O/S Recommendation

[Dougmeister]

I started off MAME'ing when I had an old Celeron and had to tweak every last bit of performance out of it.  Thus, I went with v0.36 final and Win 98, running the DOS version but in Windows (couldn't figure out how to do it in plain DOS).

Then I "upgraded" to a P3-700 a few years ago, but kept the same O/S, etc.  It has a Gig of RAM.

From what I've heard, upgrading the OS to Vista Home would be a mistake.  Is that correct?

[TOK]

Yes, Vista is too resource hungry. 98 uses the least amount of resources, but is also the least stable.
XP with unnecessary Services disabled will run fine on a P3. I'm using a P3/933 with 512meg and XP for my bartop. No issues.

[loadman]

Yes, Vista is too resource hungry. 98 uses the least amount of resources, but is also the least stable.
XP with unnecessary Services disabled will run fine on a P3. I'm using a P3/933 with 512meg and XP for my bartop. No issues.

ditto

[gonzo90017]

I'm using a 400mhz with just about everything stripped. I'm using mame37b16.

[esaelectrionics]

Well it all depends on what version of mame you want to use,
but you are quite limited with the speed of your system.
If i was you i would use dos with advancemame, .66

Its a bit hard to set up and to get soundcard working in plain dos.I have done something similar and setup win98se with 98lite and got it down to a really small/optimized
size so it loads in about 5 seconds. no web integration,no acpi.
and win95 explorer. it works well if you dont want to do too much.

i am still running advancemame in dos through windows to get the sound working
well, but dmame would be just as good if you are still using an early version and not wanting arcade resolutions.

I stick with what you got and just improve your setup.