first cab - decision time

[ALeX K]

Hi everyone,

great site here! Am a newbie, am building my first cab, and have been reading the faq's and cab reports for a few month. Could any of you with more wisdom in these matters than I comment on this pc spec I am thinking of putting together? It will be used to run mame in my cab, and also some oldish pc games/other emmys.

Celeron d 2.4ghz processor
ASRock775V88 motherboard
512mb RAM DIMM
ATI Radeon 9550 128 Mb DDR DVI SVideo Graphics Card (tv output via s-video to SCART input on a 25inch sony tv)
Windows XP

Also, a question regarding the control panel. I will be assembling a CP using the IPAC with happ controls, and it will also have a trackball and a spinner. Am I correct in assuming that the trackball and spinner will be regarded by the OS as usb mouse devices, and that mame will have no problem seeing them? Any problems with conflicts of "multiple" mice, or anything of that type of problem?

Any help or advice any of you could spare would be most appreciated! 

Mnny thanks,

Alex

[moonpatrol 4 lyfe]

you wont be able to interface optical devices such as spinners and trackballs with an I-Pac.  If you'd like to stay with Ultimarc (the company that makes I-Pac), you'll need an optipac.

http://www.ultimarc.com

-Bill

[quarterback]

I'm not sure that the OP wants to interface the trackball and spinner with the Ipac.  It sounds like he/she is asking about hooking up both a USB trackball and a USB spinner to his/her computer and wants to know if MAME will have any problem seeing them.

I can tell you that I've used a ps2 trackball that was simply treated as a mouse and worked in mame but as far as also adding a spinner into the equation... I don't know the answer.

[Beeeph]

I have a PS/2 Trackball and a usb spinner hooked up to the mobo in my CP and it works fine so long as you're running windows xp.

I just finished building my first cab a few days back and if I were you, I would...

- Downgrade the RAM to 256MB (512 is more than you need for any console game).

[quarterback]

I have a PS/2 Trackball and a usb spinner hooked up to the mobo in my CP and it works fine so long as you're running windows xp.

Are they both seen as "mice"?
You say you're using XP, just to be clear, are you running mame or mame32?
Thanks

[Beeeph]

I was using both mame and mame32 in windows xp.

[quarterback]

Thanks for the reply.  I'm using MameWah as well and it's great, but when I had both my mouse and my trackball simultaneously hooked up under XP, the trackball would act erratically.

I never even tried both in mame because of all the wierdness in windows.  With both hooked up, the cursor would jump around whenever I moved the trackball and with every movement it would also act like I had pushed the right mouse button and open up a right-click menu of options.  So I just unplugged the mouse and the trackball worked fine in both Windows and Mame.

It just seemed like XP wasn't happy with 2 mice attached so I gave up.  But if you've got it working finr, I'll have to try it again and troubleshoot a little more.\
Thanks

[ALeX K]

thanks very much to all  for the replies.

I was indeed hoping that the spinner and trackball could be usb devices. i will be running command line mame through a front end prog like mamewah or game launcher - so hopefully won't need to see windows at all!

Will take onboard the advice about downgrading the ram - i've never specced a system to be deliberately underpower...  I will also try to see some local vendors and comapre prices to happ if they are as expensive as you say - would anyone know of any suitable places to start looking in the london, UK area?

Is it silly to buy some

[krick]

I don't agree with the "downgrade the ram" comment.

Windows XP is a memory hog.

[ALeX K]

Hey, thanks for that link - it makes