Choice of OS and Mame variant...

[currygoat11]

Hi all. Well I have just started my project which is basically a Mame Cocktail Pacman. Please bare with me as I

[currygoat11]

Hi spystyle, thanks for the tips

last night, I installed Mandrake 9.1 on my PII, 450. Went fine. Then downloaded latest dev svgalib and xmame. Compiled all. And finally ran a few games. It seems to work quite well... I need to do more testing and comparison tests against things like you recommended..

thanks again

[currygoat11]

I don't see any win98 reference at www.lightpc.com. are you sure this is the correct website?

[pointdablame]

its actually litepc as opposed to light

http://www.litepc.com/98lite.html

Good luck

[Howard_Casto]

linux and cool should never be used in the same sentence......

linux and dork.... linux and nerd..... linux and living in my parents basement.... sure

silly users..... linux is for servers!

[GadgetGeek]

Look up advanceCD on sourceforge and try that.  Allows you to create a very lightweight bootable linux/advmame CD.   Also gives you a different benchmark and by digging around, you can get some ideas on what you can include/exclude on your machine to get the linux install as light as possible.

[PacManFan]

linux and cool should never be used in the same sentence......

linux and dork.... linux and nerd..... linux and living in my parents basement.... sure

silly users..... linux is for servers!

Linux is an awesome choice for OS. It may be a little intimidating for amatuers, however, it is far more stable than any Windows based OS could ever hope to be.

I've been porting my Front End "Kymaera" to Linux, and I have to say, I've really enjoyed using Linux as an OS. If I can figure out how to get my winmodem to work under Linux, I may never go back to XP.

-PacManFan

[gregor7777]

linux and cool should never be used in the same sentence......

linux and dork.... linux and nerd..... linux and living in my parents basement.... sure

silly users..... linux is for servers!

How about linux and cheap? Some people don't like forking over large amounts of money for software if they own a bunch of systems. New operating systems aren't cheap.

Linux isn't easy though...

[daywane]

Man have you seen the 3d window Keven Rose had on screen savers. with linux  
I am still trying to get linux going.
I have had it going when I first built this pc ( I want a dual boot system) but windows xp wiped it clean. DAMN!!!
and when I tried to get linux on my XP , Linux wiped out windows .. again DAMN!!!!!
red hat is what I tried. also linux did not see my modem nor the three others I tried.
I am no real teck person
but I do think linux will be the future.

[PacManFan]

The easyist way to install Linux is to get yourself a Knoppix-Live CD. You can download it off the internet for free. Knoppix is a Linux Distro based off of Debian. It runs completely from the CD, with no installation required on your HD.

 After you play around with it and decide you absolutely love it, hit ctrl-alt-f2, and go to the window and type knpx2hd to install it permanantly. Installation took about 15 minutes, and was hitch-free.

-PMF

[daywane]

The easyist way to install Linux is to get yourself a Knoppix-Live CD. You can download it off the internet for free. Knoppix is a Linux Distro based off of Debian. It runs completely from the CD, with no installation required on your HD.

 After you play around with it and decide you absolutely love it, hit ctrl-alt-f2, and go to the window and type knpx2hd to install it permanantly. Installation took about 15 minutes, and was hitch-free.

-PMF

I do not mean to steal the thread BUT... are you saying I then would have a dual boot system?
I think thats what your saying.   well... I can feel it. Hre I go .... Half cocked.... and running a google search I go

[PacManFan]

I'm not quite a typical user, but here's my setup on my desktop /development machine:

I've got 3 hard drives installed and 1 DVD/CDRW combo drive. On one drive, I've got XP installed, On the 2nd, I've got Win98 installed (So I can develop DOS applications), On the 3rd drive, I've got Linux (Knoppix) installed. In my BIOS, I've got it set to boot from the Linux drive.

    When it boots, Linux brings up a boot menu, asking which drive to boot from, Linux, XP or 98.

I think you should be able to partition a single drive to do something simular.

-PMF

[whammoed]

2. why would I want to pursue AdvanceMame?  Doesn

[currygoat11]

Hey all, thanks for the replies!

Just to provide an update to everyone, I now have my PC booting Mandrake 9.1 with a customized MAME console background, auto-login to the 'mame' user that I setup, and I have successfully configured Advancemenu (running using the SDL libraries). I'm also successfully using xmame.svgalib to run the games.

I had great difficulty trying to get AdvanceMenu to work using svgalib. Likewise with AdvanceMame. For now, since I will not use an arcade monitor, I'm going to stick with xmame.svgalib.

I'm still managing to stay on course for the most part for this project

[Matt, GoC]

The great thing about Linux is, it doesn't cram a few hundred MB of worthless crap on your HDD if you don't want it to.  It'll even run off a floppy disk!  I could see the benefits of using a minimalist installation on one of those flash cards hooked up to an IDE connection via one of those adaptors.  If you don't have too many roms, you could fit it all on a 128 MB flash card!

[Howard_Casto]

The bad thing about linux is you have 2 front ends (one of which sucks) and one type of emulator per game type if you are lucky.  No pc games, no third-party apps to help you manage your cabinet, nothing. I can't reccomend linux to anyone.  

[PacManFan]

The lack of a skinnable FE for linux will be solved when I release the next version of Kymaera shortly. It supports DOS and Linux in addition to Windows now. I just need to test a little more, work up the docs a bit, and post to SourceForge.

-PMF