What games can this hardware setup run?

[Brax]

My buddy has a pentium II 350 with 384 megs of ram and a ATI Radeon 7000 with 64 megs of video ram and tv out. We'll be running Mame .61.

He's concerned about not being able to play too many games... I think he'll be able to play tons. What games do you think he'll be able to pull off? Which ones won't he?
I'm not messing with different emulators or different mame versions, I'm just curious what we can run with this setup.

One important one.... Puzzle Bobble. His girlfriend is a serious addict! Think we can pull that one off?

[johnpurs]

It will play most of the Classics fine. Also the original Puzzle BObble should play just fine. I have a AMD k-6 350 in my cab with only 256 RAM and these play fine. I also run pure DOS which may be afactor you might want to consider.

[rampy]

My buddy has a pentium II 350 with 384 megs of ram and a ATI Radeon 7000 with 64 megs of video ram and tv out. We'll be running Mame .61.

One important one.... Puzzle Bobble.

That's a definite maybe... =P  I bet he can play tons of games.  I assume you'll be playing in DOS?  

I'm not so sure about the neogeo games running smoothly with the latest mame with scanlines and sound  on a 350... I run a celeron 366@550 and I still get a little stutter in NeoGeo games (for example Turfmasters when you get onto the green and all the graphics splash on and there's speech at the same time)

I know they'll run great if you use something like neorage or the like, but you specifically said ONLY MAME and mame .61... so maybe he'll have to settle for 800 games instead of 1600 (or whatever)

I'd be surprised if the mortal kombat 1 would work (it works on my 550 with moderate amount of frameskip) ... NBA jams is out... some of the newer-est capcom's probably out too like marval vs etc....

With that said... the only way to know is to try it.. maybe puzzle bobble will run like a dream on that setup.  

*shrug* good luck!

rampy

[SirPoonga]

Sigh, that video card is yawning at how slow the computer is.  I bet that computer doesn't even come close to stressing the video card to its limits...

Anyway.  I ahve a PIII500 with 256 megs of memory.  I run alot of stuff just fine, at least playable.  There are other emulators.  Like Nebula emulates cps1,2, and neogeo better than mame, for the most part.  marvel vs capcom on run 35fps vs 70fps on the same machine.

[Carsten Carlos]

Puzzle Bobble 2 was playable but could have been much smoother on the P2-350 /256MB I wfirst anted to use.
It's one of the main reasons (& visual pinball) to get a better one.

As soon as I get a new CPU, my P3-800 will fit in it and this one runs almost anything perfectly.

[Psyklops]

One important one.... Puzzle Bobble. His girlfriend is a serious addict! Think we can pull that one off?

You should be able to pull off the original, but I doubt the second one.  My girlfriend is a serious addict of that one as well.  I have a PIII-600 with 256 MB of RAM and an ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon 64 MB DDR and I can't really run the 3rd or 4th versions without some serious drop in frame rates.  Of course I'm running XP and this is my everyday desktop, so if I had a dedicated machine I might be able to run a DOS version or disable a considerable amount more in XP to get these running okay, but I think honestly the difference would be minimal.

[Lilwolf]

Few things to try.  

1) Use any emulator other then mame... Most do a better job.  IE, theres a few NeoGeo versions of the game, and NeoRageX will run better then mame does.

2) Go back a few versions of mame.  Specifically before they converted to an alpha channel and no 8bit colors.  v.36 is MUCH faster for older games then .61.  I don't remember when the speed started slowing... in the betas somewhere.

3) Run in DOS....  UNLESS, you have to use hardware stretching.  

Remember, mame was out when that machine was king... and so start looking around there.

[Trenchbroom]

I have a Celeron 400 w/ 128 MB in my cab w/ a PCI ATI 8MB card so the specs are pretty close, if not worse in some respects.  I'm outputting to TV so I use the "Sharp" setting whenever possible and sound is at 22,000.  I use the latest version of Mame (not DOS but Windows based).  

"Sharp" is a speed thief but here are my typical experiences using it:  

You should have no problem w/ classic (8 bit) games, except Bally games that use the Vox voices.  Wizard of Wor and especially Gorf will chug along.  System isn't too happy w/ vector games either unless you frameskip, say 3 or so.

16-bitters from the 80's are usually OK w/ frameskip 6 (every other frame skipped).  Just depends on # of sprites on screen and how complex (# of support CPU's) the original game had.  Some games that I figured would be too complex (Simpsons) run fine, other's that I thought would be OK (Neo Turf Masters) are unplayable.

Neo Geo's and CPS1/CPS2 games I play on Kawaks w/ frameskip 2 (again, every other frame skipped) and have no problems, even w/ CPS2 games.

[Mike]

I wouldn't use dos. I had a P2 400 and I was able to run more games smoothly under mame32 than I was under the dos port of it. I had a lot of games that stuttered under dos that ran smooth under win 98se. Plus the setup is so much easier. I have since upgraded to a P3 600EB and it will run most games minus NBA Jam TE. That is the only one that stutters that I've found.

[Lilwolf]

NOTE:  If you use the dos version... people here are talking about the dos build WITHOUT running windows... IE, in DOS.  This is MUCH faster for most games (getting rid of the windows overhead).   Trouble is you get rid of a few features in windows (like the hardware stretching).

But again, also look at older versions and try them.  There were some definate slowdowns after version .36.  So that will give you a few more games that will run.