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Building a PC for MAME, Need some suggestions

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pointdablame:

To really answer this question, you should tell us what you plan on playing in this cab.  If all you're playing is classics, you're overspending and wasting money.

If you want to play as many newer games as you reasonably can, or are using the cab for other high end emus like Dreamcast or PSX, or for higher end PC games, then that changes the entire equation.

Your PC specs look fine to play almost all of the games in MAME.  You'll be able to play some CHDs and most newer stuff will run well (out of the games that can run well at all).  Jumping to a gig of ram might help on some of the larger roms, but if this is strictly a Mame box, you probably won't see a big difference.

Dual core isn't a big deal with Mame as mentioned.  Clock speed is the more pressing factor, so getting a faster CPU may help you, but it won't help you much BECAUSE its a dual core... it'll just be since the chip is faster.

Video card is again, highly dependent on what you are doing.  A classics only machine can probably run on any damn video card that you can find that works, including one that you pillaged from an old machine.  For newer games, PC games, other emus etc, something with 128mb ram is probably a safe bet... again depending on what you plan to play.

needlesmcgirk:

Thanks for the help!  I was under the impression that video cards weren't even used in MAME at all, but I'm sure it doens't make much difference for what I want to do anyway.  I want to play the classsics, but I also want to play the Street Fighters, Mortal Kombats, TMNT, etc, and maybe even Gauntlet Legends if that is actually running well in MAME yet, but its really not that important.

I'm really curious if Hard Drive speed matters at all.  Like if I should bother getting a SATA or SATA II drive or just stick with the 60 gig ata drive that I already have.

pointdablame:

Hard drive speed will not make much of a difference at all in my experience.

The games you mention (besides Gauntlet Legends which I am unsure of) have been running full speed for quite some time.  The Mortal Kombat series can give some troubles to certain (older) systems, but it should run fine on what you are building.

You could probably get away with an even older system but seeing as you are buying new anyway, you may as well buy something like what you are asking about.  No need to go any crazier though if you ask me.  If you had an older 1ghz range system sitting around, I'd tell you to install Mame .55 and see if you can't play everything you'd be interested in, but you may want a new system for whatever reason.

ahofle:


--- Quote from: pointdablame on January 08, 2007, 03:24:13 pm ---Dual core isn't a big deal with Mame as mentioned.  Clock speed is the more pressing factor, so getting a faster CPU may help you, but it won't help you much BECAUSE its a dual core... it'll just be since the chip is faster.

--- End quote ---

Are you guys sure about this?  Those new Core 2 Duo chips are apparently the best performing processor when it comes to MAME, and yet their clock speeds are relatively the same or slower (2-3 Ghtz) as standard single core processors.

pointdablame:

Last I heard, Mame was still single threaded and could only use one core at a time.

They're very good processors though, so I'm sure they run Mame very well.  Then again, I use older versions of Mame mostly, so who the heck knows.

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