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Old Pentium
Kremmit:
There's no reason not to go with a cheapie- you can always upgrade later, and the cash you save now can help you finish the rest of the project sooner. Don't spend much on a PII, though- people are always throwing out old computers. Tell everyone you know you're looking for an old machine, you may find one somebody's got in the closet they'll toss you free. My local dump keeps old computers separate, you may find one at yours. Thrift stores sometimes have them. www.craigslist.org and www.freecycle.org are good ways to find cheap and free computers, as well as other junk.
Voodoo_Ray:
Thanks for the replies.
The idea is to get a cheapie for <$20 so that I can get cracking on the project. My home PC is a P4 and doesn't need updating quite yet. The idea is to swap this machine in to the cabinet in a year or two when I upgrade my home PC.
Steve
LPZ:
I've just built a cab with a 667 pentium in it and it runs sweet. Not to mention that 512 megs of ram makes it happen though......keep that machine....just in case you want to build a vertical and a horizontal cab!
JCL:
Even though I said, not to go too cheep, I think going free (or nearly so) and upgrading later sounds like a reasonable idea.
The scenario that I would want to avaoid would be to spend $50-100 bucks on a computer now, put it in a cab in 6 months, then spend $500 on a new machine 6 months after that.
the3eyedblindman:
I'd make a dedicated cabinet out of it, have it run one game of your choice, then build a replica of a dedicated cabinet, pacman for example. I am doing this with an old computer, and I am making a replica moonwalker. Use the arcade VGA card, or a video card with s video out to make it capaple of running on a big monitor, or get a big pc monitor, give it original artwork, dedicated controls, etc. You can tell everyone its a dedicated machine ;).