Best OS recommendation

[Odonadon]

Yes, this question has been asked a thousand times.  And yes, everyone's had good answers for them.

But I would like to hear everyone's opinion on MY rig, as to which OS I should be using for best performance:

Athlon 1600+
128Mb RAM (soon to be upgraded)
7Gb HDD
ATI Radeon 7500 64Mb

I'll be running Game Launcher (maybe), ZSNES, Gens, and Magic Engine.

I'm upgrading pretty quick, and want to know what OS I should use.  I pretty much have all OS's, so it's not  question of what I have.  

Thanks for everyone's input.

Odonadon

[u_rebelscum]

With only 128megs memory, I'd say win98.  Especially if you have two USB trackballs. (hint, see link )  Dos might be another possible option.

Not sure about the non-mame emus, though.  And once you get more mem...  winXP becomes more viable, and dos option less.  I'll let others get into the 98 vs XP arguements.

FWIW, I have a 1 Ghz athlon, 384 megs ram, winMe and running mame/mame:analog+ on my desktop.

[rampy]

I'll toss a hesitant 2nd vote for w98...  if you are using 128 megs of ram.  Also the 7 gig HD, you'll appreciate 98's "smaller" footprint on your harddrive so that you have more room for roms/mp3 etc. (ha mp3, get it? he'll have room for "a" mp3, never mind! =P)

I'm currently weighing the 98 vs XP (but only if I lean and mean the services on XP) on a similiar system (AMD XP 1600,  384 megs ram, 11 gig and 8 gig HD)... I'm currently in 98 but always wonder about the grass being greener (what I really need to do is update my video card, but that's another story)

Rampy

[Howard_Casto]

98... there shouldn't be a debate due to the limited ram size.  xp will only run at an acceptable rate if you have at least 256 megs of ram.  Anything less and it'll choke, even with minimum services running.  To give you an idea, my maxed out developer station has a 240 meg Xp footprint.  Of course there is paged memory in that too and I could probably get it down to around 100 if I skimped on resident processes, but you get the idea.  

[JoyMonkey]

Is anybody out there using a Linux build of MAME in their cab? I have no experience using Linux, but I'll probably take a look at it this week. Just wondering how it compares to other OS versions. Any speed differences?

Personally, I use DOS 7.1 with AdvMame and ArcadeOS in my cabs.