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new Mame machine PC?


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re: MAME performance - at only 1GHz with very poor floating point performance, they don't make great MAME machines. You won't squeeze full speed out of anything circa 1990 and younger. Older 80's games will of course run like a dream.

 

Of course, a lot of that has to do with MAME itself, which is a bloody slow old thing. Instead you could try RAINE, which is heaps faster and currently has the support of David Haze (one of the MAME devs) who's porting a lot of MAME drivers across:

 

http://www.rainemu.com/

 

Worth a try for older/slower machines.

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Wow, that really IS tiny. Elvis is right though, those CPU's are the equivilent of those crappy Cyrix processors that were out in the Pentium 2 / K6 days. Useless for any real processing, especially 3d. Depending on what games you want to emulate, it could be ok though.
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I did mean them for running 80s mame games in cabs though. I had in mind desktop units. Perfect for that. Would also go well in my current mame cocktail that is running mecodino core celeron 566 with 128 sd ram pc100. 2.1 gig HDD

 

Yeah why would anybody want to emulate those piss poor 90's games

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re: MAME performance - at only 1GHz with very poor floating point performance, they don't make great MAME machines. You won't squeeze full speed out of anything circa 1990 and younger. Older 80's games will of course run like a dream.

 

Of course, a lot of that has to do with MAME itself, which is a bloody slow old thing. Instead you could try RAINE, which is heaps faster and currently has the support of David Haze (one of the MAME devs) who's porting a lot of MAME drivers across:

 

http://www.rainemu.com/

 

Worth a try for older/slower machines.

 

Vantage is excellent as well, (DOS). Can run on a 486

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Problem is, none of these things plays ALL of the handfull of classics I want to play.

 

Care to list that handful? Maybe I can find you something that will fit the bill. You'd be pretty amazed just how many different emulation projects are out there. MAME certainly is famous, but it's only a piss in the ocean.

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Galaga

Galaxians

Gyruss

Moon Cresta

Pacman

Space Invaders

 

Those'll do for starters. I thought Vantage was gonna be exactly what I wanted but the number one most important game I want isn't supported, Gyruss. Looking through the list of games supported by Vantage I can see most of my all-time faves but number 1 isn't there so it's no good.

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Hrm.. .possibly try HiVE or Retrocade:

 

http://www.sys2064.com/hive.htm

http://www.sys2064.com/retrocade.htm

 

The good news is that the list you give above will all run easily under an old version of MAME (say, 0.55 and earlier) on as little as a 200MHz machine. You don't always *NEED* to run newer/slower versions if the titles you want are supported in earlier versions.

 

At any rate, that little 1GHz box in the original post will run those titles you list full speed without batting an eye lid.

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I have found MAME DOS version 36 final to be great, plays most of the classics and will run on a P1. I have used as little as a P1 133Mhz.

 

0.36 was the last version before they changed to the new alpha-blending core.

 

If you want to play titles with no alpha, then that's the best version to use. For those who don't know, "Alpha" is the process of having two sprites on top of each other with some level of transparency so that one can be seen through the other. It takes up some processing time as you need to matrix multiply the colours to find your final blended colour. Old 80's games generally used the "sprite flicker" technique to rapidly switch between two sprites to simulate some sort of alpha. Not a high-tech solution by any means, but back then processing power didn't grow on trees like it does today.

 

So anyways, if you have games that need alpha, check out around the 0.55 or so. If your games don't need alpha, 0.36 on DOS is by far the fastest version you can get. Soundcard support will be tricky however, so make sure you've got an old ISA Soundblaster compatible card lying around. These new fangled PCI cards are nothing but dramas to old DOS software.

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Yeah, I've got a copy of .36 for that reason. But my romset isn't complete because many of them changed between .36 and the version that was out when I got the romset (.74 or something). Ran CMPro over them with the .36 .dat file and many of the roms were incomplete. I'll probably run .36 in my cocktail and the current version in my upright cab.....when I have time to finish them. I have PC's more than capable of running either at present but I also have some old PI and PII machines I'd like to put the oldies on and build mini cabs for my brothers.
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