64 bit OS suggestions post mame 136

[pmowry]

Ok, so I was to lazy to properly source a pc and just went to bestbuy and picked up an ASIs desktop with an i5 650, 8Gb of ram, integrated intel graphics and 64 bit win 7 home premium. It is going in a cab with a WG D9800, so no higher than 800x600 display. I plan on trying to get an actlabs lightgun working and various other USB attached controls.

I have an obvious bias since I'm asking here, but for mame performance and to run as many emulators as possible with my hardware restrictions should I stay with win7 or switch to Linux?

If I do switch to Linux it would most likely become a mythtv backend and an asterisk pbx to help justify it being on all the time.

Thanks,

[pmowry]

I'll try to do some name benchmarks today with the system as built and then with using puppylinux or maybe ubuntu off a USB drive. I'll run the benchmarks twice on each only reporting the results of the 2nd run. I'm assuming that would get everything in cache and even out any penalty the USB boot might have.

But 64 bit OS is new to me, so any suggested tweaks on both sides are appreciated. I'll be looking at the SDLMame forum for Linux tweaks and I don't mind compiling mame on both setups

[Arbee]

It's generally a wash on performance if you have both OSes tuned up as well as they can be.  However, since your goal is to run "the most emulators possible" in my mind that negates performance and means you have to go with Win7 simply because there are no Linux-only emulators but there are a few (less nowadays with things like Kega going multi-platform) that are Windows-only.