Main Restorations Software Audio/Jukebox/MP3 Everything Else Buy/Sell/Trade
Project Announcements Monitor/Video GroovyMAME Merit/JVL Touchscreen Meet Up Retail Vendors
Driving & Racing Woodworking Software Support Forums Consoles Project Arcade Reviews
Automated Projects Artwork Frontend Support Forums Pinball Forum Discussion Old Boards
Raspberry Pi & Dev Board controls.dat Linux Miscellaneous Arcade Wiki Discussion Old Archives
Lightguns Arcade1Up Try the site in https mode Site News

Unread posts | New Replies | Recent posts | Rules | Chatroom | Wiki | File Repository | RSS | Submit news

  

Author Topic: Ideal Windows OS for a MAME set up ?  (Read 2048 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

mike boss

  • Trade Count: (+1)
  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 2645
  • Last login:October 22, 2021, 01:19:45 pm
Ideal Windows OS for a MAME set up ?
« on: January 04, 2018, 09:57:26 am »
Long & short of it, I picked up some Remote Power Switches from Costco over the holiday season for $10.
Sweet 3 pack on sale from $18 ! Each outlet allows you to plug in two devices. So I plugged in my Mario Bros & Popeye into one switch. The other is for my DK and DK JR. Two of the 4 cabinets are PC based running MAME + MALA.
I've changed the BIOS to boot from power loss. Everything is working great....except my one MALA PC. I constantly get loss of focus. I've tried all the fixes I've read about and none work.
In the end I've decided to update the set up and go with a new (used) PC.
I found this PC online, small footprint I can toss right into the cabinet. Possibly using a KVM switch and going between PC's. My question, I've always used XP when setting up machines. This PC has Windows 10. Any drawbacks in using Windows 10 ? Are all Windows created equal ? Any advice would be great. Should I format the PC and just add XP ?

The cabinet is set up to play vertical games with a 4 way joystick. So this will be a pretty baisic set up. No emulators or anything fancy. Just MAME and MaLa as the front end with vertical games that require no more than 1 button. (as the control panel is a DK JR control panel)

ASROCK ION 330HT

https://www.kijiji.ca/v-desktop-computers/oshawa-durham-region/asrock-ion-330ht-computer/1323187109?enableSearchNavigationFlag=true

Haze

  • Trade Count: (0)
  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 1296
  • Last login:October 04, 2023, 08:30:02 am
  • I want to build my own arcade controls!
    • MAME Development Blog
Re: Ideal Windows OS for a MAME set up ?
« Reply #1 on: January 04, 2018, 11:59:36 am »
Windows 10 is a FAR better choice than XP, like 100x better.

You should consider Linux before even thinking about XP these days.

Putting XP on anything semi-recent will only cause the machine to struggle because when XP was released a lot of tech was very different to today, a good example is SSD drives, XP really doesn't know how to make proper use of them and will more likely end up killing them more quickly as it simply treats them like any other mechanical drive.

At this point anybody developing software, including emulators, have to take special steps if they want it to even run on XP, not to mention the 64-bit version of XP is so bad it often ends up slower than the 32-bit version, so you're throwing a good 20-30% of your performance away right there by not being able to use a proper 64-bit operating system.





« Last Edit: January 04, 2018, 12:04:04 pm by Haze »

mike boss

  • Trade Count: (+1)
  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 2645
  • Last login:October 22, 2021, 01:19:45 pm
Re: Ideal Windows OS for a MAME set up ?
« Reply #2 on: January 04, 2018, 02:16:52 pm »
Thank you.
I appreciate the info. I'll leave the PC as is.
I have an existing build of MAME (with the ROM set) that I plan on using.
For MaLa I'll use the newest build.

Thanks again

smass

  • Trade Count: (0)
  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 302
  • Last login:January 09, 2024, 07:46:54 pm
  • Cheapskate Arcade
Re: Ideal Windows OS for a MAME set up ?
« Reply #3 on: January 04, 2018, 05:44:40 pm »
If starting from scratch I would say go Windows 7 and disable updates.  Plus keep that sucker off the internet.