Using Xbox with MAME

[Tykey]

Hello all,

Firstly, I'm new here so be easy one me.    I'm a complete newbie when it comes to designing and building an arcade machine. I bought the saint's book, & since then have been reading on the forums a lot, and i'm starting to feel like i might actually know what i'm doing.

One of my friends mentioned using an xbox with a chip in it instead of a PC to run MAME. I was just wondering what the pro's and con's to doing this were, and if anyone out there has tried this?

Thanks for any help.

[nukedawg]

Well for one thing, the Xbox is only a Pentium III 733 MHz with 64mb of RAM. This limits the number of MAME games such as the larger Versus games such as KOF, Street Fighter etc (I am not sure which ones but some will load while others will run out of memory). I have a ton of games installed on mine but they work alot better on my actual gamecab instead (P4 2.8ghz with 1gb RAM. It will allow plenty of other emulators though and to me thats one big plus. Also if you like videos, the Xbox has the ability to run like a media center PC which is what I really use mine after building my cab. I have not really used my Xbox as the guts to a cabinet so can't help there.

So its a great console to run emus on, even though it may not be the best solution but it would be a great way to get a cab up and running if you didn't have a PC available to use.

[amadama]

This was discussed last week:
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=80647.0

[Tykey]

Thanks for the info nukedawg. I had no idea of the specs for the xbox, so that'll help my decision.

I'll check out the link too for more info. Cheers guys.