900 mhz Celeron versus 800 mhz Pentium III - which one should I choose?

[pressthebutton]

Hi guys! Some help needed !

I'm considering to use my old PC to run Mame on a restored cabinet that I've bought from a local dealer. My questions are:

1- should I use a 900 MHz Celeron (900/128/100/1.75v) or a 800 MHz Pentium III (800Eb/256/133/1.65v). Which one will give best results?

2- I'm considering to use 3 ram modules (128 single sided + 128 single sided + 256 double sided). I that OK for Mame?

3- Will I be able to play games like, sunset riders, final fight, metal slug, cadillacs and dinos, fatal fury...with this setup?

I will be adding a arcadevga and a Ipac soon.

Really need some help on this one... Thanks !!!

[KDOG]

I would use the Pentiom 3 as long as you use an older version of Mame around .55 it wont be a problem . What OS are you going to use? I suggest spystyle dos boot disc here.

[WaRpEd]

I agree about the P3 being faster, the celerons are to slow IMHO.
I'd try an Xp boot setup for ease of setup and hardware compatibility. I believe it was called Tiny XP beast edition.
Dos drivers are difficult to obtain and a 7 or 8 year old sound card is at the end of it's life anyway. As far as RAM goes use your largest in DIMM 1 and smaller in DIMM 2 or 3.
Cheers and good luck on your project

[pressthebutton]

Hi KDOG and WaRpEd!

Thanks for the input!

I was hoping to run a DOS Mame with a front-end. Will spystyle do the trick? I've read that many people are using win98 with a special command line config that allows Mame to run directly without loading windows.

Also I´ve got an old 8 gigas harddrive that I was hoping to use. Is that enough?
 
Any thoughts?

 

[SpeedEng]

does your mb take 133fsb chips? because if not than the p3 800 will be 600mhz running @ 100fsb 

then you should deff just use the celeron if the 133fsb wont work

[gonzo90017]

does your mb take 133fsb chips? because if not than the p3 800 will be 600mhz running @ 100fsb 

then you should deff just use the celeron if the 133fsb wont work

Could you explain this?

Hey pressthebutton your setup is overkill for the games you wan't to play. I'm running all those games at full speed on a 400mhz celeron with no frameskip. It runs on 256mb ram. It ran great with 128 but NeoGeo games load faster with 256. My setup is a slimmed down version of xp I made using Nlite. You'd be better off using an older version of mame. I recommend FastMame 84.zip for your setup.

As far as the 8gb hd you have. You better get rid of all the clones and chd's if you have the full collection. My xp version takes around 1gb of hd space if I remember correctly.

[SpeedEng]

does your mb take 133fsb chips? because if not than the p3 800 will be 600mhz running @ 100fsb 

then you should deff just use the celeron if the 133fsb wont work

Could you explain this?

ok if mb can only accept fsb 100 cpus a 133fsb chip will run @ 100fsb
in this case you have a p3 800 (@133fsb)
800 (mhz) / 133 (fsb) = 6 (the 6 is the multipler)

so if you have a mb that only takes 100fsb and use that 6 multipler chip
6 (multi) x 100 (fsb) = 600 (mhz)

[Franco]

Im no use to you on the processor choice, im just glad to see you'll be playing my favourite game, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs   

[pressthebutton]

Thank you so much for your support guys! Really appreciate it!

Can't wait to have Mame running and start playing all those fab classics that are as powerful and entertaining today as they were in my youth.
Pure magic!

It would be great to tuneup my setup as much as I can, to make the most of it.
I guess there will be no problem with the 133MHz bus sync as it seems that my old mobo can handle it OK.

DFI Socket 370 CA64-TN

Form Factor: ATX
Compatible Processors: Celeron, Pentium III, Cyrix III
Processor Socket: Socket 370
Max Processor Speed: 1.26 GHz
Chipset Type: VIA Apollo Pro133T
Max Bus Speed: 133 MHz
BIOS Type: Award
Storage Controller: ATA-100

Also your advices made me think if my ram specs will meet the system needs:

Supported RAM
Technology: SDRAM
Supported RAM Integrity Check: Non-ECC, ECC
RAM Installed ( Max ): 0 MB / 1 GB (max) - DIMM 168-PIN
RAM Technology: SDRAM - 133 MHz

Installed Dimms:
Dimm 01 = Dbx 133 MHz (256 mb – double sided)
Dimm 02 = Kingston 133 MHz (128mb)
Dimm 03 = Tonicom pc150 (128mb)
I also have a Tonicom pc166 (128 mb) – any advantage in using it instead of the pc150 module?

Total= 512 MB

I just ordered arcadevga and Ipac from ultimarc.

  have an excellent 2008 with lots of success and arcade fun !!!

[SpeedEng]

pc133, 150, 166 memory will all run @ 133fsb

nah dont even worry about the speed
you can overclock the system but you wont get much with the p3

the celeron on the other hand will oc slightly higher tho..

[TheManuel]

You definitely should try both if you have them avialable.
I think the Celeron will be faster.

I tried a Celeron 700 and Pentium III 800 for my project and the PIII was not much faster than the Celeron above the expected 14% increase in speed.

If I'm not mistaken, Celerons are Pentiums with lower Level 2 Cache size.  This does does not improve your performance by more than 10%, if that.
Check out this article (although the tests were done on more recent hardware but the basic conclusion should hold).

As for the FSB.  It will not make a difference in MAME.  I tried both, 100 and 133 memory modules on my PIII 800MHz and could not extract a single fps from the upgrade.

MAME is very strongly dependent on CPU speed.  Anything else will have little or no effect.  There is too much anecdotal and "everybody knows" advice when it comes to making MAME run faster.  Not a lot of people have really done the tests themselves. 

The one true effective way to make MAME faster other than increasing processor speed is using an older MAME version.  Anything else, please show data.  I try do to do some myth busting on this subject every time I see someone asking on advice to improve MAME performance.

[pressthebutton]

Thank you for the input guys!!

I´m about to test both processors and I´ll post the results here. I´ve just recieved arcadevga graphic card. First I need to build a vga to scart/rgb cable to test everything on the tv.



 

[DaOld Man]

I was hoping to run a DOS Mame with a front-end. Will spystyle do the trick? I've read that many people are using win98 with a special command line config that allows Mame to run directly without loading windows.

Also I´ve got an old 8 gigas harddrive that I was hoping to use. Is that enough?

Game Launcher (GLaunch) works good in dos, and looks good for a front end, I think. (Download the DOS version.)
I had problems setting up my first machine in dos, so I just used win98, then later winxp. GLaunch works good in win98 too. (Download the windows version.)
But dont use mame32 with a frontend, you can, but its not really meant to be a command line mame.
If you run CMD in win98 (start/run/cmd), it will start up in dos each time the machine is booted after that, until you type EXIT.
So this may be what people are talking about?
8 gig will be enough, unless you have a lot of games. (remember screenshots take up a lot of space too.)
I suggest you set up a test computer on your workbench (kitchen table) and just try some things.
Looks like you are already headed that way.

[Afterburner]

I'm using an old PIII 1GHz for my mame cabinet.

I'm running Mame32 v.110 or v.116 (forget which, maybe both!) without any real frontend....just the default mame32 interface.

I've got XP installed.  I didn't install TinyXP, but I stripped just about everything out I could and shut down anything I didn't need running.  And my graphics card is a poor PCI (not PCI express) card as the original was an intel integrated graphic chip that doesn't work with mame anymore.

It boots pretty fast....faster than it takes Mame32 to load, anyway.

I'm able to run just about any game I want to play with the exception of newer ones.  Starblade, HOTD, etc.  Any of those are too complex for it.

[IG-88]

......MAME is very strongly dependent on CPU speed.  Anything else will have little or no effect.  There is too much anecdotal and "everybody knows" advice when it comes to making MAME run faster.  Not a lot of people have really done the tests themselves. 

Just curious but would dual processors (as in 2 separate chips) help improve performance? I have an old server mobo with 2 400mhz cpu's on it and thought about trying it.

sorry for getting OT.

[ringram]

I'm using a 350mhz celeron overclocked to 450mhz, 192Mb of ram and a 10gb hard drive. I am using DOS 7 (win 98 bootdisk) and Mame .81. I have ArcadeOS loaded as a front end. I play all of the classics with no frame skip. It's fast. I don't have to worry about shut down (just turn the power off). No booting into windows. Turn the power on, and a couple of seconds later, you're in the front end. It's (almost) kid proof.

Unless you really want the more recent games to work on the machine, don't get get all caught up in processor specs, etc. What you have will be fine. Upgrade later when you can source out a better (used/free) machine.

[pressthebutton]

Hi ringram,

Thank you for posting your system specs.
I'm mainly interested in playing the "classic" arcade games, so knowing that my system will most likely handle the job is great news!
Didn't you had trouble installing the drivers for your soundcard or network card?
Some people defend that it's better to use tiny xp as for driver availability.
Not really sure what to choose. Need something that is not to hard to setup.

I'm just about to finish the vga to scart/rgb cable. Are you by any chance using a cable like this? I'm using a schematic taken from this site:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/callum.henderson/basement_boomera_000009.htm

Having a bit of trouble understanding the reason why I must solder the 12v power supply lead to scart pin number 8   


P.M.

[Tiger-Heli]

Anything else, please show data.

Disabling sound in mame can help as well (but isn't much fun), as can running at a lower resolution (640x as opposed to 1024x).  I don't have data, though.

And I'm mainly just being difficult.

[TheManuel]

You're absolutely right about the resolution, I forgot to mention that.  I've seen data 
About the sound, I would not even consider it.

[pressthebutton]

I've "solved" the 12v yellow lead mystery with a "little" help from Ultimarc support. 
The 12v lead enables automatic switching to the AV mode when the cabinet is turned on.    Great stuff! It's that simple and it really does the job!
Now I've got rgb on my scart tv set. Amazing, sharp quality! Much better than s-video.

I've decided to give win 98 a chance and see if it works OK, as I'm looking for a direct boot to arcade OS. Presently following an advice from this link:

http://www.marcianitos.org/tutoriales/arcadeos.php

A step-by-step direct boot configuration for AOS with win98 (Spanish only, I'm afraid) I'm Portuguese myself but I don't have much trouble understanding Spanish.

Hey guys, I'm starting to get excited about this! Any thoughts?

P.B.

[u_rebelscum]

Just curious but would dual processors (as in 2 separate chips) help improve performance? I have an old server mobo with 2 400mhz cpu's on it and thought about trying it.

From what is posted here, no:

MAME's current multithreading is completely useless on, say, a dual Pentium 3/800 - you don't see any benefit until your CPU's single-core speed passes a threshold.

[pressthebutton]

UPDATE»»

Wow, I'm really stuck in my Mame win98 configuration. Man, this is hard!! Nothing seems to work properly. First, it was the arcadevga win98 driver problem, now it's the Arcadevgares tool that doesn't install correctly... what's next?

I want to play!! What a torture... 

I'm starting to incline towards win xp. Already got tiny xp. Is it possible to have a direct boot to arcade os with Win Xp? If not, how can I navigate to arcade os without a keyboard?

Come on guys,  need a helping hand... starting to get clueless and confused.

P.B.