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Enough power to run mame? Any suggestions?

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Digital Vandal:
Thank you for your reply. I had searched but not found, although my searching skills are not the highest.  :( I'm assuming with the 2.4ghz being a celeron that it wont compare to a pentium 4 or higher at the same clock speed? I was using hyperspin and that was running so slow it was ridiculous. I only have 512mb ram on it though.

Dr Zero:
I have maybe 20 or so p4 machines that would be good for a mame machine if anyone is in FL or nearby shipping can get high.

I run mame on a lowly 1.6 up on up and for most of the games I play I havent ever noticed an issue some of the newer 3d started bogging down but most no issues. At the shop we have a dual head card and the 2nd output goes to a 46 lcd it always gets customers talking about the games they used to play.   :cheers:

Turnarcades:
In my first spec listing, the 'P3' and 'P4' references assume Pentium or other-brand equivalent with the clock speed mentioned. Particularly with older MAME versions, there are loads of modified builds/hacks available to enhance performance to take advantage of certain hardware so it's easy to get better performance just by switching to one of these builds (eg. there are pentium-optimised builds, celeron-optimised builds, Athlon-optimised builds, some with speed hacks etc.).

With regards to front-ends, Hyperspin does now tend to be the weapon of choice owing to it's very impressive visuals, features and relatively easy setup. The trade-off of course is that you need a lot of storage space and higher spec PC compared to other simpler front-ends. In my opinion, a front-end should not be more demanding than the emulators themselves and there are many 'lightweight' front-ends that can look very good and have many features, so why improve spec just for a menu system? Try switching to tried and tested favourites like AtomicFE, Mamewah or Mala. Even GameEx is far less demanding and that has very animated visuals too.

One last comment is that although it may sound obvious, many people fail to check that essential base software is installed correctly. Ensure your graphics and sound drivers are up-to-date, Windows updates are done and background services killed, and that DirectX is up-to-date. Many emulators will perform drastically different with any one of these factors not done, so be sure they are.

Mikezilla:

--- Quote ---I run mame on a lowly 1.6 up on up and for most of the games I play I havent ever noticed an issue some of the newer 3d started bogging down but most no issues.
--- End quote ---

Hey Dr. Zero, have you tried to run any of the Marvel vs or Street Fighter vs series on your 1.6? How do they run if you have? I have a friend that has an AGP card in his 1.8 ghz with some random number of ram, like 768 or something. Think that will run those games?

smalltownguy:
No, a CPU in the 1.6-2.0 range will choke on fighters from that era. I had a P4 2.0 in my first MAME setup, and the frameskip was pretty noticeable on Street Fighter and Marvel vs Capcom.

I've since moved to a P4 3.0 HT and that runs most of what I would ever want to try. But 90% of my time is spent on Ms Pac Man. Cripes I could play that with damn near a hamster wheel and abacus.

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