Planning on upgrading my MAME pc/Cabinet

[payment_due]

I bought a candy cab from jripley recently and it's working like a champ, but some of the games I really want to play are bogged down by the 933mHz P3 that's running the PC (Killer Instinct 1/2, Mortal Kombat III, etc)  I plan to buy a new mobo/cpu and RAM in the next few days but I have some questions.

First of all, the PC is connected to the cab using a JPac that was included in the package along with an ArcadeVGA card.  My first question is; will I run into any problems when changing out a CPU and Motherboard?  Reason I ask is that sometimes WinXP will crap on itself if you take a fully working HDD with it installed and put it in another system with a different motherboard and IDE controller thus forcing a reinstallation of Windows.

So considering that - if I end up having to reinstall Windows and start from the beginning - will I run into display problems with the ArcadeVGA, or does it always send the right signal to the arcade monitor regardless if the drivers are not installed?  I don't want to install WindowsXP only to get to the desktop when it's finished and blow my monitor.  This might not be an issue because XP might not crap out with a new board but it's very likely.  I really don't know too much about how the ArcadeVGA cards work and I dont have any drivers for it - which I'm sure can be downloaded from Ultimarc's website anyway.

Assuming that I do end up instaling XP again, and everything is working fine - when I download MAME and whatever front end I want to use - do I have to set resolution settings for the programs, or will the ArcadeVGA do all of that for me?

Did all of that rambling make sense?  If so - I thank you for your time and help. 

[payment_due]

anyone?

[Lon]

I am on my first cabinet build myself, so I can really comment on that end. That being said, I have a lot of computer building experience and I would not install a new motherboard without doing a fresh install of windows. If you used your previous install windows will likely run, and it will try to function, BUT most likey you will have many errors and strange lockups. It is just much better to do a fresh install and go from there.

 On the AcradeVGA card I can only speculate since I do not have one. Since it is based on an ATI chipset I would think that it will display correctly on a virgin system.

good luck,

Lon

[APFelon]

It's been a while since I did a mobo swap on my MAME cab, but I'll try to remember what I did. Perhaps it'll answer some of your questions.

In my experience, you cannot do a hardware swap at that level without XP barfing all over itself. I had no problems doing this with Win98, but I believe that XP has some sort of protection that will not allow a full system swap.

The ArcadeVGA card should NOT send an unusable or dangerous signal to your monitor. However, I thought it was a PITA to do all the OS installation hoop jumping on the arcade monitor. So, I used a standard monitor / VGA card for the OS install, then I popped in the AVGA and hooked it up to my arcade monitor. Then install the drivers and software.

I thought doing the system swap was a real pain. I hope these answers smooth it out a little for you.

APf

[Fat_Trucker]

Not sure about the XP thing. I upgraded my PC a while back and changed everything except the HDD and PSU and XP made the jump fine, although it required a major amount of driver uninstalls/installs and I had to re-register XP because of the amount of hardware changes so if you don't have the original XP registration key you have a problem.

The AVGA won't send any nasty signals to the monitor if you put it in another PC (the J-pac and AVGA are hardwired not to send anything that will break your monitor) so you don't have to worry on that score, but you will need to re-install the drivers and set it all back up again to get it working properly. I would recommend going to the ultimarc site first and downloading all the utilities and drivers and bang them on a CD before you get started.

You could do a fresh install on a new HDD and connect the old one as a Slave drive then drag and drop all the emulators and folders into your new one (remember the drive letter will change so most will stop working on the old drive if you set it up as a slave). In theory you could go through and manually change all entries, paths and ini's to the new drive letter assigned to the original drive and run all the emu's from the original drive.

Hope that helps.

[dax]

I used a regular monitor to configure my PC before I install the AVGA.  If you get a new motherboard, make sure it has the proper interface, which I believe is an AGP.  Some of the new MBs have PCI-E, which I don't think will work with the AVGA, but correct me if I'm wrong.

[krick]

You can swap a motherboard on a 2000/XP machine without re-installing.  My primary machine running Windows 2000 is on its third motherboard without a re-install.

There's a pretty decent thread about how to do it here...
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/groupee/forums/a/tpc/f/77909774/m/1400925745

In order to do this though, you'll need to install a "normal" video card instead of the ArcadeVGA and connect it to a normal monitor.

I recommend picking up a really cheap Nvidia based AGP card (under $20) and avoid ATI based cards so you don't have driver conflict problems later with the ArcadeVGA (which is based on an ATI Radeon chip).

[Havok]

You should be able to do a mobo and hd swap - look into an application called Sysprep by Microsoft. It is included on the XP CD.