OLD machine proof of concept question

[electricd]

Hello,

I have an old NT-150 STB machine that I have converted into a computer.  It basically has a 133Mhz processor with 8MB or ram and runs the OS (windows 95) off of a compact flash card (128MB).  I would like to install mame on this box and run just the classic games (pacman, ms pacman, galaga, dk, asteroids, etc.)  Can anyone tell me if they think this might be possible, and maybe give me some pointers?  Thanks!

ED7

[AlanS17]

Well performance is dependant on hardware, but if you've got Win95 running you should be able to get MAME going. Use an older version of pure DOS MAME. I suggest trying .37 or something around there. I don't see a reason why it shouldn't work, though. Good luck to you.

[electricd]

Awesome..I will give it a shot and see what happens...any idea where to get older version of Mame?

[electricd]

NM  found it!

[electricd]

Ok I downloaded mame .37 and got it installed on the system.  I try and run it in MSDos Mode (as I downloaded the dos version.)  I get "Error: no DPMI" or something like that, so I downloaded csdpmi5b.zip and extracted cwsdpmi.exe to the Mame directory and ran it.  Now when I run "mame pacman" it just sits and hangs, but never does anything?  Anyone have any idea what to try?

[AlanS17]

You can run it in a command prompt in Windows or through the run command in Windows. You don't have to run in pure DOS mode unless you want to.

[electricd]

Well it looks like this dpmi HAS to run in puredos...maybe i will try the win version of Mame?

[elvis]

Vantage is the king of "old crappy CPU" support:
http://www.mameworld.net/pc2jamma/vantage.html

Your P133 may actually be overkill for it! HA!

[ahmer]

CWSDPMI5 is for more than 64 Mb ram.

for 8 mb you may try Cwsdpmi3.

[AlanS17]

You shouldn't have a problem runing an instance of MAME in WIN95 without using memory managers. Just run the pure DOS version in Win95. Win95 was a wierd operating system. It was more of just a fancy shell for DOS. Your DOS stuff should run fine in Win95. It just won't run fine in later Windows versions.

... at least that sounds right. I could very well be talking straight out of my butt.

[electricd]

well when I try and run cwsdpmi it tells me that it can only be ran in dos mode, and makes me reboot into dos to run it.  Do you think I should cwsdpmi3 and see if that is the same way?  If not, anyway to run it in like the autoexec so I don't have to load it each time i restart the computer??  Basically I just want this to be a STB (as it has RCA and S-Video outputs on board already) to run some classic games.  Perhaps I will try vantage on it as well.  I have been running what I believe to be the pure dos version of mame .37b16 but have never been able to successfully run it without getting the DPMI error.  Any and all help is greatly appriciated!

[electricd]

Ok so I installed Vantage and ArcadeOS, but now the issue is that my roms don't seem to work for vantage...it says cant find ... files.  They are from the mame .97 romset I believe, so perhaps they won't work with Vantage?  Is there anyway to make these roms work?

[elvis]

Ok so I installed Vantage and ArcadeOS, but now the issue is that my roms don't seem to work for vantage...it says cant find ... files.  They are from the mame .97 romset I believe, so perhaps they won't work with Vantage?  Is there anyway to make these roms work?

Grab ClrMAMEPro:
http://www.clrmame.com/

And the Vantage DAT files for ClrMAMEPro:
http://www.logiqx.com/Dats/OlderEmus/OlderEmus.shtml

And use them to rebuild a proper vantage set.

[electricd]

Ok so I downloaded those files and put the vantage dat file into the datafiles directory, but I still am not sure how to procede in converting my romset to work with vantage??  Any one give me the quick version?

[elvis]

Check out the ClrMAMEPro guide on EasyEmu:

http://www.mameworld.net/easyemu/

[pointdablame]

you .97 romset may also be the problem with your Dos mame.  A lot of your .97 roms won't work on .37.   Grab that .dat file for your version of mame, and rebuild them for your version of Mame as well.