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Ginsu Victim:

--- Quote ---So, if you can play a SNES game from 1993 on your system you can play an arcade game from 1993.
--- End quote ---

This is not accurate. Example: Donkey Kong
gonzo90017:
It doesn't take a really fast computer to run any of those systems. NES, SNES, and Genesis should run fine on just about anything. I'm currently testing on a 233mhz 160mb ram Windows 98SE machine and those 3 systems plus NeoGeo and Capcom arcade games run full speed. The rest of the games are on a per game basis since I use Mame 36 or Raine. The problem with using such an old version of Mame is the romsets.
Rakae:
Right now in my mame I have the following.

AMD Athlon  1.3 gig
Ram 768 megs of DDR 1
Radion 1600 512 megs ( Note I also used an order card with 128 megs and it worked just as good)

harddrive is just just an old 5400 rpm

I can play all everything 16 bit and before.
I can play almost all arcade games fine. It will not play anything 3d at a the right speed.
Killer instinct plays slow as well.

wbassett:
I agree that for most games it doesn't take a powerhouse PC.  In my cab now is a 1.2GHz AMD Thunderbird with 512 ram and a 60GB HD.  Video is some AGP card I had laying around, so it's nothing fantastic.

I also have mame running on a Medion PC upstairs that I kinda use as a test bed.  It's a 2.8GHz system with a gig of ram and NVidia AGP card.

Most games play fine, but I ran into some that had some serious lag, so bad it wasn't even watchable for the game intro let alone playing the game.

I know there are more than this, but this one comes to mind because I just tried it out...

Star Wars Arcade would not run on either the Thunderbird or the Medion 2.8Ghz system.  I acquired a new PC from my son because it was 'broke' (ended up only needing a $15 CPU fan) and its a 3.33Ghz Hyperthreading CPU with 2GB ram and I am using the onboard video.  It does have a PCI Express video slot but I don't have a spare card for it.

Star Wars Arcade came up an ran just fine.  Granted there are known bugs with the version I have, but it wouldn't run on the other systems at all.  It was choppy and the sound stuttered so bad I originally marked it as unuse-able but now it looks like a pretty cool game.

There is also a couple of Japanese fighting games that had frame rate issues on my Medion PC and they run just fine on the ASUS board, and as I mentioned, that's with onboard video too and no fancy card.

So like everyone points out, it really depends on what you want to do and play.  If you want a classic cab, then 99% of the classic games should play fine with even a super old PC (like my Thunderbird).  But if you want to play some newer games, or games like Donkey Kong, then you may want a little more beef.

I want to be able to play certain PC games on my system too, so I want a bit beefer PC in my cab, but that's a personal preference.
Shieldwolf:
This would be nice to have in a  new forum section or to have added to the  "What computer do I need to run Mame"to include other emulators as well.


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