Opinions/Assistance needed on hardware

[brandon_brummett]

Right before Christmas I stumbled on Todd Moore's article/blog on putting together an arcade system using a 27" TV as the monitor.  Seeing as how I had a 27" tube TV gathering dust, I thought I might try to do something similar.

I got an old computer very cheap on Craigslist; a Dell Dimension E 521 model with a dual core AMD Athlon 64 3200+ 2GHz processor, and 4 GB of RAM running Windows Vista Home SP2 (32 bit).

When I was tinkering around with the system using a LCD monitor hooked to the standard VGA port, MAME and Nestopia appeared to work OK.

I got a Radeon X1300 Pro card to put in there to take advantage of the S-video out capability to hook to the old TV, and the TV appears to work fine as a monitor; but when I try to run MAME I get a message saying that the video card cannot handle the 3D objects.  I have had some success running games like Donkey Kong and Pacman by using the -video gdi tag.

All that being said, I have a few questions
1 - Will the hardware setup described above work, or should I look at trying to get a better PC (especially if it may be cheaper than trying to make upgrades to it)?
2 - Am I better off ditching the X1300 graphics card and getting a VGA converter box for the TV and use with the onboard VGA port on the computer (especially since I didn't get any error messages when running MAME using it)
3 - Or do I have something messed up (which is a distinct possibility)

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated!

[brandon_brummett]

Tried running Nestopia on the computer and nothing happens.  Thinking the graphics card I put in may be causing a lotime of problems trying to run the emulators...

[processedmeat]

Not sure if this would work but I've noticed that some of my mame builds in the past required DirectX 9.0c drivers. 

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=34429

[brandon_brummett]

I'll try it and see if it works.  I did full deletes and reinstall on the driver (from both Dell and ATI) and that didn't work, so it's worth a shot.

If it doesn't work, I'm ditching the X1300 and old TV and getting an LCD or LED monitor and using the on board port.