What games will I NOT be able to play with a PII 733?

[exibar]

I have an old Dell demension Pentium III 733 with 512Meg RAM and an 80 Gig HD that I'm going to be using for my Mame cab with 25" WG arcade monitor.
   Does anyone else have a similliar setup?  I'd like to know what games I WILL NOT be able to play with this machine.  I'm using Arcade OS, running on DOS and will be using z26, NESticle, MAME, and perhaps a couple other emus as well.  The importance is on MAME, of course though.

   What's the highest CPU I can put in a Dell Demension 733?  If I have to, I'll upgrade it, but like the rest of us, I don't want to spend needless money if I don't have to.

  thanks all!
  Mike B
 

[monkeybomb]

One of my setups is a pIII 550, 256mb pc100 ram, running windows 98 and fastmame .84.  I can't play mortal combat or any fighting game like it.  I also can't play puzzle bobble 4 (? I think)

I can play mavel v capcom and the like.  ALL the old games run great.

When you're done test MK and MK3 and let me know how they work.

[whammoed]

My office comp is a p3 700 which struggles with MortalKombat on the new versions of mame.  I remember when I first got into mame (version 5#?) it ran fine.  So maybe with an older version you won't have trouble with much.  The cabs I have built had new comps so I never had to worry about it so unfortunately I can't give you any real good specifics.

[paigeoliver]

Using a Mame around .69 or so you should be able to run darn near everything, except hard drive games, STUN Runner, and SOME of the Mortal Kombat hardware games.

You aren't going to get enough of a processor upgrade out of that system for it to matter.

[TalkingOctopus]

I have a p3 733 w/ 512 memory in my arcade using MAME .66.  I am very happy with it.  It will not run CHD games, and has trouble w/ mortal combat as well as a few other games.  However, it runs everything that I want it to in MAME.

[RayB]

Why exactly do games become slower with additional releases of MAME? It really doesn't make sense to me. The code should be getting more and more optimized, not more and more bloated and slow. Why is this so?

[GameDork]

Why exactly do games become slower with additional releases of MAME? It really doesn't make sense to me. The code should be getting more and more optimized, not more and more bloated and slow. Why is this so?

Yeah, I was wondering the same thing...........

[whammoed]

It is my understanding that the code changes to have more accurate emulation, with no "tricks" or anything to get it to run faster.  Sometimes more accurate means it also needs more processing power.  I could be wrong.

[bryan1945]

From mame.net's faq:

The software keeps adding more advanced hardware to emulate, at the expense of older hardware.

For the full explanation-  http://www.mame.net/mamefaq.html#m13

Why exactly do games become slower with additional releases of MAME? It really doesn't make sense to me. The code should be getting more and more optimized, not more and more bloated and slow. Why is this so?

[DvMxDv]

Interesting...

I'm planning on using a PIII 800 for my Mame cab.  I tested the machine this weekend because of this thread.  Currently the machine only has 128MB of RAM.  I downloaded Mame32 .85 (I figured it would be the most bloated and slow for test purposes) and could run Mortal Kombat and SFII World at full speed on Windows98.  I haven't tried any of the hard drive games yet, so I don't know if they will be a problem.  I've got 512MB of PC133 that I'll be installing before it goes in the cab, and I'll also be altering the system.ini to boot GameLauncher as my shell rather than Windows.  Guess I'll see in a few weeks how it all works out.

Dave