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Nore help - what front end would suit me?


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Hey guys,

 

I am after some mame help. Thought I would post as much detail as I can about my cabinet, choice of games and PC specs.

 

I bought a lowboy ( see attached photos) and I am interested in putting in a simple Mame setup. I will using both an arcade VGA and a JPAC.

 

My computer that I have to use is

 

P3 500

256 ram

10gig HDD

 

It currently has no operating system, but I have the choice of 98se or XP. ( should I upgrade my Ram?)

 

I don’t want my cabinet to have heaps and heaps of games. 20 is about how long the list is. Games like

 

Double dragon.

Final Fight

Bubble Bubble

Golden Axe

Shonbi

Kung Fu Master

 

I think the most complex games I want are NBA Jam and Street Fighter 2.

 

Now this is where I need some help. What front end system should I use? I should stress that I am not overly concerned about what the front end looks like – as long as it’s simple to select games and is reliable.

(also want to use coins – which I am guessing the front end doesn’t have a lot to do with)

 

I have no experience in the front end of Mame – I just use DOS on my laptop at the moment. If anyone has good websites that guide you through the setup of a particur front end that would be great.

 

Overall I want something simple, effective and reliable. I have a good understanding of computers but don’t have any programming experience. Willing to do over-time to make sure it runs well.

 

If anyone has any experiences and could point me in the right way that would be great.

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MameWah - The dude who designed MameWah designed it around those using a J-PAC and ArcadeVGA by the sound of the e-mails I received from both him and Andy from Ultimarc.

 

Gamelauncher also has a good rep.

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If you want somthing simple, effective and reliable with a PIII 500, forget windoze use DOS 7 and Gamelauncher. Also you will need to use an older version of mame, say V.36 final. This would only need 64Mb of ram and will run at full speed (you might struggle with NBA jam)
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If you want somthing simple, effective and reliable with a PIII 500, forget windoze use DOS 7 and Gamelauncher. Also you will need to use an older version of mame, say V.36 final. This would only need 64Mb of ram and will run at full speed (you might struggle with NBA jam)

i run dos mame 084 fine with glaunch runs pretty sweet i found when i go to use 100 the load time is increased????

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I use mamewah and really like it. It runs well on older PCs, supports alot of emulators and is specifically designed to be used in an arcade cab. It is highly recommended over at BYOAC.

 

I must admit that i have only played around with 4 or 5 other frontends at the most.

 

Smit

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with this fraggals boot cd

 

does it mean you do a fresh install so you dont have windows on your computer?

you just have dos mame and the front end?

 

or is it a cd you leave in the cd drive and when the computer turns on it loads up the frontend and mame instead of windows?

 

mike

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so do you recomoend it over something like mamewah?

 

with the fraggal cd, ive downloaded it, now do i just burn it to a cd as data, or is there a special way to burn it?

I have never used mamwah so I can't really comment there. With the fraggal's boot cd, you just burn the iso image and your set to go.

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For me, 3darcade was an absolute nightmare to configure. I eventually got it up and running and despite it's brilliant colourful menu system, i went back to a more simple menu system. I guess if you do consider 3darcade make sure you have enough CPU grunt and a lot of free time...

 

Cheers,

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Fraggal's BOOT CD

 

New features to 4.02.F:

 

- Completely new install interface

- AdvMAME 0.97.0

- Dos Mame 0.100

- ArcadeOS 2.51

- ArcadeVGA support

- Fixed goofy random bugs here and there

- ArcadeOS "UPDATE.BAT" support!

- Several more options for installation.

 

Think I will give this a shot and see how it goes.

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Fraggal's BOOT CD

 

New features to 4.02.F:

 

- Completely new install interface

- AdvMAME 0.97.0

- Dos Mame 0.100

- ArcadeOS 2.51

- ArcadeVGA support

- Fixed goofy random bugs here and there

- ArcadeOS "UPDATE.BAT" support!

- Several more options for installation.

 

Do you have a link for V4?? I can't seem to locate it

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Thanks for that!!

 

I can't get my old p3 to boot from the CD rom and of course I dont have a floppy drive to make a boot disk :cry

 

 

Hit delete on post then go into your bios and edit your boot sequence. Make the Cd first boot device. If this still fails, make all the Boot devices CD-ROM, First, Second, Third and Forth.

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If you want to use Mamewah you will need XP. It's a bugger to figure but once you work it out it is great! Has so much flexibility for customization and supports all emulators and pc games and does not tax the processor power But with a PC with low specs I would stick to Arcadeos and dos for maximum FPS which also is pretty cool..Fraggels boot cd has been around for a while and in its infancy had probs with sound cards etc haven't tried the new one don't want to mess up what I already have..

Is the fraggel Boot CD that good now Ian?

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If you want to use Mamewah you will need XP. It's a bugger to figure but once you work it out it is great! Has so much flexibility for customization and supports all emulators and pc games and does not tax the processor power But with a PC with low specs I would stick to Arcadeos and dos for maximum FPS which also is pretty cool..Fraggels boot cd has been around for a while and in its infancy had probs with sound cards etc haven't tried the new one don't want to mess up what I already have..

Is the fraggel Boot CD that good now Ian?

To tell you the truth DKong I haven't set it up on a new system yet. I used the first version of Fraggal's BOOT CD years ago. I am redoing mine when time permits with it. Others, feedback seem very happy with it though.

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If you want to use Mamewah you will need XP. It's a bugger to figure but once you work it out it is great! ......

 

I've had it running on Win98 no probs..

 

Smit

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My computer that I have to use is

 

P3 500

256 ram

10gig HDD

 

should I upgrade my Ram?

Depends on the games you play.

 

Some bigger games decompress to over 300MB. A few examples are Gunbird 2, and the more recent MVS games like Garou and the later King of Fighters games.

 

The easy way to tell is to fire up MAME with your favourite game. Under windows, open up Task Manager and look for mame.exe (under Linux or MacOSX, use the "top" command in a console for the same sort of thing). Check out how much memory it is using. You need at least that amount of PHYSICAL memory installed. Virtual memory (or your "swapfile" when speaking the language of a real OS) is no good. You'll find performance extrememly bad as the game data constantly swaps in and out of RAM to your disk.

 

Adding more RAM to a system that doesn't need it WILL NOT improve MAME's performance. If your system is performing fine with 512MB, jumping to 1GB will do nothing for MAME's speed. If however you are sitting at 128MB and you find out via Task Manager that MAME is using 200MB for a particular game that you enjoy and will play often, then it's time to upgrade.

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