New PC advice (yeah yeah, been asked before)

[releasedtruth]

Well, I unveiled the arcade to an audience of 22 on Sat night, drank and ate me out of house and home, but it was worth every penny. Here's my current pc specs. It was a company surplus machine.

P4 1.7Ghz, 128k L2, 400FSB, 512MB PC133, 60GB HD, Radeon 9600 Pro

The video card/HD will stay the same, but I wanted to get a barebones setup to replace the rest. My replacement reasoning is for better play of some polygon games, hotd, eTekken/Rival Schools/Die Hard. Question is this, will this proposed setup improve those games enough to matter. Currently they're at about 12fps or so.

Celeron D 3.33Ghz, 256 L2, 512MB DDR2 400

The barebones is only 250 out the door. Thanks

GT

[spystyle]

I don't know about speeding up those games with hardware but you could try new software, fastmame - it's supposed to be faster than mame/mame32

It needs a frontend, arcade.exe is super easy to set up to give it a try.

You could make your OS less hardware demanding to free up resources - Win98 (20 mb ram) or TinyXP (50 mb ram) use less RAM than XP/2K so the rest is left for the emulator.

Cheers,
Craig

[releasedtruth]

Thanks Craig. I need a new pc for this machine either way. It's pretty archaic and for 250 it may be worth moving into this century. In the least Hotd 3 should run a little better and I can give the surplus computer back to the friend from whence it came.

GT