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G'day Guys,

 

I'm looking at buying a cab with mame already set up in it but the problem is that the pc is too slow for my liking. It is an AMD Athlon 256meg ram and motherboard is 1gHz.

There has been discussion many times about exactly what specs you need and generally it comes down to what games you want to play. Greg (Maverick) has mame with 512meg ram and 2.8gHz and it played that Do Don Pachi game a little slow in some places (not often though) whereas my 1Gig and 3.2Ghz did not run slow at all. This might say that for some newer games you need quite high specs.

I would really like to be able to play the Metal Slug series on this new mame cab so is it in anyway possible to upgrade the pc in question? Can the motherboard be swapped for a faster one? How much ram can 256meg be increased by?

 

I don't want to simply get a whole new pc because I don't want to have to set up mame and the front-end programme again - I just don't have a spare 6 months of fumbling around again like it took me last time:cry

 

What can you do to a pc like this to speed it up?

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DoDonPachi decompresses to 300MB of needed space. With 256MB you are going to be hitting your swap file, hence the slowdown as the I/O in your system spikes while threashing the disk.

 

Thus far I don't know of a single game that requires more than 512MB RAM to function under MAME. Even the big bastards like the new NeoGeo titles only decompress to 350 to 400MB or so.

 

Processor speed wise, 2GHz should be fine for most 2D games (not including ST-V titles). 3GHz+ is needed if you want to play newer 3D titles, some of which are unplayable even on the fastest of processors.

 

My MAME cab is an AthlonXP 2000+ (1.6GHz) with 512MB RAM, and it plays all Cave and NeoGeo/SNK games full speed.

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thanks guys.

 

Elvis can you play Metal Slug ok without slowing?

 

The pc is an Athlon XP 1500. So can you upgrade the motherboard from 1gHz to 2gHz by just putting a new in? Is this possible?Simple to do? How can I speed it up from 1gHz or is it a lost cause?

Also the ram is 256 meg. Is it easy to find extra memory for an old pc like this?

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i used to be able to play metal slug on my P2 233 with 32MB ram, then again that was on neo rage x. My PIII 733, 512MB was more than capable of playing neo games under mame though.
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thanks guys.

 

Elvis can you play Metal Slug ok without slowing?

 

The pc is an Athlon XP 1500. So can you upgrade the motherboard from 1gHz to 2gHz by just putting a new in? Is this possible?Simple to do? How can I speed it up from 1gHz or is it a lost cause?

Also the ram is 256 meg. Is it easy to find extra memory for an old pc like this?

 

You should be able to find upgrades without an issue. Just check the socket type of your motherboard (Socket A for AthlonXP). Just be careful as I think Athlons and Durons are now gone, and only Semprons exist. Double check on your motherboard manufacturer's website that it can take Semprons (you may need a bios flash).

 

Likewise for the RAM, check if it's SDR or DDR. The two are different sizes and incompatible. Speed wise it doesn't matter, as you can use faster RAM with your current system. It will simply slow down to match everything else.

 

Metal Slug should be playable on 1GHz. There is slowdown, but this is actually emulated slowdown (the NeoGeo processor can't handle it's own game!).

 

To check, press F11 during play. This will show you your framerate. If it drops below 60FPS, then that is system slowdown. If it doesn't drop below 60FPS but the game slows down in heavy graphic areas (lots of bullets, etc) then this is emulated slowdown, and identical to the real arcade hardware.

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thanks guys.

 

Elvis can you play Metal Slug ok without slowing?

 

The pc is an Athlon XP 1500. So can you upgrade the motherboard from 1gHz to 2gHz by just putting a new in? Is this possible?Simple to do? How can I speed it up from 1gHz or is it a lost cause?

Also the ram is 256 meg. Is it easy to find extra memory for an old pc like this?

Just to confirm, you have an Athalon XP1500 processor yes? If so this runs at 1.33GHz not 1GHz. The motherboard is a seperate componenet and the amount of RAM you can throw at it is determined by what the motherboard is, not the processor. The same for what processor you can upgrade to. The AMD socket A processors go up to XP3200+ (2.2GHz) so it depends on what the motherboard can support.

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The bus speed is probably what you need to worry about. If you look at this page on AMD XP processors:

http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/K7/TYPE-Athlon%20XP.html

you'll find a link to most of them. The XP1500+ is a 133/266MHz bus and the last of the processors using this bus was the XP2400+ (runs a 2GHZ which is what you are after). So as far as bus speed is concerned you could go up to an XP2400+. After that the XP2600+ goes to a 166/333Mhz bus. My main PC had an XP1600+ (1.4GHZ) in it originally and I swapped it out to an XP2000+ (1.66GHz) with no problems.

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.....Processor speed wise, 2GHz should be fine for most 2D games (not including ST-V titles). 3GHz+ is needed if you want to play newer 3D titles, some of which are unplayable even on the fastest of processors.....

 

What type of PC Specs are required to run Streetfighter EX? or is this one of those games yet to be emulated correctly?

 

Smit

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Yup, if you want to play 3D games you're better off using more specific emulator that don't target hardware accuracy like MAME does, and instead are OK with the idea of offloading to hardware 3D acelleration to improve game speed at the cost of accuracy ot the original. (Some argue it's better than the original, but that "better" by definition is "different" and therefor not accurate).

 

I quite like ZiNc. It supports a great deal of 3D games based on the ZN hardware used by folks like Sony, Namco, Arika/Capcom, etc.

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