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paigeoliver:
If you are willing to say "screw the CHD games" then you can use just about any old freebie computer you can find (I LOVE version .55 for processors 400mhz up to 1ghz). There have been very few non-chd games of any substance added to mame since that version anyway.

Screw the CHD games is actually a really good strategy too, since they happen to contain all the games that won't run full speed on ANYTHING and they also happen to largely contain a bunch of games that require specialty analog controls that you probably won't have.

Any money you planned on spending on a comp budget would make you a lot happier funneled into your monitor budget or simply being spent on a trackball or spinner or something. The real-world difference between what your mom's old computer will run in mame and what a brand new $2000 one will run is actually very, very little.
Zobeid:

--- Quote from: paigeoliver on March 12, 2008, 03:27:10 am ---If you are willing to say "screw the CHD games" then you can use just about any old freebie computer you can find (I LOVE version .55 for processors 400mhz up to 1ghz). There have been very few non-chd games of any substance added to mame since that version anyway.

--- End quote ---

But if using anything other than the most recent MAME, then finding matching and compatible ROMs would be a problem wouldn't it?

I've never understood why, but every time I got a new version of MAME a lot of old games that worked just fine suddenly don't work anymore, then I had to get new versions of the ROMs.  (Who is making new versions of Pac Man, anyhow?  Doesn't make sense.)

Ginsu Victim:

--- Quote ---But if using anything other than the most recent MAME, then finding matching and compatible ROMs would be a problem wouldn't it?
--- End quote ---

A set of rollback roms and Clrmamepro fixes that. I just rolled back my .123 set to a perfect .84 set.

metaHipster:
i've got a crusty old P3 700Mhz for my vert cab and an Athlon 2000+XP Shuttle PC for my work-in-progress.

Both are somewhat noisy so if you want things to be super quiet you may want to consider an Antec case.  The shuttle is great & compact form factor but I would imagine most cabinets could fit a standard ATX case without problems.
soulblazer28:
Something that might not have been touched upon, sure you can get an old pc on the cheap and you will be able to play most games, and this is exactly what I did, except in my case I just used my old pc and built myself a new "main" pc.

In any case, it plays most games beautifully, but using Mala as a front end is extremely slow!  Of coure I am using Mala with glitzy graphics and a gameplay avi video whenever a game is selected, but it literally takes about 3 seconds to browse through each game in the list.

For me, part of the charm of playing the cab was having a kicka55 front end that will motivate me and others to play games we've never heard of before. So I am going to end up buying a better computer for it just for that reason. Lucily it didn't cost me anything the first time around.

Of course that might not be your case but thought I'd pass that consideration along.  ;D

For reference my cab's pc is an AMD Athlon 1.4 or so with 512kb RAM and a Radeon 9600 with S-Video out.
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