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games on a 450Mhz computer

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goofy:

Is there a list somewhere of games that will work at full speed FPS (isn't it 60 fps generally) on an old 450Mhz computer?

I see Vantage supports about 80 - 90 games (http://www.mameworld.net/pc2jamma/vantage.html) and I'm assuming those will all run at 450Mhz. But just wondering if there is more or less a definitively list of the minimum processor required to get full speed out of each game using either Vantage or MAME?



paigeoliver:

Install Mame version .55

Every game supported by that version should run full speed.

Problem solved.

(Mame .55 also supports pretty much everything the current Mame supports, at least the important stuff).

You see there can't really be a list anywhere of what will run on what because there are like 50 Mame versions now, and each new one is generally slower than the last, so the Mame version matters A LOT.

MonitorGuru:

The key actually is to drive an old arcade monitor instead of a computer monitor.

On a 600 MHZ Duron chip with 128 meg of memory, I can get 180 fps/60fps (i.e. 300% speed) out of things like Donkey Kong and Ms.Pacman when driving a 1:1 pixel output, even on an old ancient, crappy 1997, 4 meg PCI video card.

The reason: 1:1 pixel mapping. No extra work by the processor or video card to multiple/scale pixels with driver libaries to display on a 640x480 or 1024x768 monitor. That's what eats your clock cycles in mame.  

Download AdvanceMame and connect to an arcade monitor and I bet you can run even on a 233 MHz Pentium 1 with a 2 meg video card at better than full speed, at least for the classics, even with the latest releases of AdvanceMame like .84

SirPoonga:

well, .55 doesn't have the better asteroids and other discrete logic sound :)  But it will do.  ALSo you may want to think about nebula or kawaks emulators for neogeo, cps1, and cps2 games.

captainpotato:

I'm just in the process of setting up my K6-2 500 box with 256mb RAM and a TNT2 M64 graphics card for my cocktail cabinet (perhaps a little overkill on some things, but it works and it's not worth much as anything else).

At the moment, it's running Fraggal's AdvanceMAME/ArcadeOS/DOS 7 installation CD, available from here. It uses a fairly recent version of AdvanceMAME (not sure which one), and it can play Gauntlet at full speed on most levels using a 15" PC monitor.

I haven't configured it perfectly yet (far from it, to be honest), but with the ROMs that work (I have a real mish-mash collection built up over the last few years, so they aren't all compatible with the same MAME version), but it plays most mid- to late-1980s stuff fine: F1Dream and WEC Le Mans run at full speed, and older stuff is fine as well.

If you have a PIII 450, you'll be even better off than I am. From my tests to date, the choice of OS is important: Linux (Slackware 9) wasn't quick enough for Gauntlet (on a Celeron 433 with onboard graphics chip), but DOS 7 seems to be enough for what I what to run.

I'm going to try Vantage (I'm making a cocktail cabinet) and a couple of older AdvanceMAME versions, so I'll let you know how the machine copes. I've also got access to a 14" NEC3D monitor that does 15kHz modes, so I'm tempted to use that instead of the 15" one.

The biggest issue I'm having so far is configuring the monitor correctly for a few games, but that's more my inexperience than anything else :P



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