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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