Stats on you Mame Computers?

dpful · Post by **dpful** » Sat Jul 21, 2007 12:40 am

Does anyone have the stats on their recently assembled mame computers? I'd like to put one together but want to save time on the research (I don't know a whole lot about computer parts), so I'm looking for advice. Maybe if yours works great I'll just buy exactly the same stuff.
I want to run MAME plus other emulators- was thinking of using GameEx as a frontend. Also, any advice on frontends, operating systems and such (which I also don't know how use yet).

Sorry if it's to many questions at once- I've been surfing the goog and I thought that maybe some of you might have some easy answers and opinions.

GaijinPunch · Post by **GaijinPunch** » Sat Jul 21, 2007 3:47 am

I slapped together a 3.0Ghz P4 machine w/ a gig of ram about 2 years ago for $600 or so. Then another $100 for the A-VGA. That shit is on time.

Ed Oscuro · Post by **Ed Oscuro** » Sat Jul 21, 2007 7:12 am

I used to use an Athlon 64 4000+, which ran games well. Now I have a Core 2 Duo (E6600), which I think could be slightly faster for MAME, with or without multi-core enabled, since I get closer-to-decent framerates for Gradius IV.

I'm not using a 64-bit operating system yet. I got a chance to play around with Vista a bit; I'd end up stripping it down to nothing, I bet. XP is great for now, clean-looking, and doesn't bring up a scary-looking menu before you can select Task Manager when you give the ol' three-finger salute.

Other specs: Single 300 GB SATA hard drive of uncertain purveyance (hoping to get another for an upgrade to RAID), 2GB DDR2 Corsair Dominator XMS2 RAM, and BOOM HEADSHOT graphics with a sorely underutilized (even at 1600x1200 resolution) GeForce 8800 GTS (640 MB model).

stuntman · Post by **stuntman** » Sat Jul 21, 2007 7:44 am

Athlon 64 3800+ (single core), 1GB DDR, 74GB Raptor, Arcade VGA (AGP), Win XP Pro (32 bit), put together in my cab about 18 months ago. Runs MAME without a hitch, and I don't anticipate having to upgrade any time soon.

elvis · Post by **elvis** » Sat Jul 21, 2007 8:45 am

I run a MAME benchmarking site. Plenty of stats there to see what processors will run what games under what versions of MAME:

http://benchmark.mameworld.net/

You can do your own benchmarks and submit them to the database.

My own cabinets:

Cocktail cabinet:

AlthonXP 1500+ (1.33GHz)
512MB SDR-SDRAM
VIA KT133 chipset
some cheap radeon video
Slackware Linux 9.0 (2.6.3 kernel I believe)
AdvanceMENU + AdvanceMAME + SVGALib out to 17" VGA monitor (vertically oriented)

Runs DoDonPachi and Gunbird2 fullspeed. They were my benchmarks for this cabinet. If they could run, most older games would also run. Gunbird2 requires 300MB RAM, so 256 was too low. 512 was the minimum.

Upright cabinet:

AthlonXP 2000+ (1.83GHz)
512MB DDR-SDRAM
VIA KT-333 chipset
Nvidia GeForce2MX
Debian Etch Linux (kernel 2.6.8 )
AdvanceMenu + AdvanceMAME + SVGALib out to 15KHz 26" Kortek arcade monitor

Runs everything fine except 3D stuff and 2D Sega ST-V.

This was a WinXP box running to a 21" SVGA monitor in a scratch-built cabinet, but got upgraded to a real cabinet with a real arcade monitor (and fucked Windows off, because I hate it so). RGB out's required 75ohm resistors plus 220uF caps each. They plug into a JPAC which has a 15KHz cutout on it, protecting the monitor during bootup when the system spits out only 31KHz.