Dreamcast, is it the way to go?

[Mr. Dude]

How well does the Dreamcast version of MAME play?  Also are there Dreamcast friendly emulators for SNES, NES and Genesis?  The reason I'm asking is because I'm in the process of building a cab for my sister's family and I was gonna use an old PC.... it's only a P2 350 though and I was planning on updating many aspects of it including RAM, HD, CPU & motherboard, etc.  After reading through this forum though I realized how many people have a Dreamcast in there cab.  So what I was wondering is would it be worth it for me to update the old PC for them or should I just throw in the Dreamcast and run Mame and everything off that?

[Bgnome]

ive only tried the snes emulator for dc and it is playable, but not full-speed.  with a little tweaking, i can get my p2 266 laptop with 64 megs of ram and a 4 gig hd to run zsnes fullspeed in DOS, most mame games fullspeed in DOS, and neogeo games practically fullspeed in NeoRAGEx.  if you want an emu box in your arcade, but dont want a pc, i would suggest getting an xbox.  sure, a dc is a capable machine, but you can honestly accomplish much more with the pc you already have.

[Mr. Dude]

Thanks for the reply Bgnome.  I guess I'll just stick with my original idea then and go with the PC.

[Stingray]

I've never managed to work out how to burn a Dreamcast disk that actually works.

-S

[Bgnome]

its been a whlie since i have messed with it, but i think you need to burn a 2 minute audio track first.  the second track needs to be the data track and then finalize the disc.  there are some fairly detailed writeups available out there which are pretty good.

[Generic Eric]

I think the reason a lot of folks use the DC in a cab is for the actual games, not strictly to play emulators...

If you don't have a Dreamcast, you should pick one up, there are alot of fun games available.

edit for content: wording

[TalkingOctopus]

The NES emulator runs at a good speed, but the sound is not so great.  I don't think any of the other emulators will run all that great.  I really only use the DC in the cab for dc games.

[Dave_K.]

I made many a coster before finally burning the MameD disc correctly.  The image required the latest Nero to burn the image.  This was a bout 2 years ago...probably not a problem now with programs like Alcohol 120.

I don't think mamed has been updated since then.  

[Mr. Dude]

cool... thanks for all the replies guys.  I've never personally tried to burn a dreamcast disk myself.  The only successful CDs I've made for any systems have been for PSone and TGFX-16.