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| jonnik:
Yeah I was not planning on having it as part of my home network its purely a gaming machine. This is my first project thopugh and all this advice is really welcome, it will a lot of first for me including building a PC and I just dont want to make a complete hash of it. the actually woodwork and building the control panel I should be comfortable with its teh hardware and software I need I am unsure of. |
| dkersten:
Hardware isn't too big of a deal, just make sure to go with a discrete graphics card, preferably one with a little power and preferably something newer that supports directx11 if you intend to use Demul (pain in the butt otherwise). I have heard that the newer Intel CPU's with the 4000 GPU built in do indeed work with mame in d3d mode and even run HLSL with no problem, but I have had issues trying to run mame with on board graphics a few times now (older machines). I highly recommend you get the computer together first, figure out which front end you want to use, and start messing with it now. I bet I have well over 200 hours into software setup now, and I could easily spend another 200 hours before it is where I would really like it to be. Getting a FE working is usually pretty simple. Getting mame working is usually pretty simple. But getting all the artwork, cabinet pics, control panel pics, flyers, snapshots, videos, creating a custom layout, and making it all work together will take some time. Then getting mame dialed in the way you want for your games will take some time. Then getting your game list refined will take a LOT of time. Setting controls up will take some time. And once you get all that working the way you want, then you get to look at other emulators. And once you have those running right, adding them to your front end can take a lot as well. And that isn't even considering things like collecting CHD files, getting a control panel viewer to work, and compiling your own builds of mame. And all of the above gets multiplied once you decide to add a new type of control (and hence a new type of game). Add an aimtrak, and you will end up with many hours spent dialing it in on each game. Add a wheel and you will spend many hours making it work for each game.. ETC ETC.... You can never start too early with software, and most likely after a year you will still not be done playing with it. |
| jonnik:
Thanks for all the advice I will get the PC built and then am sure I will be back for software advice no doubt. If I was to use a Intel i3-550 Core i3 Dual-Core Processor -3.20GHz, 4MB Cache, Socket 1156 what motherboard, graphics, sound and PCU would you reccommend ? |
| dkersten:
Are you locked into that CPU? Everything has migrated to the 1155 and 1150 sockets, it is hard to find 1156 socket based motherboards now. Plus the latest generation of the core series draws nearly half the power of those gen2 core i processors. I am a fan of EVGA motherboards and graphics cards. You won't need anything special on the mobo like SLI compatibility or anything, so just pick from the least expensive for the type of CPU you get.. I have had good luck with ASRock motherboards lately too, good bang for the buck. No need for anything more than built in audio. As for graphics, the bigger the better but keep in mind that the bigger you go, the bigger your PSU needs to be. For single card systems, a 600 watt is probably more than sufficient. Unless you are anal about power draw, just get an 80+ and you will be fine. If you stick to a sub $100 gpu you probably don't need more than 350-400 watts either. I prefer NVidia over AMD. The 740 would probably suffice for most games, but if you want a little extra juice jump to a 750ti, which will run just about any modern PC game as well as anything emulators can throw at you. If you want your Front End to run really well, and games to launch fast, go with an SSD for your main drive. Prices are down so low that you can get into a half terabyte for pretty cheap any more, and the performance is worlds above any mechanical drive. |
| jonnik:
No not locked in at all its just one I was looking at I will keep looking, I been told asrock are decent will look further into that. Thanks again for all the advice guys I will be sure to be back for more before the end of the build |
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