Please recommend software for a pentium 133

[spystyle]

Hello,

I am going to finish off a bartop I built with a pentium 133 laptop sans screen (it's a tight fit in there)

Could you software gurus recommend what I should run on it?  (what's the fastest arcade emulator?)

I'm thinking FastMAME but that requires Win32, maybe FreeDOS with MAME.36 ?  But what's the fastest frontend?

It's a horizontal cab so no Vantage...

I'm going to be changing the CP based on what will run on the 133

Thanks!
Craig

[paigeoliver]

Ok, start with dos Mame. 29 or so and try working your way up and down from their until you find one that plays a decent selection of games.

Or you might want to skip Mame altogether and go with a Nes emulator instead.

Use arcadeOs with that setup.

[maraxle]

Try FreeDOS with MAME 0.36 and Game Launcher.

[spystyle]

Thank you for the replies, to honor Paige I installed a spinner on James Brown!

I was also curious about all the other arcade emulators, there is a long list here :

http://www.zophar.net/windos.phtml

[Lilwolf]

There are tons to use... but look at what where popular back then.

MGE for gauntlet
REM! for rygar
Vantage
Hive

BUT dont forget about old versions of mame.  I first used mame on a 233 and it worked well for most of the games emulated at the time... then a year later... I upgraded to a 450 and could run a bunch more.

Start with mame... see what you can play.

Look at the others...

Go with dos... If you can... but you might loose some emulators to run.

[spystyle]

Here is a description of the emulator "Retrocade" from it's homepage :

"Retrocade is an arcade emulator that emulates over 100 games. Retrocade was built with speed in mind, most games run full speed on a high-end 486 or low-end pentium. It has one of the best GUIs ever seen, the entire emulator is configurable from the GUI. It has a nice dot display with messages running and marvelous backdrops. Let's not forget Retrobabe ;) "

http://www.retrogames.com/retrocade.html

That looks promising, when the laptop arrives in the mail I will post the results.

Dig it?
Craig

[spystyle]

If there are emulators that run at full speed on a inexpensive Pentium 1 laptop builders who are interested in 'portable' cabinets have allot of options. Check out this guy's mini cocktail :

http://www.inanna.com/~calhoun/ibox/index.html

Build a car/motorcycle battery into the enclosure and you've got the world's first "ArcadeBoyAdvance"

(Auto batteries can be charged via inexpensive AC charger, and I bet they'd power a laptop for days)

Also these configurations are silent for those of us who get sick of fan noise...

Dazzle your friends when you visit them

[ErikRuud]

I used to run Retrocade because at that time MAME did not support all the vector games that I was interested in.

Retrocade does work well on slower machines, but developement stopped a long time ago.  The built in frontend (GUI) is very nice. Some of the games (mostly the vector games) do not have sound emulation in them.

[spystyle]

OK,
Thanks for all the tips, I'm using FreeDOS with Pmame .59 (Pentium optimized MAME) and Game Launcher, I filtered out all the Neo Geo games assuming the Pentium 133 would'nt run them.

To convert my .84 set to .59 I used ClrMAMEpro, made a .Dat file by importing the Pmame.exe, then converted a 'split set' so I could remove clones with sortinfo.exe

The control panel will have a switchable 4-8 stick and 2 buttons, it'll be a minimalist setup but fun and portable (note all the handles)

Dig it?
Craig

BTW: Can the games that sortinfo defines as 'stick' be played properly with a 4/8 way joystick?