I absolute second Jeffo here.
First, I hate it when people equate time with quality experience.
Second, you are way way better off knowing the specs and what you need than buying parts cuz it will probably help.
Third, it's been said, Zinc is a made for emulating these titles in 3d using your graphics card, mame is not.
Please be glad that people are trying to help. I'm only mad here because your taking a tone.
What kind of approach to find a solution is saying "ooo, buy a new computer" without trying anything else first? Not everyone has $1,000 to spend to just play couple more games.
First, I hate it when people equate time with quality experience.
...
I'm only mad here because your taking a tone.
Looks like you are taking a tone here. FYI, I hate when people make generalizations like this. Trying a newer/different video card (with more memory) does not mean lack of quality experience, as it's obvious his card is very old with little memory and probably with very old drivers. Borrowing a card is certainly cheaper than buying a new computer. There is certainly no need to have any experience to say: "Hey, get a new Dell" to constructively solve any question/problem.
Second, you are way way better off knowing the specs and what you need than buying parts cuz it will probably help.
Third, it's been said, Zinc is a made for emulating these titles in 3d using your graphics card, mame is not.
Once again, the better video card is for the better 2D support. Nobody is talking about 3D at this time.
No one is saying to buy a new machine, thats a bit silly.
And if you've got friends who will let you borrow their card to see if it helps, thats smart too.
I'm just saying to read up on things and not BUY hardware on whims.
Mame does not use the resources on your graphics card, 3d or otherwise - the processing is handled at the motherboard because the Mame devs want to keep the machine emulation as pure as possible and so they don't handle any of the processing on your card, 3d based or otherwise.
All a card will help in mame is display wise, like if you want to make mame display on a TV or some such.
Sorry I can't point to specific article, it's been a bit since my last reading but thats kind of always been the mame dev stance, archive and study purpose before playability. People have been complaining about the lack of card use and such for a long time and the only way that'll change is a modified build of the mame source optimized for card usage.
Good luck with things, let us know what you decide to do.