate the hacker stuff that always seems there on C64.

I brought a proper commerical collection of C64 with games. And they had it. If I create a snapshot. I can bypass all that crap. I am assuming I am basically grabbing the contents of the memory my only issue being if it doesn't take a clean image. I suppose I will have to read up on it.

Thanks again