Newbie here planning a cabinet! Tons of questions

[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.

[ivwshane]

Just use mame32, it's recognized by most front ends anyway.

A good and easy front end to use with a lot of emulators is mala but there are plenty of others.

[CheffoJeffo]

Welcome!

You may be interested in:

http://wiki.arcadecontrols.com/wiki/Software

[javeryh]

Hi - welcome to the boards.  You should definitely look at the wiki.  Practically no one uses command line DOS to launch MAME.  Everyone uses "Front Ends" to launch the games with MaLa, Maximus Arcade, Gamelauncher, Mamewah, GameEx and a few others being the popular ones.

Also, a widescreen monitor is not ideal for MAME at all, IMO.  Everything will either be stretched or have black bars.  Also vertical games will look particularly awkward (and tiny).  I've used a 4:3 (or 3:4 depending on orientation) LCD and CRT and they both look great.  I've also used a 5:4 monitor and I don't really notice a difference with the picture.

[severdhed]

the monitor size depends alot on the cabinet it will be going into.  i have a 19" 5:4 LCD monitor in my cabinet and it looks good. (it originally had a 20" CRT arcade monitor) however my friend has a dynamo cabinet that originally had a 25" monitor, the 19" LCD looked way too small.

command line emulators are the way to go for a cabinet.  i highly recommend MALA since it is very easy to get set up with multiple emulators, and is very easy to customize it's appearance...you can always change it later

as for the PC< i was running an Athlon XP 2500+ with 1gb of ram, geforce 4 mx440 video, 20gb hd.  i recently upgraded though because i had the parts lying around..now it is:

Pentium 4 3ghz, 2gb ram, radeon 9600xt video, 80gb hd.

i havent gotten around to really play it much yet, but it runs most stuff pretty well.

[Spinach]

Welcome, from one noob to another!

I'm running a dinosaur AMD 1.5 from 2001.  I can run many old games and a few (very few) newer games (MKIII is just not going to work).  I think a lot of this is due to my video card for the newer games although for MAME I read the card plays little effect, so maybe my processor is to dogged slow?

For the monitor I am in the same boat as you.  I am going to start out with a 5:4 17" inch LCD I have with the computer.  I actually purchased a 22" WideScreen but found I gained only 1" in height and increased my width by another 50%.  I felt this would make things look/play wierd, so I took it back.  I'm thinking a 24" might be a better choice, that should give me about 2" more height, and again, another 50% + width, which seems unavoidable at this time.

I use Mala for the front end, very easy to set up.

Good luck, and measure twice!

[dkubarek]

Spinach, I would think that you could get MK3 to run well with an AMD 1.5. What version of Mame?

[Spinach]

.128 with Mala FE

I can get it run on our laptop, almost same specs but newer, so I'm thinking it is the video card.  On my Mame dedicated computer I run a Savage card.  I believe it is 32MB total with only 8MB dedicated.  Windows XP Home SP3.  Tekken will also work on the laptop but not the old desktop.

[mrx88]

Spinach I would agree with you that it may be the vid card. Have you tried going into BIOS and giving the card more RAM(That is if you have any to spare) Its been a LOOOOOONG time since I messed with a Rage card but I thought you could pop into BIOS and allocate more "shared" ram for it to grab. I could be just  :blah:ing though......

[Spinach]

I don'[t really mess too much with the system.  I'm not very computer risky.  I can read directions but changing the way a system works is a bit much for me.  I will however consider it.  Could I do it through windows or do I need to hit the F10 button and make a change that way?

I don't mind too much right now as I am almost done with the cab and will then delve into process of making everything just right.  That should take me another 2 years! 

The other difference I just thought of was the laptop is a Pentium.  I suppose that could also make a difference.

Thanks for the help 

[Goatz18]

I am also running a dinosaur, an 800Mhz PIII, and can play all old games pre-1990. Some after 1990 can play but the likes of Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam can't play. I just made sure I got the MK for Sega CD and run that just fine through Kega Fusion and I also run the four player SNES NBA Jam T.E. just fine as sort of an end around.

I did manage to come across a P4 hand me down just last week that's a 1.6 Mhz. I have all the most advanced 2d games, including UMK3 and Street Fighter The Movie, and some 3d games, like Virtua Fighter,  running on it. The original Tekken though is still sluggish.

[Jack Burton]

You can easily play practically any 2d graphics game up to 2009 on a 1 ghz processor.  All the CPS2 and Neo Geo game will work 100%.  It's all about making the right choice in emulator for the others.   You will need to use older versions of MAME.   However, most midway games will run like crap even on old versions of MAME.  You can get around that by emulating the console versions.  The psx versions of UMK3, NBA Jam, and Blitz are very good and will run on much lower specs. 

It always seemed kind of silly that I could run an N64 emu 100% speed on my setup but not MK1.

[MrMojoZ]

Spinach I would agree with you that it may be the vid card. Have you tried going into BIOS and giving the card more RAM(That is if you have any to spare) Its been a LOOOOOONG time since I messed with a Rage card but I thought you could pop into BIOS and allocate more "shared" ram for it to grab. I could be just  :blah:ing though......

Allocating more sharded memory to an onboard video isn't going to help you run anything better.