Please Critique my MAME Hardware Plans!

[KevSteele]

If you've visited my site, you know that plans are underway for the MAMEframe II. I just got my Wells-Gardner D9200 arcade monitor today, and now I'm trying to figure out a good, mid-to-high level PC hardware config for the cabinet.

Here are my preliminary choices:

ABIT NF7 or Epox 8RDA3+ motherboard
Athlon XP 3000/400 processor
2 sticks of Crucial 256mb PC3200 RAM
ArcadeVGA card from Ultimarc

(I've already got a hard drive & other hardware sitting around)

Any better choices?

Kevin

[night]

that chip is serious overkill, and im pretty sure 256 ram will do just fine.

[SirPeale]

Sounds good.  You should order the RAM from the link on my site.  I get a kickback, and you get nice Crucial RAM!

[KevSteele]

The chip may be overkill, but I just have a hard time getting a 400 FSB capable MB without putting in a proc that can take advantage of it.  

Besides, I might actually be able to run Crusin' USA at above slide-show speeds.  

We'll see how my final budget pans out -- if not, I'll go cheaper.

(As to the RAM, it's fairly cheap, and next to CPU it's one of the few things that can speed up MAME games.)

[OSCAR]

Ironically, your best decision is the one you mentioned last (ArcadeVGA)...  

You definitely won't be disappointed with the results, that's for sure.  The last few MAME releases have improved greatly on the automatic resolution selection.  I've only used this on DOS MAME, so I don't know if it has been implemented in the standard command line version MAME...  I'm using the ArcadeVGA on the vertical monitor in my cocktail, and MAME has chosen the correct resolution on every game I've tried.  Beautiful, fullscreen displays on all the games without hardware stretching.  It really has to be seen to be fully appreciated.

[KevSteele]

Kelsey,

I'm glad you like the ArcadeVGA -- when I saw that Andy had special config files just for the WG D9200 monitor, I figured it would be the right video card.  

There's also a file on the Ultimarc site that supposedly adjusts all the individual game .ini files so that they use the correct video settings.

I'm dying to see how the D9200 looks with Robotron in 27" of non-stretched glorious color.  

Kevin

[crashdmj]

Please let me know how the ArcadeVGA and D9200 combo goes.
Not to take over your thread but would the ArcadeVGA be able to handle newer emulation such as PJ64 or ePSXe.
Derek

[OSCAR]

Someone had mentioned that the file on Andy's site had been incorporated into the last couple of MAME builds, like since .69 and up.  I haven't verified that myself, but I've seen it posted a couple of times.  All I know is that I didn't have to use it all with .70, and every game I tried came up perfectly without doing a thing.

[KevSteele]

All I know is that I didn't have to use it all with .70, and every game I tried came up perfectly without doing a thing.

I love it when things work perfectly without doing a thing! Good to know - I'll test it out once I get the ArcadeVGA card.

Kevin

[Frostillicus]

I've been using the D9200/AVGA for awhile now and there are no drawbacks whatsoever.  All emulators I've tried (epsxe included) work great on it.  Jump from z26 to stepmania to mame and it's all good looking. What's really cool is to get arcade-perfect scanlines with newer ePSXe games like capcom vs snk.  me likey.  Dreamcast looks great, too.

As for the utils on andy's site - very handy.  Obviously there is the one that restores the standard 640x480 and 800x600, which is nice.  The  INI util is mame version independent - it just parses whatever version Mame.exe and creates an INI file for each game called <gamename>.ini (surprisingly enough ).

The only attributes in each ini are artwork=0, hwstretching=0, and resolution=<whatever>.  You can define if you want the artwork or hwstretchin included in each one, but the main purpose is to set the resolution.  This is the last INI parsed by mame for a specific game.

Downside to all this is I had to manually erase the ini's for vector games - they were Out of Range.  But that wasn't a big deal.  I just use vector.ini instead.  

Good luck with the reviews

[SpAwN]

I've been trying to decide what card to get for my D9200. If you get the ArcadeVGA I just plug it right into the D9200 using a vga cable?


I read the Ultimarc website, and it says the ArcadeVGA is windows only, has anyone run this with Linux?