Mame Cabinet

wild_eyed

been upgrading my cab recently and foolishly purchased a amd phenom 9600 to help my mame run better.

looks like it runs exactly the same as my athlon 5400.

does anyone have any advice on a possible intel solution?

Optimus Prime

Mame is software emulation not hardware so a better pc wont make a difference to it. The only reason to upgrade the pc would be if you are using a frontend like hyperspin.

Myrddin

keithgeo wrote: »

Mame is software emulation not hardware so a better pc wont make a difference to it. The only reason to upgrade the pc would be if you are using a frontend like hyperspin.

But MAME is software driven, & a really good CPU & lots of ram is where you'll see benefits over say upgrading your graphics card...

I've a Core2Duo 2.8Ghz in my cab & 4GB ram...runs anything I throw at it with Mame. I've a cheap ATI 256Mb card in it then to handle the other emulators

wild_eyed

EnterNow wrote: »

But MAME is software driven, & a really good CPU & lots of ram is where you'll see benefits over say upgrading your graphics card...

I've a Core2Duo 2.8Ghz in my cab & 4GB ram...runs anything I throw at it with Mame. I've a cheap ATI 256Mb card in it then to handle the other emulators

core2duo, cool can i ask what your fps % is on radiant silvergun... its my benchmark test, im currently running it at 66%

Myrddin

wild_eyed wrote: »

core2duo, cool can i ask what your fps % is on radiant silvergun... its my benchmark test, im currently running it at 66%

No idea man, my cab is currently out of action due to a chassis failure. Havn't got around to really sourcing another chassis at the mo, but I remember running the game & there was no framerate issues to my eye

wild_eyed

which is better a core 2 duo or an i3?

Myrddin

wild_eyed wrote: »

which is better a core 2 duo or an i3?

I suppose whatever you can afford to put in it at the time, future proof it as much as possible. In general though, a mame cab doesn't need much in the way of specs...well going by todays standards of course

I would boost the ram before you do anything else with it. Ram is cheap enough and will make a decent difference to running mame.

You can also do all the usual tweaking stuff like disabling system restore and all the other crappy services and startup items that are running in the background and hogging resources, if you haven't already tried that. Basically try to get yourself some more processor and memory headroom before you go upgrading your chip. You might also want to make sure your paging file is nice and large to make sure your machine has plenty of virtual memory, should it need it.

What's your full spec? (OS, setup, frontend, emulators etc)

wild_eyed

cool, advice, i'll look into that this evening.

im running hyperspin and mame 146 which is the newest one.
on windows xp

if there was even a better version of mame that did the st-v stuff id use that... but ive been using this 146 nonag with cave sh3 drivers included...

CathalDublin

Hyperspin is really processor heavy, benchmark that game runnin mame from a command prompt and see the difference.
I'm running the same software as you but I've a dual core and 2gb of ram(crap motherboard wont take any more)
I'll see what speed mines running at when I get home an report back

Update
I'm afraid I don't have a keyboard at the moment to check the FPS, but I can tell you its definitely not 100%
it runs a bit slow and the music doesn't sound 100%
I'd read online it needs a fairly beefy machine

wild_eyed

wild_eyed wrote: »

cool, advice, i'll look into that this evening.

im running hyperspin and mame 146 which is the newest one.
on windows xp

My cab is running hyperspin and mame 1.46 on a single core P4 3Ghz, 4GB DDR2 Ram, XP Pro SP3, Onboard Graphics. Far from a computing powerhouse.

It's running fine, but i've tuned the feck out of the PC, turned off a lot of the fancier transitions in Hyperspin, made sure it was running at native 1024x768 and ripped everything that wasn't essential off the operating system. I've also re-shelled XP so it doesn't have the overhead of running explorer in the background, it just boots straight into the frontend when you turn it on with pretty much nothing else running.

In case you haven't tweaked your OS yet, google it, there's a lot of good simple stuff you can change in XPs settings etc that will give you a decent performance boost that will make a bit of a difference. Mame is not at all system heavy, but Hyperspin is, and it's worth fiddling with things in the settings GUI or ini file to see what difference they make. Graphical animations, transitions, gradients, etc, all eat up your available resources.