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Which OS? Windows 98 or Windows XP?
danny_galaga:
--- Quote from: Howard_Casto on July 21, 2004, 06:45:01 pm ---
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.
--- End quote ---
damn, you mean im going to have to reboot my mame cabinet EVERY month?
Minwah:
--- Quote from: danny_galaga on July 22, 2004, 11:10:44 am ---damn, you mean im going to have to reboot my mame cabinet EVERY month?
--- End quote ---
I think Howard was maybe being a bit conservative there for once. I know I had to restart my old Win98 machine all the time (at least once an evening). It pissed me off to the extent I *bought* XP, and I have never intended to place any of my hard earned into Gates' hands before...but I have been happy ever since - it hasn't crashed once :)
Howard_Casto:
Agreed... there was a point I wouldn't even run mame because I had the hideous combination of 98se and mame 32 (i'm thinking about version .36 or soemthing llike that). Whenever a game maxed out the system's resources, mame would crash and I would have to reboot. Playing with test drivers.... crash, reboot. Multitasking (maybe I have something compling in the background) crash, reboot.
I was being a tad kind. On a mame cab with NOTHING on it mame might be stable. Otherwise, not really.
Grasshopper:
Howard, I'm afraid you're a victim of the Micro$oft marketing machine!
In any case, if you re-read the third paragraph of my original "dumb, uneducated" post you'll see that I agree XP is superior. If is wasn't you'd have to question what the Microsoft people had been doing with their vast resources over the past 6 years.
The point I was making was that most of the improvements are of little relevance to a typical home PC user, certainly not enough to justify the cost and hassle of upgrading. Although I mainly use 98SE at home we use XP at work, and I honestly have to say that from the user perspective, the only obvious difference between the two is XP's prettier icons.
Most people don't even care about that. Tell a typical PC user that "XP uses full palette bitmaps with alpha blending" and they'll just stare at you blankly.
The only point you make that is really relevant to cab builders is that XP supposedly makes better use of DirectX 9 calls resulting in faster modern games. That may or may not be true but at the moment it doesn't really matter. We're going through a phase where the rate of increase in PC processing power is far outstripping the ability of games developers to make use of the extra power. And that situation also applies, even more so, to desktop applications (wordprocessors, spreadsheets etc).
The extra stability of XP will be relevant if you're carrying out a mission critical task but this is not really an issue for most home users.
{provocation_mode on
If course any sensible person requiring a rock solid industrial-strength operating system will be using Linux but that's a debate probably best left for another thread....
provocation_mode off}
Getting back to MAME cabs....
A MAME cab is essentially an embedded application and Windows (all PC versions) is not really a suitable tool for this task. Microsoft recognises this and that is why they developed Windows CE. Unfortunately, in their infinite wisdom, they have decided not to make a stand-alone version of CE available to the general public.
The best options (IMHO) for a MAME cab are DOS (if you can find drivers for your hardware, and can live without USB), or a stripped down version of Linux (if you have the necessary expertise).
One advantage of Win98SE that I forgot to mention is that it sits on top of MSDOS 7, so you don't have to purchase MSDOS separately if you choose to go down that route.
Now if Microsoft produced a version of XP that could be disengaged from its GUI and also ditched their product activation nonsense (another debate for another thread) then I'd happily upgrade tomorrow.
danny_galaga:
--- Quote from: Howard_Casto on July 22, 2004, 03:25:59 pm ---I was being a tad kind. On a mame cab with NOTHING on it mame might be stable. Otherwise, not really.
--- End quote ---
no might be about it! mines super fine with 98se and mame32. can leave it on for days...