Years away: what's the current recommended setup?

[captainpotato]

After many years away, I'm becoming active again - sparked in part by the death of my PC in my still unfinished (after over a decade - never get a cabinet working before finishing the artwork!) cabinet.  I've been looking through the forums to try to catch up on what I've missed and I'm finding it all a little overwhelming.

Is there a thread that somebody can recommend that outlines the current state of play, or can somebody give me an overview what I should be looking for in the way of hardware and software, please?  I'm only interested in the classics (to the mid-1980s) to run on my upright with one set of controls and an iPac.  I can see that there are a few different emulators that didn't exist back then (my dead PC was running AdvanceMAME on XP), but I'm not really clear what is best.

For the era of arcade emulation I'm interested in, what sort of PC/OS would I now need?  I'm planning on changing the monitor to an old 20" HP 1600x1200 to give me as much screen real estate as possible, without needing to worry about rotating, but would like to use as many visual effects to imitate the CRT effect (I remember these existed back then but as I was using a 15KHz CRT I wasn't fussed about them, so they must have come some way since).

On the controller side, is Ultimarc still the king?  I'm keen to upgrade my CP with a 4/8 switching joystick to make the cabinet as flexible as possible (it was configured for vertical 4-way previously, but in the intervening years, life has changed a bit, and I no longer have the space or time for a bunch of different machines).

Anything else I ought to know?

Cheers!

[Howard_Casto]

You don't need much really.  I would suggest getting a pc that can handle windows 7/8/10 though.  Not because there is anything wrong with xp, but it's outdated so why not future-proof things a little.  I hate to keep giving this site free advertisements, but get yourself a pc at a site like arrowdirect.com  They are cheap and come with a license for the OS, so you are good to go.  I would also suggest putting a modest video card in there.  There are lots of retro-inspired games on steam these days you might want to try and mame actually needs a decent video card to pull off all the screen effects (look for something shader capable) The latest version of regular old mame should be fine, but some people are running a few versions back because mame and mess finally merged officially and list-management is kind of a pain. 

Ultimarc still makes a quality product yes.  You've also got groovy game gear and, well avrs..... The avr revolution has made it to where if you want to get really cheap you can just buy an uno clone, throw a joystick/keyboard sketch on it and be done with it. 


As for the new emulators.....  for what you want to run, mame will do you.  Much like it was back in the day, these other emulators are mostly for running games that take too much processing power to run in the all-software-based mame.  Stuff like model2/model3, dreamcast-based hardware, ect....  About the only thing you might want to check out are the emus that run cave games well as they are sort of classically inspired. 

[captainpotato]

Thanks for your response.  By "modest video card", you mean anything in the last few years?  Presumably the GPUs that are integrated into some chipsets won't cut it?

Are there still the MAME forks that offer different benefits, or has PC processing power now reached the stage that it's largely irrelevant?  And what about front ends?

I'll be strictly MAME of the classics I remember - no time for much else, and unless it's from my childhood, it won't fit into my mid-life crisis

[Howard_Casto]

It doesn't take much really.  The card I have in this pc was something I got on sale for 50 bucks 5 years ago.  It runs the mame filters just fine.  As a rule of thumb get something that's shader 3.0 capable.  It depends on what you mean by integrated gpu.  If you mean those crappy intel chipsets that they throw on most motherboards, yes, you'll need something better than that, but these newer apus (combined cpu and gpu) would probably be good enough. 

As for mame forks it's the usual stuff we had back in the day.  Some are made for arcade monitors, some are made for specialty purposes like a racing cab, ect, but if you just want to run games regular old mame is the way to go. 


Front-ends are a bit subjective.  People seem to really like hyperspin so you might want to look at that.  It's certainly the best looking one out there.  What you are wanting is so basic, just 80's games in mame, that I think anything would do. 
 

[captainpotato]

Thanks - that gives me a good idea where to start.

APUs is what I was thinking of - knowing that an older video card can cut it means that I can check out what the benchmarking of the APUs look like.  Although, truth be told, it'll come down to what machine I end up with.  I had been looking at using an RPi, but that looks to be too much effort for what it is.

[Phreakwars]

If your into APU's, then the A6 5400K is pretty decent. The last bartop I did, is running an AMD A4-6300 with only 4 gigs of ram and hyperspin/MAME runs excellent on it. Those 2 APU's are pretty much the same price. Dual core is all you really need, quad core or higher is a bit of a waste.