| Main > Main Forum |
| Newbie here planning a cabinet! Tons of questions |
| (1/4) > >> |
| Tizzel:
Hey guys longtime reader of this board. You guys definitely know your ---Cleveland steamer---! I'm just in the early planning stages of building a cabinet and looking for some answers/opinions. Seems as though the easiest way of building a cabinet from scratch is to use a PC in the cab. I do have an extra 19"WS LCD monitor kicking around. Is this too small or acceptable? I plan on running a wide variety of games, from console to arcade. What specs are good for a PC? Software wise I've found some pretty easy to use Emulators for NES & SNES. They are nice GUI programs. I cannot, however, seem to find a GUI interface for MAME games. Also do all emulators have to use DOS based commands to run from a frontend? Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks |
| dkubarek:
I'm a newbie, too. I say the monitor is big enough, but bigger is always better. Same with the PC. I have a Pent 4 1.6, gig of ram and can play Mortal Kombat 3, Tekken 2, NBA jam and others well. I can't play Tekken 3 and many other 3-D games. If all you have is a Pentium 3, it will play most older games, say 1990 or older. You can give newer games a shot and see how they play, tho. Get a good Front End, command line emus, follow the Wiki or use total sheller to hide windows and minimize PC power sappers. There are great GUIs out there (MameUI is a Mame GUI) but you'll want to use command-line emus for the cabinet for sure. If you're intimidated, go with Mala or another easy-to-use Front End. Mamewah is harder to set up (I'm not tech savvy and I did it fine) but many here say it's very stable. I use Mala now and really like it. Command line emus will perform better and will hide windows perfectly, which you'll want. Also, you can do about everything without a mouse or keyboard when it's set up. |
| Tizzel:
I'm quite familiar with computers so I'm gonna put more reading into MAME command line. |
| Tizzel:
Ok I somehow remembered how to run DOS. haha. I can get MAME to run but the few ROMS that I have don't run. MAME keeps saying it needs a CHD file!?! What does that mean? |
| dkubarek:
Does it say one or more roms/chds is missing? CHDs are "chunks of hard data" that mimic hard drives found in some newer arcade games. They can be very large. For example. The complete mame rom set .129 of about 7,000 games is about 17 gigs, but the CHDs for about 200 games is more than 80 gigs. You can also drag the rom zip file onto a shortcut you made on the desktop for command-line Mame. If you set up a Front end you won't need to really run dos. It will launch it and tell it what game to run. A front end is the GUI. It lets you use a joystick or keyboard or whatever to pick games in a fancy GUI menu but then calls up dos for the games. Can even make dos invisible, which is great if you want to completely hide windows, etc. |
| Navigation |
| Message Index |
| Next page |