Tournament Mame

[paigeoliver]

Ok, I got a Tournament Solitaire cabinet off ebay for $52. After futzing around with the original parts for a while I just replaced the computer with a P2- 400, and set up about 20 trackball games on it.

Of course I promptly lost the monitor like a week later to a bad electrical outlet. At least it was just a 13" VGA, and not something expensive like a 19" VGA or a standard res monitor.

Now the monitor has been replaced with a 14" PC monitor.

I am still toying with the idea of adding extra buttons (right now it still needs a keyboard to function), and possibly shoehorning a 21" monitor into it (I still have a 21" kiosk monitor, a 19" PC monitor, a 15" PC monitor, and the 14" that is in it now, either the 19" or 21" needs to go in the Battlezone, and something has to sit on my desk too).

I am using mamepp version .55, and I am not running a frontend at all. Instead I just have individual shortcuts on the desktop to each rom (using the proper icons from icons.zip). This older version of Mame seemed to be MUCH faster than the newer versions, although I did have to give up two games (but I gained 100 percent speed in 5 games that couldn't run without frameskipping in the current version).

Pics coming soon. This thing is in great condition, easily in the best condition out of all my cabs (which is saying a lot, since most of my stuff is all 8s and 9s on the old 1 to 10 scale). This one would be about a 9.8. The control panel and bezel are both flawless. There is one nickel sized scuff on one side, and it has lockbar holes in front.

[SirPeale]

I just can't believe you're running Windows on it.  Why aren't you using DOS, since it's such a low end PC?  I tried running Windows 98 on a 400, and performance sucked.  Went to DOS, and everything was tasty.

[SirPoonga]

Weird, because I ran 98 on a P166 without issues in college  
I have XP on a 500 and it isn't that bad.

[iwillfearnoevil]

i have a cyrix 686-166 at home and it works great in win95, but takes forever in win98. i even added a bit more ram and no luck.

[SirPeale]

Weird, because I ran 98 on a P166 without issues in college  
I have XP on a 500 and it isn't that bad.

Yeah, but were you running MAME on it?  This is the performance issues I was speaking of.  I was just running a P233 with XP Pro with no issues (although a bit slow with only 64M RAM) but I couldn't run any games more than 4FPS, and that includes slow stuff like Pac-Man.

[paigeoliver]

I chose Windows over DOS because I wanted access to all the various windows games, and I wanted to run winamp. I chose 98 over 95 because I wanted proper USB support.

It plays nearly everything I wanted to run full speed, except for Puchi Carat, but I can live without that.