MAME Machine CPU Question

[Tempest]

I may have a spare P-733 with 256MB of ram. If I were to use this as the heart of a MAME machine, how many games could I run? IIRC it was doing pretty well with everything up to around 96-97ish. It was the games that use hard drives that was killing it (not that I'm interested in those). I'm mostly interested in games from the 80-89 era, and I assume it would run all those just fine.

 

Tempest

[Flack]

Yes, it should handle those perfectly. I recently put a MAME machine together for a friend of mine using a 700mhz eMachine. Works great playing all the classics. About the newest thing he had on his was Commando and it ran just fine.

[Flack]

Note: I should have mentioned, it also depends on what OS you're running. For DOS and Windows 95/98, it should work great. I would assume it would work fine for Linux also. I'm unsure how well it would run with Windows 2000 or XP.

[Cassidy Nolen]

Frame rates on your vectors might be off some. I had a Star Wars I built with an 800 processor and 128 megs Ram (onboard video card sharing memory) and it struggled with a full screen of graphics (around the trench sequence). Otherwise, it worked great. Pac Man was fun to play with a Star Wars yoke

 

Cassidy

[Tempest]

Hmm... I wonder how much a very cheap 'MAME Only' CPU and video card would be?

 

Tempest

[Stella+KDE]

well you can get a combo mobo pretty cheap, but get a reguar video card of at least 16 mb preferaby 32 megs i use an ATI 7000 Excalibur 64 Meg 350 MHZ Ram Dac for mine and i got it for about $20.00 new.

 

and i can run most mame games up to about 92 or so but all the games i have range from the 1977 era to 1984 (yeah i live in the past:) ).

 

the combo borad i got cost $45.00 used /256 megs of ram Cpu is a AMD Duron Authentic 1.2 GHZ.

 

All of this was Aquired at my City's MicroCenter ( I live in Olathe, Kansas)

 

So for about 65.00 plus tax and a copy of Dos 5.0 - 6.21 you can build a nice dedicated system.

 

Cheers