Need some guidance on MAME Cab Upgrade

[HeadRusch1]

Forgive me, its been many years since I built up my CAB and since then its done the job......but as I move through new hardware, I keep asking myself if its time to upgrade the box...which of course opens up a whole new can o' worms.

My rig is running with a build of mame and a complete rom set from the 2004-ish timeframe.  I am pretty sure its one of the early stable builds that incorporated CHD files.  Its on an ancient Athlon  1.2 or 1.3ghz chip, running MAME32 as the standard front end and running on...wait for it...Windows 98.   At the time I'm pretty sure that MAME was only working best on Windows 98, that windows 2000 was giving nightmares to folks.

It outputs to a 20" flatscreen CRT TV via way of an SVIDEO cable for that "authentic low rez look without dicking around with a monitor that would likely get me killed"

But time moves on.....and now I have spare laptops with 2.5Ghz dual core chips......and I keep asking myself if I should upgrade the box, thing is I don't know of very many games that have been added to mame over the past few years that I would actually want to play.....I'd love to ditch the CRT and go with a higher rez monitor and force scanlines, or add those light guns to the cab for light gun games (or PosGun games)...but its one of those situations where I'd have to grab new roms and new MAME and, from what I heard, there were fundamental changes in MAME the past five or so years where performance degraded (for purposes of accuracy)....but you know, its all "I thought I heard...".

Can someone give me some feedback...do I leave well enough alone......or is there a big reason to upgrade over a mame build that is 6+ years old.  I mean, it plays most games at full speed...the N64-based games like Crusin USA, Crusin World and such (those are about the newest games that the build I am running has), CarnEVIL and such...those games don't run fast enough to be playable, but everything else pretty much does.

Here's a secondary question: Can I take that build of MAME32 and the roms it pairs up with and simply run it on a modern Win7 64 or 32bit OS?  Or would I need to run a new, more modern build of MAME and as a result, have to go track down the billions of Roms that work with that build?

Advice and Commentary appreciated

[Drnick]

Can someone give me some feedback...do I leave well enough alone......or is there a big reason to upgrade over a mame build that is 6+ years old.  I mean, it plays most games at full speed...the N64-based games like Crusin USA, Crusin World and such (those are about the newest games that the build I am running has), CarnEVIL and such...those games don't run fast enough to be playable, but everything else pretty much does.

Here's a secondary question: Can I take that build of MAME32 and the roms it pairs up with and simply run it on a modern Win7 64 or 32bit OS?  Or would I need to run a new, more modern build of MAME and as a result, have to go track down the billions of Roms that work with that build?

Advice and Commentary appreciated

1) If it plays everything that you want it to play then I would leave it well alone 
2) You would need to work out which version you are running (Should be in help, about, or something very similar) then you could transfer it to the new machine and at the worst have to find a download for the same version you are running and install that. (Not sure if Mame32 integrates itself into windows at all).

If the laptops are capable of outputting S-video then there should be no reason not to use one of them for a bit of speed increase.  I would run the system on xp/xp64 but that is personal preference. 

[wetwaterwalker]

In my personal experience, Laptops kind of are a pain to put in a cab. I am running a dell inspiron 1525 in my cabinet and while for the most part it is nice, but when you need to tap into different power sources it's difficult to find 12v and a good places to splice into it. Plus everything is a lot smaller and harder to work with, e.g. the power switch.  It is doable by all means, but at least on my cabinet I wish I had had a desktop to put in there. But given you have the laptops I'd say go for it. Just be prepared for a few little set backs verses a desktop.