Suggestions needed - tweaking for speed!

[gibbous]

I've been mostly lurking around here for years, I think I bought the book like two years ago.  Anyway, I've been collecting original cabinets for a long time, and a while ago I finally found THE cabinet I've wanted specifically just for MAME-ing: a Sega Megalo 410.



It's working out OK, but I guess I underestimated my speed needs...or they've changed.  I can't run NBA Jam at full speed.    My current setup:

Celeron D 2.66
512k RAM
Radeon 9700 Pro
Windows XP Pro, SP2, all non-essential services turned OFF

I've tried MAME .067, .105, and .121.  I've already tried all sound settings.  Thinking raw processing power counted most (GHz), I thought the Celeron running at 2.66 would be sufficient after running NBA Jam flawlessly on my dedicated desktop computer (which is a C2D 2.66), I guess there's a little more to it.  Eventually, I will probably upgrade the desktop computer and bump the C2D to the MAME rig.  But for now, which should I do (without spending too much money)?

- try running Tiny XP Beast?
- try to find a cheap 3+ GHz Celeron?
- try to find a cheap 3+ GHz P4?
- try something else?

Thanks!

[JimmyU]

Yeah Celerons are pretty slow.  I can get NBA Jam running full speed on my P4 1.5 laptop.  More memory might help as well; MAME loves itself some RAM.  Core2Duos are the way to go. 

[gibbous]

Thanks!  Doubled the RAM to 1G, and it seemed to help.  It holds up pretty well until the 3rd quarter, then it starts to stutter and then the play itself starts to bog down.

I've been hesitating to install Tiny XP because it takes so much tweaking to get everything the way I want it, but I recently threw it on an old laptop and was pretty impressed.  I have a spare hard drive, so I may try it out on that so I can swap it back if it doesn't make a difference.

They do use Celerons on some of those multi-in-1 boards.  So it maybe that I just have to manage the CPU overhead better.  Otherwise, I'll have to hit up eBay for a used P4.