OK, first question: What OS should I use?

[jeaster]

 
After an unfortunately (for my wallet and wife) stumpling onto MAME, I am at the point where I NEED to build a cabinet.  Have I successfully obtained a set of ROM's? No, just a few.  Have I found a cabinet, monitor, or controllers?  No, again.  What I have done is developed an unhealthy obsession for having an arcade machine, and a free computer (18.6 gb HD, AMD processor).
So my first question is this.  What is the best OS for me to run in this cabinet?  I come to this project with a bit of AIX experience, almost no Linux experience, and some rusty DOS in the past.  I am leaning toward Linux, for no good reason, but the probelems I had with it before were sound and video, not a good starting point for this project.
So I am asking how hard does setting this up in Linux have to be, which distro, or should I go with another OS, say dos or win9X?  
Any opinions out there?

[dommer]

I'm not close to the most qualified person to answer this question, but from what I can tell, XP is probably the os of choice.  In modern machines XP will outperform DOS, and as far as Windows vs. *nix, I'm all for fighting the good fight, but I think you'll find that many front-ends and utilities that are handy just dont exist for *nix.  I don't want to get a mac/pc, *nix/nt, open-source/closed-source, monolithic/microkernel flame war going, but it seems like XP is probably the easiest path to go down.  

If you're more comfortable with something else, then go for it.  To get everything working right, you're going to end up cowboying it and editing ini files which aren't documented well at some point, or writing perl scripts to rename files, etc., and generally wrestling with different emus and frontends, etc., so choose the environment that you feel the most comfortable with.

I'm sure there are many people with far more informed opinions than I, but I didn't want to leave your question unanswered.  

[Shieldwolf]

I too was wondering what os to use. I was going to just use xp, but then I started thinking about windows 98 or even linux.

I think the major concern with running xp was using mame command line on xp required more resources. However, I don't think you'll have any problems More and more fe,emulators, and utilities for this kind of stuff are slowly catching up to xp, so  I would say go for xp or 98 whatever you do don't use windows me

[jeaster]

... so  I would say go for xp or 98 whatever you do don't use windows me

Don't Worry, I won't!  
I run a computer repair service on the side for retirees, 95% of my problems with them are AOL and WIN-ME related.
Nothing from the Linux camp here yet?  You guys should be ashamed!  

[Silver]

I would make a decision about what the machine is going to do. If you feel you may want to use to web browse/play movies/run other emulators (a popular choice) then it restricts your choice a bit. If you know it will do nothing apart from run mame games then I would vote for somethinng non-windows (dos or *nix) due to the lower overhead and faster boot-times.

XP is indeed more resource hungry than the others - and you don't mention how fast or much mem is in you pc. However, I find it much more stable than 98, even with little software installed.

[Jakobud]

Tell us your hardware specs and we will tell you what OS to use.

[jeaster]

AMD Athlon 1100 mhz processor
128mb RAM
18.6 gb HD
This is a Gateway tower, manufactured 06/01.
As far as what I want to do, I want to play games  
I am leaning towards advancemame, as I want to put a well-gardner in here, I think.  Also saw things like daphne (for dragon's lair), and atari ,  nes, sega etc emulaters.  Just games though, not a jukebox or anything else.  
Thanks for the thoughts,
Jeff

[Shieldwolf]

maybe you can help me
512 megs of ram
radeon aiw 7500
k7n2 delta motherboard


mame/ps/snes/gba/sega/atari/pinball nes emus/ stepmania/daphne bandjam

Which os should I use?

[Gideon]

The question for me is not which OS to use, but which distro of Linux to side with.  Actually, I am planning to try out a couple before making a final decision, so if anyone can suggest a few, I'm all ears!

[Spaced Invader]

jeaster--Looking at your system specs and seeing that you want to run other emulators, I have to suggest Win98SE. The windows platform has by far the best emulator development and many great front ends. Having said that, if you had a little more memory (256k+) I would have to say go with XP...more stable and just as fast on your processor.

Shieldwolf--Assuming your processor is 1+Ghz deffinately go with XP.

One note...I'm running Win2k (because I had it) and upgraded to SP3+ (uses the XP kernel) with DX9 it effectively becomes XP as far as speed and stability are concerned...at least in my tests. YMMV...

[dommer]

Gideon,
   This is a tangent, but what sort of criteria are you using to evaluate different distros, as it relates to their suitability for a mame cabinet.  They're pretty much all the same product, with different installers, different package delivery formats, and different default settings for desktop manager (and not much other difference), and none of those 3 things will really impact their functionality as an emulator.  Sorry to hijack, just curious what sort of criteria you were using to rate different distros, and what your eventual choice was.

 

[jeaster]

I actually plan on maxing out the memory in this, just have to see what I can get my hands on cheap.  So I *could* run XP,  but, I am worried about being able to patch this "less than legitimate" 2nd copy of XP.  Also, if I am running windows, will that limit my ability to run advance mame or daphne or other emulators?
THanks for the info so far.

[Spaced Invader]

Advance MAME and Daphne are both compiled for Windows and run fine on 98 or XP (although Daphne no longer officially supports 98...because the Devs use 2000 and XP). Again, Windows has the largest and most sable collection of emulators...if you want to run anything in addition to MAME its the way to go. I love to play with Linux and hope someday it equals the Windows in userbase and installed apps. But its just not the best platform for your situation...or mine.  

[Gideon]

Gideon,
   This is a tangent, but what sort of criteria are you using to evaluate different distros, as it relates to their suitability for a mame cabinet.  They're pretty much all the same product, with different installers, different package delivery formats, and different default settings for desktop manager (and not much other difference), and none of those 3 things will really impact their functionality as an emulator.  Sorry to hijack, just curious what sort of criteria you were using to rate different distros, and what your eventual choice was.

Thanks for asking.  Actually, I was hoping that someone else could tell me, as I only have little experience with these matters.  Basically, though, my biggest fear is installing a distro that requires updates every 4-6 months.