Celeron 366/128Mb/AdvanceMame/ArcadeOS/4meg nVidia = Enough4Classics

[MonitorGuru]

Hopefully the people who need to know what the "minimum" system is for classic gaming will find this post in the future.

I'm building a mame into an old Donkey Kong cocktail cab (all metal), and needed a system with a tiny power supply, tiny motherboard and 2.5 gig hard drive.  Coupled with this system is a standard CGA arcade monitor for realistic classic gaming, plus an 8 way joystick, 2 fire buttons (the aluminum bezels hid a second hole in the panels), plus P1/P2 start buttons on the main player side.

I decided to go with AdvanceMame .87 and ArcadeOS 2.52 (latest versions).  The mobo was an IBM with 2 PC66 DIMM slots, an AGP and 3 PCI and 1 ISA slot. Onboard 1373 audio (untested yet). It has a Celeron 366 processor, 128 meg of memory, DOS 7 (from Win98SE boot disc), plus an old ELSA 4 meg PCI video card (nVidia Riva 128 processor).


With this paltry set-up, I was able to get on average 2x performance (unthrottled) for most classic games I loaded (Centipede, Pacman, Pengo, Burgertime, etc..). The output of Advance Mame was always 1.00x1.00 scaling since the monitor matched the modes set up perfectly.

Only annoyance was the 10 seconds it took to reload ArcadeOS after quiting a game. I may add more ram and set up a ram drive to cache some of ArcadeOS/AdvanceMame to reduce hard drive loading times.

So, anyone looking at a Celeron 366/128 meg PC66/4 meg nVidia PCI video willing to run direct to arcade monitor should have no problems playing most pre 86 games, and probably a nice chunk of those before 1990.

Enjoy!

[cobracon]

Hopefully the people who need to know what the "minimum" system is for classic gaming will find this post in the future.

I'm building a mame into an old Donkey Kong cocktail cab (all metal), and needed a system with a tiny power supply, tiny motherboard and 2.5 gig hard drive.  Coupled with this system is a standard CGA arcade monitor for realistic classic gaming, plus an 8 way joystick, 2 fire buttons (the aluminum bezels hid a second hole in the panels), plus P1/P2 start buttons on the main player side.

I decided to go with AdvanceMame .87 and ArcadeOS 2.52 (latest versions).  The motheboard was an IBM with 2 PC66 SIMM slots, an AGP and 3 PCI and 1 ISA slot. Onboard 1373 audio (untested yet). It has a Celeron 366 processor, 128 meg of memory, DOS 7 (from Win98SE boot disc), plus an old ELSA 4 meg PCI video card (nVidia Riva 128 processor).


With this paltry set-up, I was able to get on average 2x performance (unthrottled) for most classic games I loaded (Centipede, Pacman, Pengo, Burgertime, etc..). The output of Advance Mame was always 1.00x1.00 scaling since the monitor matched the modes set up perfectly.

Only annoyance was the 10 seconds it took to reload ArcadeOS after quiting a game. I may add more ram and set up a ram drive to cache some of ArcadeOS/AdvanceMame to reduce hard drive loading times.

So, anyone looking at a Celeron 366/128 meg PC66/4 meg nVidia PCI video willing to run direct to arcade monitor should have no problems playing most pre 86 games, and probably a nice chunk of those before 1990.

Enjoy!

Thanks for the info. I have a celeron 400 sitting here unused. It works with the windows command line version of mame but is slow loading. Looks like I'll be giving this a try. I have a Mr. Do Cab coming that will fit everything perfectly.

[Tiger-Heli]

Hopefully the people who need to know what the "minimum" system is for classic gaming will find this post in the future.

I'm building a mame into an old Donkey Kong cocktail cab (all metal), and needed a system with a tiny power supply, tiny motherboard and 2.5 gig hard drive.  Coupled with this system is a standard CGA arcade monitor for realistic classic gaming, plus an 8 way joystick, 2 fire buttons (the aluminum bezels hid a second hole in the panels), plus P1/P2 start buttons on the main player side.

I decided to go with AdvanceMame .87 and ArcadeOS 2.52 (latest versions).  The mobo was an IBM with 2 PC66 DIMM slots, an AGP and 3 PCI and 1 ISA slot. Onboard 1373 audio (untested yet). It has a Celeron 366 processor, 128 meg of memory, DOS 7 (from Win98SE boot disc), plus an old ELSA 4 meg PCI video card (nVidia Riva 128 processor).


With this paltry set-up, I was able to get on average 2x performance (unthrottled) for most classic games I loaded (Centipede, Pacman, Pengo, Burgertime, etc..). The output of Advance Mame was always 1.00x1.00 scaling since the monitor matched the modes set up perfectly.

Only annoyance was the 10 seconds it took to reload ArcadeOS after quiting a game. I may add more ram and set up a ram drive to cache some of ArcadeOS/AdvanceMame to reduce hard drive loading times.

So, anyone looking at a Celeron 366/128 meg PC66/4 meg nVidia PCI video willing to run direct to arcade monitor should have no problems playing most pre 86 games, and probably a nice chunk of those before 1990.

Enjoy!

For 80's games, that's not a bad system.  I was able to run all the 80's games on a Pentium 200 MMX with 64M ram and 4 M PCI video, but I was using an older R36B10 or so MAME, which is faster than the current builds.  (especially important for Battlezone and Astdelux).  Bzone was 100% on the Pentium 200 with R36B10, runs at about Frameskip 3-6 with my XP2800 now (so I still use the older MAME build).

[bdsjake]

thanks for posting this, I too have a 400 Celeron I am thinking about using with cga monitor.  Question:  I know advancemame will send the correct signal for an arcade monitor and if boot to dos then skip the windows start screens, however, my machines display an initial screen at bootup, I guess the bios stage (big DELL logo!).  Do you know if that logo will mess with an arcade monitor, and if so, what do I do to bypass it?

thanks,

[MonitorGuru]

You should not drive a monitor out of sync range. Many will be fine if not driven long, but there are some that will "fry" (ruin the horizontal output transistor or other deflection circuity) if given a tremendously out of range signal (and a 31.5 KHz VGA signal is significantly out of range from a 15.75 KHz arcade CGA signal).

ArcadeOS plays 3 notes when it's loaded and acceptable to turn on the monitor at that time, and you can also make a tiny circuit that connects to your printer port that will trigger a relay at the right time that then could be connected to the power cable to the arcade monitor to power it up once the sync signal reaches the correct state.  It's documented in the docs.

I have been bench testing this with an old Commodore 1902A (original Philips/Magnavox made square edge one) monitor that I hacked to allow analog CGA input instead of digtal (8 color) CGA input by bypassing the D->A converter board; and it seems to be fine with the out of sync signal of bios boot screens/dos so far, not getting hot or blowing, but I don't think I'd push a real arcade monitor.

[bdsjake]

MG, thanks for the info, I'll probably just stick with windows/arcadevga so I don't blow anything up!

 

[Shifty]

FYI, I'm running a P2-350 with Mame32. Classics run great, Street Fighter 2, Marvel Super Heroes runs at 100% (just) and Mortal Kombat I runs at about 95%. NBAJam is too slow, as are a lot of modern games.

I'm running Mame32 37b15 -- just before 0.53 -- yup, it's old, but is faster than the current versions.

[rchadd]

for low spec machines maybe consider using vantage instead of mame?

http://www.mameworld.net/pc2jamma/vantage.html

looks like good solution for low spec cocktail machines