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The best motherboard for a cab?
arcadecollecting:
My ideal motherboard/CPU setup would be something that has no post screen, boots really fast, and has built in sound hardware that works with DOS MAME so you don't have to wait for Windows to load. Plus it should be really cheap, small and fast.
Only problem is I haven't found such a thing. Anyone?
elvis:
No such thing. All onboard sound is PCI based, and therefor a pain in the arse to configure in DOS.
Consider the life-span of DOS. Consider when it was invented, and when it fell out of support. Consider the time frame between that day, and today, and the adavnces made in both software and hardware, and the drivers needed to make the two communicate.
And with all that in mind, consider that there are viable alternatives to DOS that will support new/fast hardware.
Lilwolf:
and you shouldn't be buying any new hardware to work with dos. You will get near same - better performance with windows on any new system because of the better (cough) memory managment and video drivers.
And you will go through a LOT of headaches so that you can possibly get 100 or so games running. Most of the games that don't work wont work on any system. And use zinc and a frontend and you get rid of 1/2 of them will run. (ie, between a 2ghz +zinc to a 4ghz with mame only is very few games different)
So the only real reason I see in using dos is if you don't want to buy an arcadevga card and get away with a cheaper card. But don't expect to be able to hardware stretch any wierd video resolutions
spystyle:
FreeDOS is current DOS, I bet they write drivers for all the new hardware.
http://www.freedos.org/
I am soon to go DOS too, and add it to my tutorial.
A desktop OS sucks on a cab, period. It's a waste of horsepower.
Soundblaster has a PCI version of their classic Soundblaster 16. I'm willing to bet that's the most DOS and DMAME compatible soundcard.
As for the common onboard sound, AC97. I bet someone has written a DOS driver for that...
Dig it?
Craig
arcadecollecting:
If I find DOS won't cut it for me, I'll probably just change the Windows registry so that it loads straight into the front end instead of explorer.exe.
Still wondering what people's opinions are on what motherboard boots the quickest with a hideable post screen.