Which OS? Windows 98 or Windows XP?

[sofakng]

I'm almost ready to start worrying about software for my arcade!  (yay!)

Which operating system should I use, Windows XP or Windows 98?  

The computer will be an Athlon 1.0 GHz T-bird with 256mb ram and a Radeon 7000 AGP video card.

I'm guessing that Windows XP will be the better choice but it takes significantly longer to boot up so I'm not sure which one to pick.  Ideally I'd like XP if I can make it boot lightning quick (like Windows 98) -- otherwise I might choose 98 over XP.

Please help me choose...

[Bgnome]

strange.. its been my experience that xp boots up faster than 98..  maybe its a setup issue?

[cdbrown]

I originally had my pc dual boot 98SE and XP Pro, eventually worked out XP Pro much better option.  It takes no time to boot - maybe about 2 sec after it has done it's bios checks to get to the login screen.  Took alot longer to boot 98SE.  Make sure you tweak the services that are being loaded as you may find alot of unnecessary services are running which are taking time to load and also taking away precious CPU cycles.

[Howard_Casto]

also Xp:

1.  doesn't suck

2.  isn't a 6 year old operating system

3.  runs all possible emus (some are xp specific now like chankast)  

4.  runs all possible hardware (the dual lightgun issue isn't an issue anymore)

This question shouldn't even be valid anymore.  If it was the year 2000 then yeah it would be, but now the only reason to run 98 is if you machine is too slow to run xp properly, just like the only reason to run dos at this point is if your system is ancient.

[Tiger-Heli]

4.  runs all possible hardware (the dual lightgun issue isn't an issue anymore)

It was a dual trackball issue, but the overall point is valid, not an issue anymore.

[sofakng]

Well, that pretty much answers my question!  

In the Project Arcade book it lists a bunch of neat tricks to hide the taskbar, etc, in XP but I don't think it lists which services to disable, etc.

Anybody know of a good optimization guide for XP?  It would be GREAT if one existed that said which services an arcade cab would need, but any optimization guide would work...  On an arcade cab you don't even need services like printing, internet services, etc, etc...

Also, are there any good boot-up logos that say "MAME is now starting..." or something like that?

[Tiger-Heli]

Well, that pretty much answers my question!  

In the Project Arcade book it lists a bunch of neat tricks to hide the taskbar, etc, in XP but I don't think it lists which services to disable, etc.

Anybody know of a good optimization guide for XP?  It would be GREAT if one existed that said which services an arcade cab would need, but any optimization guide would work...  On an arcade cab you don't even need services like printing, internet services, etc, etc...

Also, are there any good boot-up logos that say "MAME is now starting..." or something like that?

http://www.blackviper.com/Articles/OS/OSguides.htm

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1590

[MnMCaputo]

here must download the boot skins program (free with no spyware)  then heres a boot for mame
http://www.wincustomize.com/skins.asp?library=32&SkinID=1015
 
now this helps disable a bunch of services you dont need just download and run, putting checkmarks in the processes you want to stop( free as well with no spyware)  
http://www.xp-antispy.org/  

also tweak ui from powertools available at microsoft.com

after that, blackviper is great for show which services to disable and processes you dont need to be running, as a general guideline, right after startup, if you do a cntrl alt del into your task manager, you should try to keep processes running below 30.  you might need to do a combo of msconfig start up and administrative tools services tweaking
 

[Lilwolf]

If you have access to both... try them both.

XP is going to be the best answer... if your hardware is up to it.  But it is more of a memory hog then 98... You can fix a bunch of its problems.. but you can optimize 98 also.  

Just remember... xp wasn't the norm when your processor was the norm.  

But xp is the way to go..

and it should boot faster... if not..  something is wrong with your setup.

[Grasshopper]

Lol. It always amuses me that every time a new version of Windows is released journalists rave about how much faster and more efficient it is compared to the previous version, and yet mysteriously it also requires far more memory and a faster processor to run!

What I suspect happens is that the journalist replaces his existing Windows version currently installed with ancient drivers, all sorts of buggy utilities, viruses, spyware and god knows what else with the new Windows version freshly installed on a defragmented hard disk with all the latest graphics and sound card drivers. It's hardly suprising the new Windows appears faster and more stable at least for a time.

Before anyone bombards me with all sorts of technical info concerning why XP is better that 98se I should point out that my comments are slightly tongue in cheek. Yes I'm sure XP is probably better particularly if you've got powerful enough hardware, but not much. I've certainly got no inclination to upgrade from 98se at this point.

One of the main issues to consider is whether you need USB support. Windows XP's USB support is reputedly better that 98se's (difficult to verify this) but still far from perfect. It you don't need USB then you should also seriously consider DOS. It's far more stable than any version of Windows, boots up quickly, and can be switched off at any time without corruption of data.

[Howard_Casto]

That's a dumb, uneducated, conclusion man.  

Xp requires more resources because it does more stuff.  It's as simple as that.  

First of all, xp is based on the nt core and anyone will tell you that even in the old days nt always used more resources than 9x.  The reason being is it's built server tuff and has all kinds of funky port and network managment stuff running in the background (i'm not a windows expert so don't ask me to be specific)  Also it has thread managment and process managment dlls running constantly to keep windows constantly up.  In 98 if a program crashes badly you have to restart.  In xp nothing happens, you get a nice little dexter report (which can be turned off) xp quietly cleans up the memory leaks and shuts down any remaining dlls and you go about your business.   Oh and should I even get into the issue that 9x runs a 16 color window drawing gui with no transparency and xp uses full pallette bitmaps with alpha blending?  (Stuff that looks like crap tends to need less resources)  

And guess what?  If you are so hung up on the extra footprint 60% of xp's resident processes can be turned off without any ill effect.  They are there to make your computing experience more stable and useable without you having to worry about it (i.e. it's idiot proof)  but in all honesty the average mame cab doesn't need all of that crap.  With that in mind, however, xp is STILL a better choice than 98 because:

A.  We are at the point that some hardware only works well in xp and since that hardware is newer, running 98 forces you to run older stuff.  

B.  Same thing with software.  Also keep in mind that there are a handful of emulators that are xp only at this point.  

C.  98 doesn't take advantage of the newer directx versions properly, so if you have a video card that uses dx9 calls it'll run faster on xp.  (related to A. )

D.  You can keep xp up indefinately without having to worry about memory leaks and such.  With 98 your system will start to get slightly slower after a week.  After a month you'll be forced to reboot.  

E.  Native hardware acceleration to the desktop is added in xp exclusively.  This means gdi based fes (like mamewah) will natively run faster than in 98.  Same for homebrew games that use bitblt, ect.  

It's like i said... if your system can't handle xp then it's old and crappy anyway and should have a complimentary older, crappier os installed on it.  As all systems today have a 2+ gig processor and 512 or more megs of ram a beefy footprint is a moot point anyway.  

This particular rig is a little iffy, but my last xp machine was a 900mhz and it did fine, so I'm guessing this one will too.  

[sofakng]

Actually a slight update...

My mine is an Athlon (thunderbird) 1.1 GHz with 512 mb of RAM...  It makes it slightly better than what I'd originally thought, but not a huge increase...

[Howard_Casto]

512mb of ram is a HUGE difference from 128.... xp is ram intensive, not processor intensive.  

[Lilwolf]

A few things to add.

XP has a faster boot (important to many around here) because its smarter about boots... caching a lot of what happens..  So even though its slower in general... its faster in boot.  And if you have extra cpu power, it just makes it faster.

XP isn't specifically better with new hardware.  Its just that hardware manufacturing companies aren't going to optimize to 98.  Its not what their worried about.

but all in all... for an arcade cabinet... you wont care 95% of the time.

[sofakng]

Ok, what else should I customize on XP?

I've customized the boot screen and now I'd like it to boot right into MAMEWAH.  Should I change the XP Shell to mamewah.exe, or do it another way?

What else should/can I customize?

[danny_galaga]

D.  You can keep xp up indefinately without having to worry about memory leaks and such.  With 98 your system will start to get slightly slower after a week.  After a month you'll be forced to reboot.  

damn, you mean im going to have to reboot my mame cabinet EVERY month?

[Minwah]

damn, you mean im going to have to reboot my mame cabinet EVERY month?

I think Howard was maybe being a bit conservative there for once.  I know I had to restart my old Win98 machine all the time (at least once an evening).  It pissed me off to the extent I *bought* XP, and I have never intended to place any of my hard earned into Gates' hands before...but I have been happy ever since - it hasn't crashed once

[Howard_Casto]

Agreed... there was a point I wouldn't even run mame because I had the hideous combination of 98se and mame 32 (i'm thinking about version .36 or soemthing llike that). Whenever a game maxed out the system's resources, mame would crash and I would have to reboot.  Playing with test drivers.... crash, reboot.   Multitasking (maybe I have something compling in the background) crash, reboot.

I was being a tad kind.  On a mame cab with NOTHING on it mame might be stable.  Otherwise, not really.  

[Grasshopper]

Howard, I'm afraid you're a victim of the Micro$oft marketing machine!

In any case, if you re-read the third paragraph of my original "dumb, uneducated" post you'll see that I agree XP is superior. If is wasn't you'd have to question what the Microsoft people had been doing with their vast resources over the past 6 years.

The point I was making was that most of the improvements are of little relevance to a typical home PC user, certainly not enough to justify the cost and hassle of upgrading. Although I mainly use 98SE at home we use XP at work, and I honestly have to say that from the user perspective, the only obvious difference between the two is XP's prettier icons.

Most people don't even care about that. Tell a typical PC user that "XP uses full palette bitmaps with alpha blending" and they'll just stare at you blankly.

The only point you make that is really relevant to cab builders is that XP supposedly makes better use of DirectX 9 calls resulting in faster modern games. That may or may not be true but at the moment it doesn't really matter. We're going through a phase where the rate of increase in PC processing power is far outstripping the ability of games developers to make use of the extra power. And that situation also applies, even more so, to desktop applications (wordprocessors, spreadsheets etc).

The extra stability of XP will be relevant if you're carrying out a mission critical task but this is not really an issue for most home users.

{provocation_mode on

If course any sensible person requiring a rock solid industrial-strength operating system will be using Linux but that's a debate probably best left for another thread....

provocation_mode off}

Getting back to MAME cabs....

A MAME cab is essentially an embedded application and Windows (all PC versions) is not really a suitable tool for this task. Microsoft recognises this and that is why they developed Windows CE. Unfortunately, in their infinite wisdom, they have decided not to make a stand-alone version of CE available to the general public.

The best options (IMHO) for a MAME cab are DOS (if you can find drivers for your hardware, and can live without USB), or a stripped down version of Linux (if you have the necessary expertise).

One advantage of Win98SE that I forgot to mention is that it sits on top of MSDOS 7, so you don't have to purchase MSDOS separately if you choose to go down that route.

Now if Microsoft produced a version of XP that could be disengaged from its GUI and also ditched their product activation nonsense (another debate for another thread) then I'd happily upgrade tomorrow.

[danny_galaga]

I was being a tad kind.  On a mame cab with NOTHING on it mame might be stable.  Otherwise, not really.  

no might be about it! mines super fine with 98se and mame32. can leave it on for days...

[Tiger-Heli]

Here are some comments from the real world.

The point I was making was that most of the improvements are of little relevance to a typical home PC user, certainly not enough to justify the cost and hassle of upgrading.

Agreed.

Although I mainly use 98SE at home we use XP at work, and I honestly have to say that from the user perspective, the only obvious difference between the two is XP's prettier icons.

Not agreed.  We use Win2k at work and I use 98SE at home.  Not a fair comparison, but 98SE will about twice a month, freeze (mouse won't move, keyboard won't work), and I have to re-boot and lose whatever I was working on.  (But I'm also in the habit of saving often, so a minor annoyance).

At work, Word will ocassionally (maybe once every two months) say "We're sorry, but Word encountered an errror and needs to close"  Then when I click OK, it backs up my file (to a recovered doc), and closes, leaving my other apps running unharmed, and when I re-open Word, my last changes have been automatically saved.

A big improvement from the users perspective.

Keep in mind that I have more time spent daily on my work then my home PC, (and balace it against the fact that I have a fairly barebones software environment at work and tons of crap on the home PC), and there is a stability improvement.

Now if Microsoft produced a version of XP that could be disengaged from its GUI and also ditched their product activation nonsense (another debate for another thread) then I'd happily upgrade tomorrow.

The product activation is a big drawback to me.  I wouldn't even mind paying for the upgrade, but I can (in violation of the license) load the same version of 98 on multiple computers, and I can't (easily) do so with XP, but another debate for another thread . . .

[danny_galaga]

The product activation is a big drawback to me.  I wouldn't even mind paying for the upgrade, but I can (in violation of the license) load the same version of 98 on multiple computers, and I can't (easily) do so with XP, but another debate for another thread . . .

thats something i considered when i used 98se. as well as the fact that i already had the cd. but someone recently told me (although i hardly ever believe what he says!) that the product activation for xp doesnt actually do anything. is this true? im going to test it next time i reformat my pc (which is xp). ill just let the warnings pop up for 30 days and see what happens after. that could be months from now though so if anyone knows anything about it...

[Tiger-Heli]

The product activation is a big drawback to me.  I wouldn't even mind paying for the upgrade, but I can (in violation of the license) load the same version of 98 on multiple computers, and I can't (easily) do so with XP, but another debate for another thread . . .

I would be highly surprised if your OS doesn't shut down in 30 days, but have no first-hand knowledge.

thats something i considered when i used 98se. as well as the fact that i already had the cd. but someone recently told me (although i hardly ever believe what he says!) that the product activation for xp doesnt actually do anything. is this true? im going to test it next time i reformat my pc (which is xp). ill just let the warnings pop up for 30 days and see what happens after. that could be months from now though so if anyone knows anything about it...

[Lilwolf]

quick note:  I had a 98SE machine that ran for maybe 6 months between reboots.  It was both my game / development machine... but also my answering machine (why it never got turned off)

but...  I hand build the machine and never upgraded more then on component at a time for YEARS to get to this point.  I had a VERY stable hardware set... and VERY stable drivers.

but.... I didn't do real development on it (just playing around).

XP is a BETTER OS for MANY reasons.  More stable, yes... but 98 could be stable... it depended more on your hardware / drivers then anything else.  

XP is more forgiving when you don't.

This is why I mentioned drivers..  what manufacturer out there will put as much time into their 98 drivers?  None...

XP is the future...

98 is for free os if you already have a cd laying around... (or your running on really old system)

[danny_galaga]

earlier i stated that i could leave win98se with mame32 on for days. but then i thought 'well, could i?', since i hadnt actually done it. so i did, it's just past the 48 hour mark   so now i can truthfully say that i can leave it on for days! this is a test of my cab design as well since it is giving the ventilation a workout.

of course i explain to my housemates that i HAVE to keep playing games on it as part of the test. MAME R & D isn't all fun and games you know. oh, hang on- it IS fun and games!

[Chris]

Little XP issues:

- In Visual Pinball, the game screen appears behind the editor rather than in front.  This may be an issue if you plan to run VP on your cabinet.

- Some PC games won't run on XP.  The most notable game in this category for cabinet builders is the PC version of Golden Tee Golf.

- XP may start up quickly (debatable), but it takes forever to shut down.  My 98 cabinet shuts down in less than a second if the hard drive hasn't gone to sleep, slightly longer if it has.

These are not showstoppers, they are simply issues to be aware of.

[danny_galaga]

i concur on the shutting down part. my win98 cab shuts down almost as quickly as pressing the key combo to do it. does take a bit longer on start-up. theres hardly anything in the start menu, any clues on what would slow startup?

the cab is just shy of running for 4 days straight now  

i'll let it go for a week. big test will be if it can restart again! i have a thermometer going as well. day time room temp is around 30-31 degrees c at the mo and the vent temp on the cab is around 37 degrees. i think thats pretty good...

[danny_galaga]

ok, my cab has just passed the 7 day mark!! good enough for me. i have now restarted it and also shut down, switch off and then start. just letting it cool down for another start. i think the whole combo has passed with flying colours! that is- my cabinet with win98se and mame32