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Is this PC adequate for a full Multicade system
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lilshawn:

--- Quote from: epetti on July 11, 2013, 04:37:53 pm ---
--- Quote from: lilshawn on July 11, 2013, 04:30:58 pm ---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.

--- End quote ---

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.


--- End quote ---

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:

--- Quote from: Felsir on July 12, 2013, 04:58:38 am ---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).

--- End quote ---

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:

--- Quote from: DickTurpin on July 12, 2013, 10:09:34 am ---Is there any way around the loading times? I want a quick jump in and go. I have Amiga CD32 games.
--- End quote ---

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).
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