Farm Computers For A Cabinet???

[Goatz18]

Has anyone tried farming two or more PC's together for a mame cabinet? Is it possible? How and for what OS (Windows95/98/ME/XP, Linux, MacOS) would it be best for?

[NickG]

Why would you do that?
 

[SavannahLion]

Hhmm... you mean like a Beowulf Cluster or a COW?

That's a good question. Off the top of my head, I would imagine it would be a moot point until MAME can take advantage of the multiple core CPU's.

Or maybe the bigger issue would be the bandwidth issues between the machines. Even if one were to virtualize a more "powerful" system in a cluster the MAME games that would benefit the most might suffer the most due to communication between boxes.

Might be something worth a try. I wouldn't expect much gain from it at this point in the game.  I think it would be easier just to go with one powerful box instead of two half-assed boxes for MAME.

As an aside, the worlds record holder as of 11/08 is Roadrunner. A hybrid beast using AMD and Sony CELL processors. A video about Roadrunner.

No bookmark is complete without http://www.top500.org/  

[MrMojoZ]

Might be something worth a try. I wouldn't expect much gain from it at this point in the game.  I think it would be easier just to go with one powerful box instead of two half-assed boxes for MAME.

No, it wouldn't even be worth trying.  You'd gain nothing, if you could get it working at all. Video game emulators don't benefit from ths type of computing.  And if your trying to cluster Windows 98 you have even bigger issues. 

[Goatz18]

AH I see, so it would come down to whether the emulator supports it. I was just curious because I stumbled across an article where a guy clustered like 6 really old computers, Pentium II and lower, running linux and they processed some complex video, it was crazy. But now that I think about it his video software might have cost more than the computers to have used them in such a way.

[u_rebelscum]

...it would be a moot point until MAME can take advantage of the multiple core CPU's.

Mame does take advantage multiple cores with current mame (IIRC, post 0.123, & just before that mame could use only two cores well). 

However, due to emulation's interdependence of calculation, it can't parallelize to the level that cluster computing needs to help.  Clusters/farms need calculations that can be calculated totally independent of the other calculations done by the other computer to work well.  Some video processing can be parallelized a lot; 3d video rendering can be even more so since the top left side has zero relation to what's in the lower right  (except for maybe shadows).  Emulation can only be parallelized to a certain point (which mame is doing), but nothing close to farmings.