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Which OS? Windows 98 or Windows XP?
Howard_Casto:
That's a dumb, uneducated, conclusion man.
Xp requires more resources because it does more stuff. It's as simple as that.
First of all, xp is based on the nt core and anyone will tell you that even in the old days nt always used more resources than 9x. The reason being is it's built server tuff and has all kinds of funky port and network managment stuff running in the background (i'm not a windows expert so don't ask me to be specific) Also it has thread managment and process managment dlls running constantly to keep windows constantly up. In 98 if a program crashes badly you have to restart. In xp nothing happens, you get a nice little dexter report (which can be turned off) xp quietly cleans up the memory leaks and shuts down any remaining dlls and you go about your business. Oh and should I even get into the issue that 9x runs a 16 color window drawing gui with no transparency and xp uses full pallette bitmaps with alpha blending? (Stuff that looks like crap tends to need less resources)
And guess what? If you are so hung up on the extra footprint 60% of xp's resident processes can be turned off without any ill effect. They are there to make your computing experience more stable and useable without you having to worry about it (i.e. it's idiot proof) but in all honesty the average mame cab doesn't need all of that crap. With that in mind, however, xp is STILL a better choice than 98 because:
A. We are at the point that some hardware only works well in xp and since that hardware is newer, running 98 forces you to run older stuff.
B. Same thing with software. Also keep in mind that there are a handful of emulators that are xp only at this point.
C. 98 doesn't take advantage of the newer directx versions properly, so if you have a video card that uses dx9 calls it'll run faster on xp. (related to A. )
D. You can keep xp up indefinately without having to worry about memory leaks and such. With 98 your system will start to get slightly slower after a week. After a month you'll be forced to reboot.
E. Native hardware acceleration to the desktop is added in xp exclusively. This means gdi based fes (like mamewah) will natively run faster than in 98. Same for homebrew games that use bitblt, ect.
It's like i said... if your system can't handle xp then it's old and crappy anyway and should have a complimentary older, crappier os installed on it. As all systems today have a 2+ gig processor and 512 or more megs of ram a beefy footprint is a moot point anyway.
This particular rig is a little iffy, but my last xp machine was a 900mhz and it did fine, so I'm guessing this one will too.
sofakng:
Actually a slight update...
My mine is an Athlon (thunderbird) 1.1 GHz with 512 mb of RAM... It makes it slightly better than what I'd originally thought, but not a huge increase...
Howard_Casto:
512mb of ram is a HUGE difference from 128.... xp is ram intensive, not processor intensive.
Lilwolf:
A few things to add.
XP has a faster boot (important to many around here) because its smarter about boots... caching a lot of what happens.. So even though its slower in general... its faster in boot. And if you have extra cpu power, it just makes it faster.
XP isn't specifically better with new hardware. Its just that hardware manufacturing companies aren't going to optimize to 98. Its not what their worried about.
but all in all... for an arcade cabinet... you wont care 95% of the time.
sofakng:
Ok, what else should I customize on XP?
I've customized the boot screen and now I'd like it to boot right into MAMEWAH. Should I change the XP Shell to mamewah.exe, or do it another way?
What else should/can I customize?