Building a MAME cab - PC components advice please!!

[Diewrecked]

Hi all,

I hope you can help.

I have just bought a Jamma cab off eBay (item number 380014093201 if you're interested). I'm going to rip the guts out and replace them with a PC running 3DArcade driving MAME and Daphne.

The cab comes with a 26" arcade monitor which I hope to salvage. I am going to buy an ArcadeVGA card and a JPac from Ultimarc for the connections.

I have an old XP MCE HTPC which I'm going to rip to pieces for the guts of the PC. It has an Athlon 64 3000+ chip and 768Mb RAM on 184-pin DIMMs.

On speaking to Andy at Ultimarc he recommended going for a PCIE version of the ArcadeVGA given it'll be driving 3DAracade. To do so I'll need to replace the mobo (it's a Gigabyte GA-K8VM800M).

My questions:
1. Is the Athlon 64 3000 going to be beefy enough to run the 3DArcade FE? Will it be cool enough inside a case inside a cab or will I need to start again with a cooler-running Intel chip?

2. I'm looking at sticking another 1Gb stick into the machine to give it 1.75Gb. Will that be enough for 3DArcade? And is 184pin DIMM RAM fast enough?
3. I'm looking at the Asus K8V-XE motherboard simply because it's the cheapest Socket 754 board I can find with PCIE and three RAM slots, is it any good? Will it do the job? Could I get something better for not a lot more outlay?
4. Is anyone running 3DArcade on an arcade monitor? Does it look ok? I'm just wondering if the low refresh rates and resolutions inherent in them will impact on the visuals or performance and I should instead bin the idea of using this screen and just get a normal PC screen (still using an ArcadeVGA card to drop the refresh rates for MAME).

Apologies in advance for so many questions guys but I've built PC's before to do a certain job only to discover a few months down the line that the kit I bought was completely inappropriate!

Cheers all
Jon

[paigeoliver]

I don't know about 3D arcade, but that machine is mucho overkill for mame itself.

[bloodyviking77]

Depends on what games you want to play.
The setup you describe will be fine for x% (most) MAME games. There will be some that won't run full speed no matter what specs you have.
Comes down to how much $$ you want to spend ...

[pincky]

you should test the monitor, before you start sinking money into this thing,

I would recemmend the monitor get re-caped

contact chad @ www.arcadecup.com to see the price if your monitor

I am doing a mame conversion myself

Here is my project thread
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=77686.0

My motherboard is MSI K6Delta Series
AMD 2700+
512 MB PC2100 Ram 333mhz 2x 256
20gb for OS & 80 GB (mame & roms) Running Windows XP
J-pac & Arcade VGA

I can run i am guessing about 85 to 90% games

[Diewrecked]

Many thanks for your replies so far, all.

Paigeoliver - it wasn't so much MAME itself I was worried about regarding the spec, as 3DArcade, which is very resource hungry as it does a lot of realtime 3D rendering, showing attract mode videos in virtual rotatable cabs etc.

Bloodyviking - many thanks for the heads up. I'll bear that in mind when I come across one; I thought the kit would be sufficient to run all MAME games (as in my reply to Paigeoliver above) so I'd be trying to fix games that didn't. I won't waste my time now .. nice one!

Pincky - excellent call regarding getting the screen overhauled. Unfortunately I'm based in London UK but I have mailed Chad for ideas and am currently looking for someone this side who could help.

Still interested in anyone else's opinions of course so keep 'em coming people!

Thanks again everyone
Jon

[taz-nz]

... sufficient to run all MAME games ...

If you that your target have a read of my Benchmarking thread.

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=72776.0

I suggest you read it all, but the numbers start to get ready interesting about page 3.

[paigeoliver]

Trying to run ALL Mame games is generally a bad budget decision, 99 percent of them will run on sub ghz hardware full speed. The ones that won't are largely games that use analog controls that you won't have, or things that won't run full speed on anything yet (or both).

If your budget is limited in any way then you will be happier in the long run by using a budget used comp and spending the extra money on the monitor or controls (adding almost ANY type of control buys you more games than any CPU upgrade will).

Although going for a specific frontend isn't exactly the same thing, so I do agree that you should go with hardware that can run the frontend you want.