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2023 Budget PC for MAME?
lilshawn:
--- Quote from: javeryh on February 17, 2023, 11:35:09 am ---
--- Quote from: lilshawn on February 16, 2023, 12:42:38 pm ---I go to the government surplus and pick up retired dell optiplex desktop computers for 30 bucks and toss a new harddrive in them. (for security reasons they shred the drives) the computers are usually pretty good performing. i jam as much ram as i can in them, toss a cheap ssd in and let 'er buck.
of course they are old government computers, so they basically do word docs and spreadsheets or some crap and then get tossed every couple years so they don't have tons of hours on them. even the lcd monitors i buy from there have like 5,000 hours on them... just getting broken in.
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Where are these magical government surplus stores you speak of???
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mine is right in my city... also in the next biggest city. they collect items from all the surrounding rural area government facilities and get rid of them in the 2 major cities. it's not always computers, alot is furniture and office supplies and stuff like that, medical equipment... so on. a guy can pick up a pallet of underdesk garbage cans and recycle bins for 15 bucks or a box of random desk supplies for 5. it's completely random what you might see. forestry service changes their work uniforms from tan to green? so a half dozen skids of shirts and pants go to surplus for sale... and lots of it is brand new, and heavy weight material that's good for crawling around under your truck.
they used to have a weekly auction and get rid of stuff by the pallet, but found they make more money when people could just come in and buy....whatever... so now that's what they do.
i mean, they still auction off stuff like cars and buildings, atv's trailers boats all kinds of stuff from fish and wildlife. tools and equipment and stuff from technical schools. there was some confiscated airplanes and rolexes that went up about 4 or 5 years back. all kinds of stuff.
google up "government surplus [insert city or state]" or "government auction [insert city or state]" and see what you can dig up. you'll probably find there is a tiny warehouse place out in the ghetto-est of areas, a signless building where all that stuff is ending up that you can go in and buy stuff.
Yenome:
If you stick to the all killer no filler list from here. that pc will play it all with shaders no issues. i play them all on an old amd cpu. i use mame .206 simply because it was the version that i edited to remove some pop up messages that i didnt want to see when i loaded a game. course i went in a different direction and no longer need a modded mame version
Justin:
I just went through this so I do have some good and up to date advice for you.
I sunset my p4 xp build.
Upgraded to a $200 used Dell Optiplex 9020 i7 gen 4 which has an onboard Radeon AMD 4600HD gpu. I have 16gb tan and an ssd. All for $200. I wanted windows 7 for its lightweight characteristics but that proved a NIGHTMARE to
Fully upgrade drivers. Forget it. Just go win 10 even though it's bloated - is my advice. I upgraded last week.
So it runs mame 0.251 quite fast without any shader effects. I play everything pre 1995 basically and everything has power to spare. Unthrottled at 250-1000% depending on the game.
So let's talk shaders...
I can enable BGFX or HLSL and they both run above 100% speed with all pre 1995 games I've tested. This is at 1920x1600 resolution.
I was planning on buying a dedicated card but was pleasantly surprised that the iGPU handled it.
HOWEVER there is an issue I'm having:
-BGFX has the best effects to my eyes, but it does show dancing black artifacts and I think this may be the iGPU driver. Not good. This is with d3d backend.
-BGFX with OPENGL backend engine shows no artifacts but it is not fast enough on horizontal games for whatever reason (half speed!)
Pure HLSL runs perfectly fine thought and I have settled with that with a custom shader setting that I tweaked and looks almost like BGFX crt-geom-deluxe (my target).
If I really want BGFX I will upgrade to a Nvidia 1080 or maybe 1050 and I'm positive that will solve all issues.
Hope this helps.
Roland_001:
--- Quote from: pbj on February 16, 2023, 12:18:50 am ---Stop being cheap.
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I second this. I've build many PC's before, but am new to MAME, so I did my research, and came across lots of posts recommending a repurposed HP or Dell PC - sounded like a good idea at the time.
So I bought an HP Optiplex 5050 MT (Mid-Tower) off of E-bay, ~ $200. i7 6700, 16G RAM, 1TB SATA, Windows 10 OS. Sounded great on paper!
Then I realized ... I want to run a CRT, which requires a certain series of graphics cards to output 15Hz. No problem, purchased .... except the power supply is too weak to support it. And it uses a proprietary power supply, with no upgrade path. And the case won't accept standard ATX motherboards, and has weird welded/bolted internal architecture, making a simple replacement of pretty much anything a real chore.
So after spending time researching this, and buying an external power supply + adapter to fit into the proprietary mother board slot...it works ok Except, it also has a proprietary power on/off switch with a unique MB header that nobody has the full schematics for apparently. As I wanted to run an external power button to the PC (so I don't have to open up the cabinet each time), I had to spend a good Saturday afternoon of Youtubing and lots of trial and error, to finally Jerry-Rig a weird combination of spliced wires to get it to do what I wanted. By this point, the whole contraption was ungainly, and the various connects were loose, easy to pull out accidentally, and likely ended up costing me more in time and effort than if I had just gotten a modern PC.
I ended up ditching the whole thing, bought new parts for ~ $400 total, but this new rig does everything I need easily, smoothly, with plenty of room for expansion in the future as MAME continues to evolve. The only regret I have is trying to go cheap, which ended up costing me more in time and effort than it was remotely worth.
game_nerd:
soo I 'm just gonna piggyback on this thread so I don't have to make a new one, but what are the options for wanting to play newer than 1995 games?
how high does mame even go? as far as say 2010 era games?