Good PC Setup?

[djsting]

What would be a good sound and video card for a MAME system?  I will be using it for MAME, other emulation, some PC games, jukebox, and on a RARE occasion to watch TV or DVDs on.

Also what would be a good processor for the money and how much RAM should I get?

[GroovyTuesdaY]

Explain a little more about what types of games you are wanting to run.  This would give the community a little better idea of what type of system you will need.
In general i don't think i would go for anything less than a p3 800.   That seems to be able to handle most games on my setup.  It also has 256 meg. of pc133 ram & a geforce 2 mx.    For some reason it seems this setup though has a little bit of a rough time running NBA JAM and some of the other midway games.  Lots of chugging.  My kids play on this system mostly though and play the 4 player games alot. Games like simpsons & teenage mutant ninja turtles and gauntlet run flawlessly.   Of course all the older games like pac-man & donkey kong and such run perfect as well.

Now my main mame system that i run is a DELL P4 1.8 with 512 meg. of pc133 ram and a geforce 4 ti4200 8x with 128 meg of ram.   This system seems to run all games like mortal kombat  and nba jam and everything except the newer games that run SLLOOOOOOWWW on anything but a pentium 9 running @ 10,000  gigahertz lol.

Hope this gives you some insight.  
Just drop us an idea of what it is you plan on running and you will get lots of responses.

good luck,
g~

[spectre]

im getting an 866mhz 356mb sdram, onboard video and sound
should that run everything decent?

[paigeoliver]

They don't make a computer that runs EVERYTHING in Mame decently.

A P2 300 will run maybe 60-70 percent of the games.

A 450 Mhz will run around 90 percent of the games.

A 600 mhz system will run 95 percent of the games (pretty much everything except the Midway NBA Jam/Mortal Kombat hardware stuff, and the 1 percent of games that won't run fullspeed on anything).

A 1.2 Ghz system will run 99 percent of the games.

The other 1 percent will chug on everything.

Buying a mega hyper computer for Mame is spending a premium amount to add a very small amount of games. Any speed over 600 is just adding a tiny amount of games. That money might better be spent on nicer controls, and/or a better display. Plus, its not like you can't upgrade later (buying a 600 now, and upgrading it to a 2 ghz in a year and a half will be a lot cheaper than buying a 2 ghz now).

You can get better performance on older computers by using an older version of Mame too. My numbers above are conservative if anything. If you actually tested it out, I'll bet you couldn't find more than 30 games out of the 2000 unique mame titles that wouldn't run full speed on a 600.

I remember first using Mame on my K6-2 300, and then later upgrading to a k6-2 450 and being amazed because that ran "Everything". That same 450 still pretty much runs everything except for a short list of exceptions (which are almost all fighting/sports games anyway, and like there are not enough of those that run correctly on a 450 anyway).

As for Ram. Depends on your operating system, and gaming preferences. If you are using Windows 98, 95 then 128 is fine (unless you just HAVE to play those 5 or 6 fighting games that are over 100 MB). With Windows XP shoot for 256 MB, as the OS eats a ton of your ram right off the bat.

[spectre]

well i meant everything running, lol...
pretty much i wanna play everything except for
killer instinct 1 and 2 and maximum force /area 51
LOL...
hope this will do it, i dunno

[meta87]

I've got a pentium 3 600 and it runs about everything but the midway games like everyone said.

But for those games I've found that a snes emulator can easily handle nba jam and all the mortal combats very smoothly.

So you can always run the midway games on another emulator.

[pmc]

A P2 300 will run maybe 60-70 percent of the games.

A 450 Mhz will run around 90 percent of the games.

Hmmmm..... I have a K6-2 at 400Mhz (128mb RAM) and am having problems with anything but vintage games (PacMan, Galaga, etc.). Part of this may be related to some problems I'm having with the IDE bus but have been too lazy to get serious about resolving (been focused on the cabinet itself). Also, I have a 2MB S3 Virge PCI video card that's destined to be replaced with a 16MB SiS 305 PCI. Can I expect significantly better performance based on the video card?

You can get better performance on older computers by using an older version of Mame too.

Do you have a recommended version (in terms of stability and features)? I'm using MAME32 0.62 under Win98SE. Running in dmame DOS mode does not seem to improve things much -- but I have yet to go so far as to create a bootable partition and tune it to MAME. I like MameWah alot too so I'm a bit tied to windows. I've also been told that recompiling MAME with the AMD switches on helps a little.

I remember first using Mame on my K6-2 300, and then later upgrading to a k6-2 450 and being amazed because that ran "Everything". That same 450 still pretty much runs everything except for a short list of exceptions (which are almost all fighting/sports games anyway, and like there are not enough of those that run correctly on a 450 anyway).

Not my experience (but I'm at 400MHz). I wonder what's different. Contra and similar side scroller games run terrible until I muck with frame skipping and it's still no fun to play. Sound is often choppy (Turtle Beach Montego sound card). Asteroids is unplayable. Columns and Columns II play great but sound is choppy and stutters. I don't try to play much past 1989. Pit Fighter is too slow. Shinobi is OK. Tempest is great (but sucks with no spinner!). I've only really tested Ms. PacMan, Galaga, and Galaxian heavily. I seem to recall StarCastle running crappy too.

What should I be expecting given K6-2 400MHz, 12MB RAM, 2MB S3 Virge PCI video, Turtle Beach Montego AC3D (or something like that) under Windows98 SE? I need a benchmark.

Maybe time to burn down the machine and start for scratch to be really clean and fast about it.

Does this topic belong in "Software?"

[meta87]

PMC:

I think a better video card and some more ram, maybe 64 megs, would help out alot.

I think those two things are your main problem, not your processor.

[GroovyTuesdaY]

As for Ram. Depends on your operating system, and gaming preferences. If you are using Windows 98, 95 then 128 is fine (unless you just HAVE to play those 5 or 6 fighting games that are over 100 MB). With Windows XP shoot for 256 MB, as the OS eats a ton of your ram right off the bat.

IF your wanting to run windows XP home or PRO, don't even bother with 256, just go straight to 512 as 256, tends to not be enough.  The faster the memory the better.      I would say though that unless your running something along the lines of a pentium 4 of some sort, don't mess with XP.   You need a nice fast p4 to run xp the way it wants to run.
So, if you end up staying with  win98 or ME there is a memory cap there and i think its 512 meg.  Maybe someone can clarify that one, been a while since i ran the older OS's.

g~