Poll - What Speed Is The PC In Your Cabinet?

[bcard74]

Just trying to get a better feel for what sort of computer I need to stick in my cabinet.  I am mainly looking to play the 80s type games of Track And Field, Pac Man, Pole Poisition, Arkanoid, etc.  But I would also like to be able to make sure that there is no lag at all and get in some Golden Tee as well.  I am looking at 2 joysticks, a wheel, track ball, and maybe a spinner with about 3 or 4 buttons a side.

So what do you have in your cabinet?  Thanks!

[HeadRusch]

Well I'm kinda new here myself...was going to buy a SLIKSTIK and then after trading blows with some opinionated folks here, started to think to myself "you know, rolling my own might be kinda fun".  And now I'm getting caught up in the fun of doing it yourself.

I have one spare PC: Pentium Pro 200 with 96 megs of RAM.  I'm going to install MAME on this over the weekend (gotta get it up on my LAN) and see how it does running games.  If its acceptable, I might make this into an Old Skool box.  I dont know that it would run games like Track and Field well or not.  Only way is to try

However, I went to www.pricewatch.com and got myself a barebones Athlon, in a case, with a decent motherboard...XP1700 I think (1.5Ghz), 256 megs of ram, soundblaster live 5.1....40 gig HD and an ATI Radeon 8500 for just about $350 and change, which is probably overkill for just about any MAME game out there, but it was so cheap I couldn't pass it up.  Nice thing is that it will also run Counterstrike, Unreal Tournament, and some of the cool PC driving games too.....on my home LAn thats a whole nother realm of fun.

Good Luck!

[MameFan]

I have a Duron 850 overclocked to about 920.

I have a VisionTek (now out of business) 5632 GeForce2 GTS card.. Overclocked to the max.. Great card for $45 when it was still available before VisionTek went belly-up a couple weeks ago.

Key is: Be sure you have a motherboard that supports 4x AGP bus, and a video card that runs at 4X AGP.

Why? Because if you want any special video features like scanlines or special modes (or even normally), a 2x or 1x AGP just wont cut it.

Example: I had a Celeron 633 overclocked at 950 Mhz. Same card, different motherboard (only supported 2x AGP). I couldn't even run MsPacMan full screen without it dropping about 1 out of 30 frames or so.

Unthrottled, MsPac topped out at around 140 FPS on that system. On the new one, I get at least 350 if I remember right.

So motherboard + CPU + video card all go in the mix. You do NOT need a $250 GeForce4 to play mame games, because even with that card on an old sucky motherboard, you wont get any better results than with some no-name $30 video card.

So plan it right, and you'll have no problems.

BTW--Yes, even with the GeForce2 GTS (note: not the disabled "MX" versions), I can even play relatively newer games like Metal Slug full screen without a single frame drop.   So $50 motherboard + $50 CPU + $50 video card is all you need... So long as you choose wisely!!!!!

[kgriffin]

I have a Dell Optiplex 833 that is way overkill for the early 80's games. If you are a track and field - asteroids - pacman kind of person, you might get away with the 200.

PS. Ms PacMan screams on my system and I have a PCI video card.

[Howard_Casto]

The general rule of thumb around here are these specs:

Never have less than 64 mb of ram if you can help it.

With that being said....

For the classics:  

minimum 200mhz with 64 mb of ram or less

For the street fighter era and below (up to 1993 games)

300mhz with 128+ megs of ram

For a generally good mame cab that will run most of the newer games  at high speed:

500-600 mhz 256+ megs of ram

For a machine that will run all mame games save one or two...

700-900 mhz with 512 megs of ram

For an overkill machine that will run all but two or three mame geams full speed as well as the newer 3d emulators....

1.2 gigs +  with 512 megs of ram



other factors that are important (some were mentioned before)

If the processor is halfway decent get a mb for it with an agp slot as the bettter graphics cards are usually in agp form.  

Get a video card that best suits your needs. If your using tv out you need to go with an ati, if you arnet as concerned about that then the geforce cards are slightly faster for 3d performance.  Ati's still out-perform the geforce's in 2d though.  

Get a decent sound card to reduce cracks and pops.  A genuine sound blaster is best.  Dos likes the old ISA sb 16's.  For windoze get a nice sb live.  


I personally have a amd athlon 900 mhz with 51 megs of ram.  As far as mame is concerned it gets the job done and then some. For the newer 3d emulators it's starting to show it's age a little though.  Despite this it's still fast enough for playability in all respects.    

[Smack]

I've got a measly Pentium 3 1ghz with 256 meg ram, running under pure dos with the current Advance MAME release. No probs here. I play mostly classic stuff so no speed issue.  (Sound set at 22050) No scanlines


Smack

[james]

I am running

800 Duron
ECS Mobo K7SEM
256 MB Ram
8MB ATi <- Wanted to run Voodoo 3, but Mobo/Grphx card have a known issue. It's waiting to get a hand me down nVidia.
OB Sound <- Soundblaster Compatible
OB Network
Enlight Case/Deer 250 Watt PSU
21" Princeton Monitor

AND ITS STILL NOT ENOUGH to play all the games i want to play (2on2 Center Ice/NBA Hangtime)... I only have 256 Ram because I'm running windows 98, and windows 98 only utiliziles that or 128... i can never remember...

if i put 512 in there am i going to see a difference in mame?
if i put a 64 MB video am i going to see a difference?
if i put windows 2000/xp will i see a positive or negative difference?

[Howard_Casto]

I am running

800 Duron
ECS Mobo K7SEM
256 MB Ram
8MB ATi <- Wanted to run Voodoo 3, but Mobo/Grphx card have a known issue. It's waiting to get a hand me down nVidia.
OB Sound <- Soundblaster Compatible
OB Network
Enlight Case/Deer 250 Watt PSU
21" Princeton Monitor

AND ITS STILL NOT ENOUGH to play all the games i want to play (2on2 Center Ice/NBA Hangtime)... I only have 256 Ram because I'm running windows 98, and windows 98 only utiliziles that or 128... i can never remember...

if i put 512 in there am i going to see a difference in mame?
if i put a 64 MB video am i going to see a difference?
if i put windows 2000/xp will i see a positive or negative difference?

Yoru processor and ram are ok it's your motherboard and video card that are the real bottlenecks.  First off onboard sound is bad umm k.  It wrangles ram and doens't soudn very good.  An external sound card will perform very good, especially a sound blaster, which better utilizes your system's memory.  The video card is pretty much a joke.  16 to 32mb agp is minumum now days.  That is probably your worst problem.  

Regarding 98... 98 has memory utilization issues but 98se does not.   It will handle whatever you throw at it.

If you were to upgarde your os the only sensible upgrade would be to a falvor of xp.  A lot of people think that 2000 and xp are the same minus the new gui.  Those people are wrong.  The main difference between 2000 and xp is xp has been optimized for gaming, graphics and multimedia.  2000 is for an office setup, not for gaming...  Most games wont' even run on 2000, or if they do they will only run with many features crippled.  

With that being said xp is a MAJOR resource hog.  Don't even obther upgrading until you have a better video card and more ram.  2000 isn't quite as bad and thus people come under the misconception that 2000 is "faster" than xp. Not true, xp does almost everything smoother, but you just have larger minumum sytem requirements.  

[Warborg]

Needing AGP, let alone needing 4X AGP really isn't that critical with 2D games to be honest.  AGP allows for the rapid transfer of data between main memory and the video card memory basically (there is a little more to it then that, but we'll just leave it there).  As I read somewhere, MAME will try to transfer everything it needs to run the game to the videocard memory anyway, and if all the data resides in the video memory, the AGP interface isn't doing much for you.  Additionally, I notice that some Emus like Winkawaks and Finalburn also have the option to buffer to video memory first as well.  So, I would think you should worry more about getting a videocard with a good amount of memory.  My main PC has a GF4 Ti4600 with 128MB on it, and my PC that will be used for the arcade box is a GF4 MX420 PCI w/64MB of RAM.  Just about everything runs beautifully on it (my lower-end arcade PC), with a few exceptions which are being limited by the CPU, not the videocard.  But all the NeoGeo and CPS2 stuff (which are my faves) run perfectly, with any video options I choose (I don't run scanlines because personally I hate 'em)...  

Specs on my arcade PC (which I got free from work):
Dell Optiplex GX100, 700Mhz Celeron
256MB PC100 SDRAM
Geforce 4 MX420 PCI w/64MB and TV-Out
Soundblaster 16 PCI
33 Gigs storage (13 Gig HD, and 2 10 Gig HDs)
48X CDROM

[BombProofPlane]

Well I'm kinda new here myself...was going to buy a SLIKSTIK and then after trading blows with some opinionated folks here, started to think to myself "you know, rolling my own might be kinda fun".  And now I'm getting caught up in the fun of doing it yourself.

I have one spare PC: Pentium Pro 200 with 96 megs of RAM.  I'm going to install MAME on this over the weekend (gotta get it up on my LAN) and see how it does running games.  If its acceptable, I might make this into an Old Skool box.  I dont know that it would run games like Track and Field well or not.  Only way is to try

However, I went to www.pricewatch.com and got myself a barebones Athlon, in a case, with a decent motherboard...XP1700 I think (1.5Ghz), 256 megs of ram, soundblaster live 5.1....40 gig HD and an ATI Radeon 8500 for just about $350 and change, which is probably overkill for just about any MAME game out there, but it was so cheap I couldn't pass it up.  Nice thing is that it will also run Counterstrike, Unreal Tournament, and some of the cool PC driving games too.....on my home LAn thats a whole nother realm of fun.

Good Luck!

believe it or not i did that but i had a spare 40 gig drive and i used the 1800+

[dgodwin]

I'm running the following:

AMD AthlonXP 1700+ (1.47 GHZ) Processor
Gigabyte 7VTXE (KT266a chipset) motherboard
512mb of Crucial's 2100 DDR ram.  
For storage, I have an IBM 7200 RPM 60 GB hard drive.  
An old, cheap CD-ROM drive is used to update the software and ROM files.  
The video card I use is an ATI XPERT 2000 Pro 32mb.
For sound, I use a Creative Labs soundblaster PCI 128, along with Altec Lansing speakers.  
To control the sound volume of the speakers, I used a headphone volume adaptor which was purchased from radio shack.

I can run pretty much all the mame games with no noticible slow down.  I originally tried it with 256MB of RAM, but it was taking way too long to load larger games (metal slugs, etc) With the 512 MB, it's pretty fast.  I'm running straight dos, with advmame and arcadeos.

Daniel

[Malenko]

Athlon Thunderbird 850 OC'ed to around 920 runs everything I want just fine, the only exception is 2 on 2 NHL Open Ice Challenge, and for that I disable the sound since there are problems witht he anouncer anyway.

as howard said, the older the games you want to emulate the less machine you need.

[SNAAAKE]

i got

athlon xp 1800
ddr 266 chipset motherboard(still not sure how i should call my board)
32mb ati rage fury pro
512 mb ram
some weirdo 3rd sound card from compusa(works great)


its way to powerfull for mame but i got plan for future stuff too.besides you should get the fastest you can afford because there will be games that needs very powerfull computer.and i play pc games too so i am very happy with the setup.

[Tiger-Heli]

I have a VisionTek (now out of business) 5632 GeForce2 GTS card.. Overclocked to the max.. Great card for $45 when it was still available before VisionTek went belly-up a couple weeks ago.

I have the same card in my wife's PC.  I didn't hear they went bankrupt.  So much for the lifetime warranty . . .

Regarding 98... 98 has memory utilization issues but 98se does not.   It will handle whatever you throw at it.

Howard, I am thinking of upgrading my machine and eventually running about 512M of RAM.  I am running Win98 original with all the WinUpdates.  Will this solve the memory problems, or do I need true 98SE?.

If you were to upgarde your os the only sensible upgrade would be to a falvor of xp

But there's no way to use dual trackballs in XP, correct??? or am I wrong here.

To the original poster, I think Howard's system requirements are pretty straight on.

I have a Pentium 200MMX PC, 128M Ram, 4M PCI Video, ISA soundcard, Win'98.

Older games like PacMan and Galaga play fine.  Older vector games (Asteroids, etc) play fine with MAME r36b12 or previous (before alpha blending).  Newer MAME is getting more hardware intensive as I see even the older games tend to run slower on the latest builds.

Games like Twin Cobra and Tiger-Heli are very playable, but you have to go to like Frameskip 5 or 6 to keep the speed up.  OutRun is at about 60% speed at Frameskip 11 and not playable.  Anything newer is basically not playable.

[Lilwolf]

1ghz Athlon thunderbird
512 mg ram  - NOTE:  Win98 is up to 512... not 256....
Geforce2mx

runs everything great including Zinc and N64 stuff.  I will see when the model2 stuff comes out in mame... might have to upgrade then.

I'm kinda waiting for doom3 to come out before I upgrade... that game looks to damn sweet!

[HeadRusch]

Eh Doom3 looks like every other ID software game in recent years:
All Flash, no substance.

It'll take another few years for a company like Raven to take the engine and make a good game out of it.

Uh.......and to make this reply even REMOTELY on topic, I'd suggest a P4-3Ghz+ machine and whatever top of the line videocard is out at the time to tackle THAT game.

[BombProofPlane]

Eh Doom3 looks like every other ID software game in recent years:
All Flash, no substance.

It'll take another few years for a company like Raven to take the engine and make a good game out of it.

Uh.......and to make this reply even REMOTELY on topic, I'd suggest a P4-3Ghz+ machine and whatever top of the line videocard is out at the time to tackle THAT game.

actually all you need is a gf3 to run it playable and the new amds woop the p4

but ya raven will have to make sof3 and jedi knight 3 for the engine as id games get boring fast

[Howard_Casto]

Yeah no dual mouse in xp.  I guess I phrased that kind of funny.  I don't consider 98se an upgrade I consider it the only version of 9x worth using.  Every other version is crap for one reason or another.  If you have an old machine and you aren't at least running 98se then your os is your biggest prob.  (Unless you are running in dos, bah! )

[james]

yeah, i know my video card sucks, but neither of my voodoos work properly (graphical errors everywhere in 2000 AND 98SE, havent tried xp). theres a probability that i'll be upgrading a video card in one of my main rigs, so i'll swap the 8mb ATi with a GeForce or a Radeon....

when i get an opprotunity i'll buy a sound blaster live or 128 or whatever, but it sounds fine right now.

the mobo does suck, but i got a deal on it

just go to your local computer store and ask for a used mobo/processor, at least a 500 MHZ +, and roll out your own system with leftover parts. that's going to run all pre 90s games well

[Sasquatch!]

Asus P2V-B
PII-450MHz
384MB of RAM
SiS 6326 AGP (8 MB)

It runs almost everything flawlessly.

I'm kinda waiting for doom3 to come out before I upgrade... that game looks to damn sweet!

Heh, you and me both, brother.  Based on the movies that I've seen of it, I know that Doom3 will make me upgrade my machine.

[Darkade]

Asus P2V-B
PII-450MHz
384MB of RAM
SiS 6326 AGP (8 MB)

It runs almost everything flawlessly.

I'm kinda waiting for doom3 to come out before I upgrade... that game looks to damn sweet!

Heh, you and me both, brother.  Based on the movies that I've seen of it, I know that Doom3 will make me upgrade my machine.

I got to see the Doom 3 Theatre at Quakecon this year (the same exhibit that was at E3) and it was phenomenal.  The whole movie was being run off of a standard P4 2.0 Ghz and it ran smoothly with absolutely no problems.  I can't wait.

[hyiu]

I used to run Mame32 on a Pentium 866
with ATI Rage Pro.. using Windows 2000 Server...
(all games that I had ran were ok... but that is my home work machine... too much distraction...)

now got a newer machine... AMD 1.4GHz... with GeForce 4 video card running Mame32 on Winodws Me.... all games good also.... this will be my entertainment machine... heee hee....

oh... 256 rams each....