Anyone help with PC for cab??

[Dexter]

Hi all,

I've just finished building my mate a cocktail cab with a 1ghz Athlon (old jobbie, thunderbird, on an Abit kt7a mobo.)
Another mate is looking for me to build one now as well but I would like to buy a similar performing processor, so they both have equally specced cabs.

I was wondering what processor available at the moment would match the performance of the 1ghz athlon thunderbird. Also, should I get a mobo with integrated vga (I'll be using dosmame) or should I stick to a radeon.

Ta

Dexter
 

[pointdablame]

If the cab will only be using MAME, integrated VGA would be fine.  No real need for something more unless you need Svideo out, or want to play 3d PC games.

As for the processor, if you want new, I'd probably get an Nforce 2 based motherboard and something like a 2000+ Athlon XP or Sempron processor.  I'm not sure if they make a 2000+ Sempron off hand, but you'd be fine getting the lowest Sempron available.  They would probably be close to a 1ghz Athlon, but they will be a bit better more than likely.

Honestly, I would just find the nicest price point on a CPU and not worry about getting similar ones.  A lot of times, its smarter to get a faster chip because the price diff is so low, etc.  Just an idea.

[Goz]

In building a cocktail, you may very well want to go the route of a radeon for the video. I depends if you need to do hardware rotation of the screen. Rotation can be done in software, but in using software in conjunction with a slower processor, you may not get the results you'd like.

-Goz

[Dexter]

I'll be flipping vertical games to either end of the cab with two player horizontals to the front. I'm a bit concerned about whether all of the games will be playable without ATI graphics. The radeons are so cheap now it's not too much of an issue but for the sake of saving him a few quid it would be nice to have an integrated solution.

Is anybody here running their cab off integrated graphics with dosmame??

[deoblo85]

I thought if you were running mame32 and you roms have chd game you would need atleast a pen 2.8 with 800 sidebus (hyper threading) to run them thats what i have and it just runs them and not all

[SteveJ34]

I'll be flipping vertical games to either end of the cab with two player horizontals to the front. I'm a bit concerned about whether all of the games will be playable without ATI graphics. The radeons are so cheap now it's not too much of an issue but for the sake of saving him a few quid it would be nice to have an integrated solution.

Is anybody here running their cab off integrated graphics with dosmame??

I've got a bartop project with vertical screen rotation running on a P3 667 on Intel 810 chip micro-atx motherboard with integrated graphics.

This project is for vertical classics setup using mame 55 and operates fine for what I intend to throw at it.

I wanted a small form factor board with minimal hardware (ie: no cards, etc) to minimize the space required to store the internal components.

YMMV.

[Dexter]

Cheers for the info guys!

Dexter