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Scrap PC- will this work for MAME?

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krick:

I agree with other posters here that a faster PC is probably not necessary unless you want to run the VERY latest games in MAME.

Trenchbroom:

NES, SNES, Genesis, etc. (all 8 or 16 bit emulation for that matter) should run butter smooth on your machine.

N64?  Hmm.  Your video card is gonna be the bottleneck.  If the ATI card has less than 64 MB you will have problems.  Even with a more modern video card you would still have some framerate issues due to the sub 1 ghz CPU if you use the most compatible N64 emulator (PJ64).  You might have to go without sound, or with the resolution down to 640x480 or even lower to get the speed up. 

If you are still willing to give it a go for N64 emulation, look for some old versions of either UltraHLE or Corn.  If you can get them running they should give you decent speed.

elvis:


--- Quote from: eyal8r on December 01, 2004, 12:17:18 am ---Any thoughts on the video card?  Too old, or it's just fine?

--- End quote ---

Fine.  MAME doesn't use any sort of 3D accelleration or any other video-related stuff.  Almost any VGA-capable card will suffice.

Kremmit:


--- Quote from: eyal8r on December 01, 2004, 12:17:18 am ---hehe- well, when you put it THAT WAY...

I'll throw this MB and CPU/Ram into a new case, buy a 60Gig Drive for $55 or so, and find a cheap cd rom and go from there. IF I ever have any problems, I can always upgrade the MB and CPU later I guess.

Any thoughts on the video card?
--- End quote ---


elvis:


--- Quote from: Kremmit on December 01, 2004, 12:55:50 am ---More RAM = faster MAME.

--- End quote ---

Sort of.  MAME won't run any *FASTER* with more RAM.  What it will do is allow you to load some of the bigger games into memory.

Imagine system RAM like desk space.  You can onlt put so many large documents on your desk before you need to start reshuffling (ie: virtual memory, or swap space).  Too much reshuffling slows things down (disk thrashing).  The solution is to get a bigger desk (more RAM) so that you can look at more things at once.

However, the bigger desk (more RAM) only helps for the documents with more stuff in them (bigger games).  Small documents (small games) are wasted on a huge desk.  No point having 512MB RAM for PacMan/puckman.  It won't run a single frame per second faster than it would with 128MB RAM. :)

*MOST* MAME games will squeeze into 256MB RAM.  There are some newer ones that need more.  gunbird2 won't fit in under 384MB, and the newer STV games require 512MB.  But you're talking about 30 of the 5000-odd games there.

CPU power is your limiting factor.  As the MAME devs themselves say: get the fastest CPU you can afford.  Everything else is secondary.

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