Mame and onboard video.

[Fuzzguitar]

I'm planning on buying a new pc just for my cabinet within the next week and like many I'm on a budget. So if some people could tell me how mame performs with on board video from their experiences that would be great. I'm just asking generally, don't worry too much about brand specifics but if it helps here is what I might buy:

AMD XP 2000+ BOX 1
MEM21GEN2 PC2100 256Mb DDR 1
MBAGA7N04 Gigabyte 7N400-L1 1
HDD41 40Gb 7200 1 95.00 95.00
CD1 52XCD ROM 1 29.00 29.00
CSGEN325 P4 CASE/USB 1 41.50 41.50
DDFD10 1.44 FDD

I'm using a geforce 2 mx440 right now but from what I remember (vaguely) mame ran just as well before I got that card, in fact it didn't have the typical geforce blurriness either (I counter that using direct3d/50% scanlines).  And how much real world difference would this video card add to the equation?

VIDATI01 Radeon 9200 128Mb TV. DVI.

Doesn't mame mainly utilise the CPU anyway? And what do you guys think of the speed performance of my config above?
Oh yeah, I'll using WinXP too.

Thanks in advance.

[)p(]

-add some more ram to it. under xp and running big roms that will really help loading them.

-adding a dedicated videocard will not have any noticable effect on mame. I am not sure if that is still true for the newer dx3d effects. But generally if your not planning to run any 3d accelerated games or emulators on it you will be ok

peter

[DAmnb]

Well Mame itself doesnt benefit that much from a nice Radeon or GF4 but why would you get a new computor for your cab and skimp on the Video card?
There are more emulators out there than Mame, Zinc being my favorite for 3D games and there you will definatly want a better videocard.
Another thing that comes to mind is what will you be using in your cab, TV, PC monitor or arcademonitor?

[Fuzzguitar]

Thanks guys, it turns out I'll be getting a GF4 64MB w/TV-O extremely cheap from my brother who is updating his card also (but not for Mame).

That should work out great as I can use the money I'm saving to buy more ram. I think that's a smart thing to do under xp, my brother's machine has like a gig of ram and the games just zip up compared to my crappy 192mb. Should of realised that for myself.

As for the other emu's - I don't really plan to run them on my cab, I thought Zinc had no sound on most games? Please, tell me I'm wrong   And I was going to set up z26 and other console emu's though I think it would seem odd playing console games on a cab. No doubt it would work great but still...

BTW I'm using a PC monitor.

[DAmnb]

Well if you dont want to play anything else and your using a PC monitor then its fine with onboard, glad to hear your getting a GF4 though.
Zinc has a bunch of games with sound and everything that I really enjoy playing on my cab Strider Hiryo 2 being my favorite.