Vista and MAME Gaming.....

[Gavica]

So I bought Windows Vista and will probably install it th the next few days.
On the other Hand I have MAME32, and many emulators.

Will these become worthless with vista? or are they compatible? how can I know before I upgrade?

[johnperkins21]

Vista runs through your system and points out which apps will definitely not work, which probably won't work, and which will work before the upgrade. Run that utility and then make the decision. I haven't tried to install Vista on my MAME machine, so I don't know for certain.

[steveh]

I am not sure if it will work... but ill bet you will see a performance drop.

[Bobbler]

Personally I wouldnt bother with Vista just yet for Mame usage. Given time it may become a good platform to run it all on, but PC games are seeing drop in performance at the moment in comparison to XP (mainly due to some shoddy drivers from ATI and Nvidia that need "maturing" ).
It needs bigger cpu, more memory and more disk space for the operating system - that is not a good thing from an emulation point of view. When you consider that people strip XP down for the purpose of running Mame to give it maximum resources, doing similar in Vista would probably net you less resource and none of the extra bells and whistles. I believe the guys who did nLite also now have a Vista version for this very purpose.
I wouldnt like to hazard how it would run on my mame cab PC which is a AMD 1800, 256Mb of RAM, ArcadeVGA...my laptop (Core Duo, 2GB Ram,Geforce 7400 256mb) feels more sluggish under Vista Home Premium than it ever did under XP.

[freckleface]

My dad said some video capacities would be really cool in Vista....but I just read on a very respectable technologists blog that he read somewhere Microsoft saying it'd probably be replaced within two (!) years.

[TOK]

I ran the release candidate of Vista on a machine that is now in a MAME cab. 2ghz Athlon XP, 512MB RAM, GeForce Ti4200. Its a solid MAME machine for all but CHD's. It took 4 minutes to boot Vista and was given 1's across the board in the Vista 1 to 5 system rating utility. This same machine running a tweaked version of XP gets to the front end in about 30 seconds.

Granted, I didn't have unnecessary stuff turned off in Vista, and I wasn't using it as a MAME machine. I was just using it to check Vista out. It might be better in the future, but right now there are no gains to be had buy using it, and you also need more robust hardware for the same results. For dedicated cab use, XP or 2000 is way better, and given the choice based on my current MAME hardware, I'd even take Windows 98 over Vista (its easily skinnable, easily stripped down and shelled, and also very reliable when you're not using it for anything more than a cab).

[Gavica]

so the mame program worked on the vista ?

[TOK]

I only tried MAME .32 version .99 on it (this was a spare machine before being moved to cab use) and it ran fine.

[Gavica]

cool, thanks

[u_rebelscum]

Aaron Giles, the person currently managing mame, said:
"And MAME itself runs as well as it did under XP, no problems there (whew!)" 

BTW, also according to Aaron, there are (or were) problems building (aka compiling) mame with mame's official mingw tools (but users don't need to worry about this).

[2panther]

I'm using MAME32 on Vista Ultimate x64 edition with no issues.