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SET UP ARCADEOS
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So now you’re familiar with M.A.M.E. and ROMs and there
is a finished Cab to put it in, it's time to think about what
Operating System we are going to run on our old beater and
how we are going to control it when it is inside the cabinet.
This will largely be decided by two things;
(a) The spec of the PC you will be using.
(b) The emulators you will be running on it.
M.A.M.E. isn’t too fussy about motherboards or RAM or
anything like that, it is more to do with graphics cards and
sound cards where the issues lie, the favourites being ATI graphics
cards and Creative Soundblaster sound cards.
Personally I have had better success with PCI graphics cards
than VGA cards but ISA cards (if your ancient PC supports it)
can be better still.
M.A.M.E. will happily run with the on-board graphics on your
motherboard but you may find that some of the more graphically
intensive games only display in a smaller window if they even
display at all so it's best to go with a graphics card where
you can.
Another thing to bear in mind is the amount of RAM you have
in the system. You don’t want your M.A.M.E. cab to have
to start paging and worrying about virtual Memory so the more
RAM you can throw in the better but to be honest 512 MB will
be plenty for your needs.
With regard to disk space a relatively small Hard Disk will
do, and something around 8 or 10 Gigabytes will be more than
sufficient for running classic M.A.M.E. games. However, once
you start to run the newer versions of M.A.M.E. and more modern
games, then the disk space requirements soon begin to increase.
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I had a couple of old machines lying around
that were doing nothing, and one was an old Dell Optiplex
that I had rescued from a builders skip 2 years previously.
I had brought it home, booted it up and it worked perfectly.
Obviously the first thing I did was to check the My Videos
folder to see if there was anything compromising (fully intending
to delete it instantly of course), but finding nothing I
formatted the hard disk and it had sat there for a couple
of years waiting to be turned from a dead piece of crap into
a working piece of crap. |
Like I said, the spec of the machine will largely dictate what
Operating System you will put on it, and also which M.A.M.E.
version you should use, and as I was using such old equipment
I needed a solid, reliable and more importantly low resource
Operating System.
It turned out that the Optiplex having only a Pentium 3 450MHz
processor was a little underpowered, despite running some games
and running them well, it wasn’t powerful enough to run
all of them. The same goes for the P3 667MHz unit I had too,
so the general rule of thumb for an antiquated version of M.A.M.E.
is a processor of around 800MHz, and lo and behold I had one
of those too.
So once you have your parts bin assembled into a working and
bootable PC it is time to turn your attention to the software
build, and though the software build is also as potentially infuriating
as the hardware one, you won’t be cutting the ends of your
fingers on crappy old circuit boards any more.
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