Hardware Suggestions

[wild_eyed]

Hi All just read the "before you post here read this thread" thread so i think im cool to ask.

im planning on building a weecade cabinet for my nephews and nieces for christmas.

using a 17" or 19" 4:3 monitor

what should i run my mame from that is both relatively small and cheap.....

i was looking at the raspberry pi but dont see how they work with a vga monitor and i dont want to spend the 50 euros on a vga convertor.

is my only option to place an old pc in there?

i do have an old Acer Aspire One with broken screen, but works otherwise, it has a vga out and its nice and small but not sure how i would wire the on/off to an external switch.

any thoughts or suggestions?

many thanks

[paigeoliver]

Any PC made since 1998 or so if powerful enough to run mame if you roll back the mame version far enough. Mame is indeed PC software so draw your own conclusions...... 

[JDFan]

The old laptop should be fine (it may not run the newest 3d games but should be fine for most of the older arcade games) -- for the power you can open the laptop case and splice into the wiring on the power switch and run them to an arcade button (or any momentary button) to mount on the bartop back. If you are not sure how well the laptop will play you could always run some play testing with the games you plan to include and see before starting the build. 

[paigeoliver]

People say "older games" but what they really mean is "the 1 percent of games in mame that run on 3D hardware or have hard drives in them". Those type of games are a tiny minority and just about everything else will run full speed with a 90s era processor (and the majority of those one percent require specialty analog controls that you won't have anyway).

[wild_eyed]

yeah cool, this is only for games that work on the hardware everything else will have to wait a few years. CPS2 and Neo Geo and older is fine. getting MDF today.

eek.

[Haze]

People say "older games" but what they really mean is "the 1 percent of games in mame that run on 3D hardware or have hard drives in them". Those type of games are a tiny minority and just about everything else will run full speed with a 90s era processor (and the majority of those one percent require specialty analog controls that you won't have anyway).

Sorry, but this is a massive exaggeration.

A '90s era processor' might get you some static background classics in an ancient version where MAME was designed with an optimization point of only updating the parts of the screen that changed (an optimization rendered useless and actually slower with uglier code once you got to anything with a scrolling background.

I think you have tunnel vision on this because you personally only care about a tiny handful of games that fall into that category, and are even willing to look past how utterly horrendous things like the Gyruss sound emulation, or colours on many games (due to lack of actual PROM dumps & resistor weight use) etc. was back then.  Even emulation of popular systems like CPS1 was full of hacks and glitches for a long time (MT was packed with them) because we didn't emulate the behavior graphic addressing PALs etc. properly and hacked around them.

It's not "the 1 percent of games in mame that run on 3D hardware or have hard drives in them" where you need a good processor.  If you want to guarantee a rock solid 100% there are a huge number of titles where you need something decent.  While they've not been officially re-included yet the newer Cave titles for example really do need an i5 if you want to avoid framerate drops and those are neither 3D hardware, nor have a hard drive, nor require fancy controls, and are definitely something people are interested in.  Plenty of older, but still popular drivers also have high requirements (the properly mixed Batsugun emulation is quite demanding, Sega's System 32 is too, some of the popular PGM titles)  This stuff isn't going to run on a 90s processor, it wasn't even emulated in the 90s.

I know people talk about Blitz and some fancy racers, but there's quite a lot more and I'm sure when we fix the remaining (and in places still quite serious) bugs in something like Taito F3 the system requirements will shoot right up too.

[wild_eyed]

In addition to my first post.

is there a decent light that would run off 5volt usb for the header?

[PL1]

is there a decent light that would run off 5volt usb for the header?

If you mean the marquee, that's a pretty tall order.

IIRC USB spec calls for motherboard ports to be rated for 500mA current draw, with unpowered hub ports rated for 100mA.

Much more available power if you tap into a molex or other power connector.


Scott