Build Your Own Arcade Controls Forum
Main => Main Forum => Topic started by: honkey on September 26, 2011, 09:33:02 pm
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And all you wanted to do was use it in an arcade cabinet with MAME, NES, N64, SNES, and Dreamcast emulators with u360 Joysticks, what would you use to do so? I realized today that the computer I am using is only running MAME games at 100% if it skips 7 or 8/10 fps. If I do not use frame skipping, most games run around 50%. It also needs a new video card, so I am thinking of just building something better if the price is right.
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all you wanted to do was use it in an arcade cabinet with MAME, NES, N64, SNES, and Dreamcast emulators
Emulators generally aren't all that demanding. All of those you listed have worked wonderfully at full speed for me on an Athlon XP 3000+, 1 GB RAM.
It also needs a new video card
??? Depends mostly on what you're using as a monitor, and at what resolution. Right now I'm using an Nvidia 5200fx and a 21" CRT, and I don't go above 1024x768.
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all you wanted to do was use it in an arcade cabinet with MAME, NES, N64, SNES, and Dreamcast emulators
Emulators generally aren't all that demanding. All of those you listed have worked wonderfully at full speed for me on an Athlon XP 3000+, 1 GB RAM.
It also needs a new video card
Well, I guess I do not know if I have a setting on MAME that I should change or if I should go to an older vision of MAME instead of building a new computer then. My processor is an intel pentium 4- 2.66 GHz. My video card is not working at all.
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And all you wanted to do was use it in an arcade cabinet with MAME, NES, N64, SNES, and Dreamcast emulators with u360 Joysticks, what would you use to do so? I realized today that the computer I am using is only running MAME games at 100% if it skips 7 or 8/10 fps. If I do not use frame skipping, most games run around 50%. It also needs a new video card, so I am thinking of just building something better if the price is right.
I asked myself that very same question recently -- I wanted to build the most efficient computer (bang for the buck) that would run mame and my emulators (project64, gens, nostalgia, etc, etc). Based on my research, and benchmarks that I have done on my own systems, any chip with the intel wolfdale core is the best bang for the buck. I ended up settling on a core 2 duo e7500, but thats because I got a great deal -- I would think that a pentium or even a centrino (with a wolfdale core) would work just as well. If you shop around I would guess that you could end up with a wolfdale cpu + decent motherboard for close to (or under) $100.
For the video card I settled on an ATI 5570. Probably a little overkill.
I invite others to comment.
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I am eyeing this, what do you guys think? http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboBundleDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.735688 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboBundleDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.735688)
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should be more than sufficient for most anything you want to run.
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There's not a lot of amd love around here, but an athlon II or phenom II are also great bang for your buck and motherboards are super cheap too.
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That combo looks good except for the case and harddrive (if the machine's going in a cabinet, you don't need a case, though it doesn't hurt). the HD is only 500gb. That may or may not be enough, depending on your plans.
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I think I will go this route. I am really hoping that most games will play 100% without skipping frames. Right now on my 2.66 GHz P4, I can get most games to run full speed without looking choppy, but the video looks blurry.
What could possibly need more than 500 GB? Even if I had every rom for MAME, with chd's and BIOS, that is still just around 20 gigs right?
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You may want to do all the screenshots, videos, background audio etc for your front end, and if you run a jukebox on it, there's all the MP3's. Then there may be additional games or additional emulators (like SNES or Atari, etc) you may eventually want to run.
of course, if you don't do that, 500gb would likely be more than enough.
That's odd about the frame skipping on that level machine. That could very well be the video card or the drivers you have installed. I had an older ATI at one point and I found that I HAD to run an older set of drivers because the newer sets (up until the very latest sets from about 6 months ago) caused all sorts of problems.
However, I updated several months back and haven't had any more issues.
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but the video looks blurry.
Can you define "blurry"? Sometimes bilinear filtering is perceived as looking blurry (especially on LCDs), when it's actually supposed to smooth out blocky images when upscaled. Try disabling this in your settings and see if it looks better.
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but the video looks blurry.
Can you define "blurry"? Sometimes bilinear filtering is perceived as looking blurry (especially on LCDs), when it's actually supposed to smooth out blocky images when upscaled. Try disabling this in your settings and see if it looks better.
It's when the objects on screen are moving fast. Like in Galaga (the most notable example) the spaceships flying onto the screen look almost like they have streaks. When I started to pay attention, I noticed the same kind of thing in all the other games, but it is not as noticeable because the objects aren't moving as fast. I am using a 19" CRT monitor.
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I think what you're describing is the actual phosphor persistence on the monitor.
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The reason that I do not think so is that when I display the frameskip with it on auto, it either reads 7/10 100% or 8/10 100%, but it I make it go to 0/10 it only plays around 40-50%.
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I am eyeing this, what do you guys think? http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboBundleDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.735688 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboBundleDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.735688)
That setup will definitely be sufficient.
I tend to agree with the other posters that you should, in theory, be able to run mame on your existing setup. I have an old p4 2.8ghz system lying around and just for fun I re-installed the OS and mame runs just fine with onboard graphics. Many vendors are selling p4 3ghz systems in their arcade cabinets today.
If you do decide to go new then consider the following:
- i have a similar setup (phenom II x4 840) paired with a biostar 760g mobo. I have benchmarked this system against my C2D (using -bench 90) and the C2D runs approx. 25% faster clock for clock.
- if you would like to build with AMD I would suggest a dual core chip -- if all you are doing is running emulators I do not believe emulators use more than 2 cores. If you live close to a Microcenter they have a deal that bundles a phenom ii dual core with a 760G motherboard for under $90, and 4gb of ram for $20.
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I am eyeing this, what do you guys think? http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboBundleDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.735688 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboBundleDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.735688)
That setup will definitely be sufficient.
I tend to agree with the other posters that you should, in theory, be able to run mame on your existing setup. I have an old p4 2.8ghz system lying around and just for fun I re-installed the OS and mame runs just fine with onboard graphics. Many vendors are selling p4 3ghz systems in their arcade cabinets today.
If you do decide to go new then consider the following:
- i have a similar setup (phenom II x4 840) paired with a biostar 760g mobo. I have benchmarked this system against my C2D (using -bench 90) and the C2D runs approx. 25% faster clock for clock.
- if you would like to build with AMD I would suggest a dual core chip -- if all you are doing is running emulators I do not believe emulators use more than 2 cores. If you live close to a Microcenter they have a deal that bundles a phenom ii dual core with a 760G motherboard for under $90, and 4gb of ram for $20.
Man, I must be looking in the wrong places. I am not finding these prices. The reason I settled on the combo I linked is just because I do not know much about building computers and they already had a combo with everything compatible and it seemed like something that would not need upgrading for a while even if I end up using it for more than just emulation. I have no experience with AMD, but I like their prices better than intel ;) If I understand correctly though, for these emulators, a quad core at 3.0 GHz will run at the same speed as a dual core at 3.0 GHz because two cores would never be used... Is that correct?
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According to the documentation on the mame site, the multithreading in mame splits the emulation engine in one thread and the video rendering into another.
On a dual core system that means that one core is entirely dedicated to emulating the logic of the game, and the other core is fully dedicated to shunting the resulting video data onto the screen. (Though in most cases on modern systems it's unlikely that both cores would be 100% saturated by theses tasks). Now, beyond this there is still other stuff going on: Windows is handling the input from your controller, windows is managing the routing of sound via DirectX, there might be network traffic going on, possibly a virus scanner, etc. In a purely dual core setup, all this stuff still has to schedule itself between the execution of the emulator. When you move past two cores you're increasing the chances that there will be free processing capacity at the instance that mame requires it. The additional cores don't go "unused", they just aren't being dedicated to mame. Mame isn't the only thing happening though.
On the subject of AMD vs Intel, at the moment current Intel processors seem to be more time efficient running mame, as was mentioned by another poster. What that means is that on two random systems, one AMD, the other Intel, running at identical clock speeds the Intel system is likely to be faster. If some cpu instruction takes 7 clock cycles to complete on some AMD CPU, and the same instruction takes 5 cycles on an Intel, the Intel chip would be getting ~28% more work done in the same period of time as the AMD system. (These numbers are purely for illustration).
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I am eyeing this, what do you guys think? http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboBundleDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.735688 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboBundleDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.735688)
u might get a better deal if you buy things seperate. but yeah that should be good enough to run all mame games and console emulator. need a video card though.
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That motherboard has an HD3000 built into it; that will be just fine. You can run Calamity's ATI drivers on it also for dynamic refreshrates, and run the games at their native framerate to eliminate tearing/stuttering also.
That's a pretty tight combo deal, it's going to be hard to get a much better deal. Keep in mind that case has a PSU bundled with it, so any money you save by not buying a case will be consumed by buying the PSU.
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That motherboard has an HD3000 built into it; that will be just fine. You can run Calamity's ATI drivers on it also for dynamic refreshrates, and run the games at their native framerate to eliminate tearing/stuttering also.
That's a pretty tight combo deal, it's going to be hard to get a much better deal. Keep in mind that case has a PSU bundled with it, so any money you save by not buying a case will be consumed by buying the PSU.
A couple (probably stupid) questions- I've got a build I am going to use component connections for (standard def)... would this motherboard's built in graphics solution be able to output a good component signal via a breakout cable or whatever?
and.... does output format affect anything with Calamity's drivers? As in, are they just for VGA out, etc, or would they help with a component or composite output as well. Screen tearing on my current build was a huge pain.
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That motherboard has an HD3000 built into it; that will be just fine. You can run Calamity's ATI drivers on it also for dynamic refreshrates, and run the games at their native framerate to eliminate tearing/stuttering also.
Great, this was my biggest concern was that I would still need to get a video card. I had heard that dreamcast emulators needed better cards, but some people had suggested otherwise. I was hoping someone would chime in on this.
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dreamcast game require a video card unless that onboard thing is actually good enough. if anything I can recommend this one..its great for OUR purposes around here(playing old games) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814161315 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814161315)
I was about to make a topic but I will ask here first, what are the best console emulators now a days? I am trying to get some ps1/n64/ps2 going. already tried bunch of dreamcast games they look great and full speed.
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This video card is more than sufficient:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127544 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127544)
This is the card I have in my system. In addition to mame, I run Supermodel 3, N64, Dreamcast, PS1, Taito X2 and the PC version of SSFIV:AE. All of them run just fine.
Calamity's drivers are primarily aimed at outputting either a 15khz or 31kHz signal for CRT monitors (though a handful of LCD monitors will display non-60hz refresh rates correctly). SVideo/Composite input cannot really be altered. With Component video you MIGHT have some wiggle room.
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This video card is more than sufficient:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127544 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127544)
This is the card I have in my system. In addition to mame, I run Supermodel 3, N64, Dreamcast, PS1, Taito X2 and the PC version of SSFIV:AE. All of them run just fine.
Calamity's drivers are primarily aimed at outputting either a 15khz or 31kHz signal for CRT monitors (though a handful of LCD monitors will display non-60hz refresh rates correctly). SVideo/Composite input cannot really be altered. With Component video you MIGHT have some wiggle room.
OK, I think I get it. Thanks.
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All right SNAAKE mate, ain't spoken to you in a while lol
Yeah, I'm not sure on all of them however when I researched which PS1 emulator is the best recently, I found the majority's decision to be ePSXe. I then downloaded this and completed Final Fantasy 9 on it with zero problems, it's also tremendously easy to set up which is always good!
Also, I came across many people stating that the new release of PCSX2 (PS2 emulator) is working really well, and by far beats any competition. I haven't tried it myself though due to the required specs, not sure what they are exactly but I know my laptop would be too crap run it.