What hardware is enough for mame on Linux? Graphics, Ram, CPU..

[picrard]

Hi everybody, I'm a newbie here in this forum, but I'm interested in mame for many years,
it has started at the end of the 20th century when I have still used Windows 95 and DOS, too.

Nowadays I'm using almost Linux and have let Windows passed away.

Now here is my question.

What you you think is enough, when there could be enough minimum Hardware Requierements for
building up a great Mame cabinet, I'm interested in this distribution:
http://www.arcadeinfo.de/showthread.php?16069-A-GNU-LINUX-ARCADE-DISTRIBUTION-0-92b

What kind of hardware do I need to play the most games, also the newer ones ?

There was this thread:http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,14155.msg110540.html#msg110540] [url]http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,14155.msg110540.html#msg110540[/url]
, but it has not satisfied me!

I have tested it on two PC's at home, on my standard Ubuntu LXDE distros using Mame 0.146u5 :
([AMD ATHLON 2core 64XP, 3GB RAM,GeForce 6800 GS] // [AMD PHENOM 4core, 4GB, GeForce 9600 GT]) :

- After Burner (Runs 100% accurate)
- Mortal Kombat 4 (Shows warning : There are known Problems with this Game The Video emulation isn't 100% acc...)
- Street Fighter 3 (Shows warning : There are known Problems One or more ROMs/CHDs for this game... 100% acc...)
- Tekken Tag Tournemt  (Shows warning : There are known Problems with this Game The Sound emulation isn't 100% acc...)
- Wonder Boy Monster Land (Runs 100% accurate)

So, the questions:

- Is there any chance to let run MK4 or the other two fighting games smoother than on this two computers,
 I have almost problems running them, or are there still problems in cause of the warning at startup? The older ones, After Burner and Wonder Boy running without any problems, but I haven't problems with them years ago on my older PCs, but today I want to have the chance to play also the newer( not the newest) arcade games.

- Which graphic card is better for Mame a Nvidia or an ATI ?

- Which kind of Monitor do you use, I'm sitting here in front of a 22" CRT, I would use it for the cabinet,
or do you prefer a TFT or maybe an old school CRT arcade 15khz one ??

- Is 1 or 2 GB Ram enough for most games also the newer ones, or is it recommended to use more even 4 or maybe 8 GB ?

- Which Processor is enough, I have a AMD Athlon 2800 XP left, is this one O.K. or is better to buy a newer
 one with 4 or maybe 8 cores??

Yes I know hard questions and I know, it's the best solution, 'when you have the money' to buy the biggest
PC in town with hundreds MB of RAM, the biggest graphic card ..

So what do you use in your cabinet, and which games do you can play with 'em?

So, the questions:

- Is there any chance to let run MK4 or the other two fighting games smoother than on this two computers,
 I have almost problems running them, or are there still problems in cause of the warning at startup? The older ones, After Burner and Wonder Boy running without any problems, but I haven't problems with them years ago on my older PCs, but today I want to have the chance to play also the newer( not the newest) arcade games.

- Which graphic card is better for Mame a Nvidia or an ATI ?

- What kind of Monitor do you use, I'm sitting here in front of a 22" CRT, I would use it for the cabinet,
or do you prefer a TFT or maybe an old school CRT arcade 15khz one ??

- Is 1 or 2 GB Ram enough for most games also the newer ones, or is it recommended to use more even 4 or maybe 8 GB ?

- Which Processor is enough, I have a AMD Athlon 2800 XP left, is this one O.K. or is better to buy a newer
 one with 4 or maybe 8 cores??

So what do you use in your cabinet, and which games do you can play with 'em?

So, the questions:

- Is there any chance to let run MK4 or the other two fighting games smoother than on this two computers,
 I have almost problems running them, or are there still problems in cause of the warning at startup? The older ones, After Burner and Wonder Boy running without any problems, but I haven't problems with them years ago on my older PCs, but today I want to have the chance to play also the newer( not the newest) arcade games.

- Which graphic card is better for Mame a Nvidia or an ATI ?

- What kind of Monitor do you use, I'm sitting here in front of a 22" CRT, I would use it for the cabinet,
or do you prefer a TFT or maybe an old school CRT arcade 15khz one ??

- Is 1 or 2 GB Ram enough for most games also the newer ones, or is it recommended to use more even 4 or maybe 8 GB ?

- Which Processor is enough, I have a AMD Athlon 2800 XP left, is this one O.K. or is better to buy a newer
 one with 4 or maybe 8 cores??

So what do you use in your cabinet, and which games do you can play with 'em?

Thank you for a reply!

[picrard]

Does no one have some infos for me ? 

[Arbee]

What kind of hardware do I need to play the most games, also the newer ones ?

Any recent Intel Core i5 or i7 will deliver the best performance for MAME.  Get a 4th generation ("Haswell") for best performance per clock.

- After Burner (Runs 100% accurate)
- Mortal Kombat 4 (Shows warning : There are known Problems with this Game The Video emulation isn't 100% acc...)
- Street Fighter 3 (Shows warning : There are known Problems One or more ROMs/CHDs for this game... 100% acc...)
- Tekken Tag Tournemt  (Shows warning : There are known Problems with this Game The Sound emulation isn't 100% acc...)
- Wonder Boy Monster Land (Runs 100% accurate)

Please note that these warnings are not related to your specific PC, they are the state of MAME itself.

- Is there any chance to let run MK4 or the other two fighting games smoother than on this two computers,

MK4 needs a high end Intel Core i5 or i7 CPU of at least 3.2 GHz.  SF3 has much lower system requirements; anything Intel above approximately 2.6 GHz should work.

- Which graphic card is better for Mame a Nvidia or an ATI ?

Nvidia's Linux drivers are far, far superior to ATI's and for Linux use that unfortunately trumps any consideration of who's actual hardware is better.  (This will be especially true  when the HLSL features come to Linux MAME).

- Which kind of Monitor do you use, I'm sitting here in front of a 22" CRT, I would use it for the cabinet,

This is personal taste; I think a cabinet should always have some kind of CRT monitor if possible, but opinions do vary.

- Is 1 or 2 GB Ram enough for most games also the newer ones, or is it recommended to use more even 4 or maybe 8 GB ?

A modern system should always have at least 4 GB of RAM.  Newer operating systems, even Linux distros, are much more comfortable with that size.

- Which Processor is enough, I have a AMD Athlon 2800 XP left, is this one O.K. or is better to buy a newer
 one with 4 or maybe 8 cores??

Again, for what you're looking to do a 4th-generation Intel Core i5 or i7 will deliver the best performance in MAME.

[picrard]

oops, what's in my thread starting ?? there are some repeat loops, not my fault, I think 

thank you for your reply Arbee,
so you've said that a modern e.g. a intel core i5 or i7 (ouhh expensive....) would be o.k.
does MAME support more cores or not?

Here I've read that MAME only supports 2 cores:

Mame as far as I know, currently only uses at most 2 cores.

The speed increase from turning on multithreading (using 2 cores instead of one) is about 5%.

There is zero additional benefit to having 4 cores, since Mame is not programmed to utilize them.  You could see a slight increase if you managed to push all other computer processes (of which there shouldnt be many anyway) to the 2 cores that Mame is not using, but I wouldnt expect that to be a noticable difference at all.

Its possible that in the future Mame will utilize multiple cores more, and better, but due to the nature of emulation, thats not likely at least for a good while.

I would imagine the E2180 would be matched up fairly well with the P4, maybe even slower.  If you are trying to keep your budget down, I would go for the E7200, $119 at Newegg, and should smoke the E2180 in Mame.

So, should I better take a CPU with 2 cores and a higher frequency???

Does this one should be good enough to play the most games?
- Intel® Pentium® DualCore-Processor, 2× 3400 MHz
- 4096 MB DDR3-RAM
- Intel® GMA X4500 Grafik, up to1024 MB (Its an onboard, is it enough, or should I buy an extra PCI-E card?)

The graphic cards, I'm using are more or less NVIDIA cards in my PCs, but the processor of the ARCADE VGA 3000
by Ultimarc has an ATI processsor on board, I do not prefer ATI or NVIDIA, I think the free driver of ATI is better than the
free driver for the NVIDIA, but the proprietary driver by NVIDIA is better than the ATI. Or what do you think?

AND: Is there on the net maybe a list of games and there minimum hardware requirements, because every games has its
own requirements and a list with max/min and a comment would be great?

[General_Faliure]

Hello.

Currently my cab is running on a socket 754 Athlon, (see the specs below), it's good for the older games, but not so much for the newer ones.
I have set it up myself using Lubuntu, Mahcade (a fork of wahcade).
For (L)ubuntu it is best to add some PPA's to get the newest emulators.
I am setting up a newer mainboard; a core 2 duo 8400 @ 3.6 Gh, 4 gig ram and a geforce 9500, it should last me for some years to come.
See the pictures in the link.

[Arbee]

Here I've read that MAME only supports 2 cores:

Note that that was true in 2008; MAME can saturate 2 cores, give 3 a good workout, and make itself known to a 4th nowadays.  And of course in the future we aim to make that even moreso.

Also, he makes the common mistake of not understanding what the -multithread switch actually does.  (It enables a specific kind of threading to help out with slower video cards; it does not affect if drivers such as NFL Blitz and CarnEvil actually use more cores).

Does this one should be good enough to play the most games?
- Intel® Pentium® DualCore-Processor, 2× 3400 MHz
- 4096 MB DDR3-RAM
- Intel® GMA X4500 Grafik, up to1024 MB (Its an onboard, is it enough, or should I buy an extra PCI-E card?)

That's fine for general MAME use, yes.  Again, if you want to use simulated CRT effects or if/when we port the HLSL effects to Linux, a separate PCI-e card would make sense.  But if you just like to run MAME and play the integrated will be fine.

The graphic cards, I'm using are more or less NVIDIA cards in my PCs, but the processor of the ARCADE VGA 3000
by Ultimarc has an ATI processsor on board, I do not prefer ATI or NVIDIA, I think the free driver of ATI is better than the
free driver for the NVIDIA, but the proprietary driver by NVIDIA is better than the ATI. Or what do you think?

Correct.

AND: Is there on the net maybe a list of games and there minimum hardware requirements, because every games has its
own requirements and a list with max/min and a comment would be great?

No.  The closest there is is John IV's benchmarks: http://www.mameui.info/Bench/Bench.htm

That lists some results for some of the most demanding games in MAME across several CPUs, many of them overclocked.

[picrard]

Many thanks for the informations!

I'm now using for the first time an

- Intel P4 with 2400MHz
- 1 GByte ram
- ATI 9200 SE

, but most of the older games work nice.

When I will finish my cab and this will take a long time,
(I'm still in the reading process ;-) )
I will upgrade my PC to something like this, I've wrote:

Code: [Select]

- Intel® Pentium® DualCore-Processor, 2× 3400 MHz
- 4096 MB DDR3-RAM
- Intel® GMA X4500 Grafik, up to1024 MB (Its an onboard, is it enough, or should I buy an extra PCI-E card?)
or something which would be in that way for the money... maybe a better one.

No.  The closest there is is John IV's benchmarks: http://www.mameui.info/Bench/Bench.htm

That lists some results for some of the most demanding games in MAME across several CPUs, many of them overclocked.

Thanks Arbee for that link, but it looks like there is now PC on that list, which solves the 100% rate of the games: dolphin, scud and starldr...

It looks like they need much power