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Making a MAME machine

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VenomXL

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I’m trying to make a MAME machine to emulate most of the stuff that I’m not worried about dropping a frame or 2, like X-men/ninja turtles/dig dug.

My issue is what to do about the turn of the century stuff like Blitz, NBA showtime, gauntlet legends, KI/KI2 that don’t run well on MAME with retropie.

How much firepower is needed to run those titles at arcade speed/semi accuracy? I’m kinda counting on putting a full PC in, but I would prefer to not have to.
 
Whoops. I fat fingered, thought I sent to project ideas. My bad. Feel free to delete.
 
VenomXL said:
I’m trying to make a MAME machine to emulate most of the stuff that I’m not worried about dropping a frame or 2, like X-men/ninja turtles/dig dug.

My issue is what to do about the turn of the century stuff like Blitz, NBA showtime, gauntlet legends, KI/KI2 that don’t run well on MAME with retropie.

How much firepower is needed to run those titles at arcade speed/semi accuracy? I’m kinda counting on putting a full PC in, but I would prefer to not have to.
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Most people use a Dell Optiplex system for this since they're cheap but powerful enough. If you want to get into high res SF4, SFV, etc then maybe you go a bit more powerful.

IMO if you're going with anything other than a bartop, a pi is just not worth it. SD card issues, underpowered, etc.
 
Yeah I run optiplexs 990's on all my groovymame setups. No issue with those. I can even run naomi on them with an upgraded gfx card (AMD R7 430 is what I use)

The optiplex usually costs me somewhere between 50-100 AUD
 
I kinda figured. So I can get Blitz/Tekken Tag/Wayne Gretzky/MK4 at 60 FPS with the optiplex 990 without additional acceleration?

I don’t care if I have to put a little more into it, I just want to make sure it can run anything up to the year 2000 at fullish speed.
 
when you say additional acceleration what do you mean? Since I CRT Emudrivers and groovymame, I'm not using onboard video. The setup I have plays Blitz fine - I haven't tried Tekken Tag, Wayne Gretzky or MK4 though - I can't see it being an issue if Naomi games are running @ 60fps
 
I mean throwing an additional GPU in besides the onboard graphics. Like what card are you tossing in as far as price to value?

like I’m not gonna throw a 3090 in there, but if I need to get something it’s fine
 
MAME doesn't offer GPU acceleration. what you want is the high clockspeed CPU possible.

In general MAME should not be used for 3D games, you're better off with alternative emulator that does have GPU Acceleration.

The reason being is that MAME's goal is to accurately document the hardware in code. and writing for GPU acceleration is counter to that goal, which means that while there are many 3D games that are "properly emulated" in MAME they run at about 1FPS because the CPU is performing all the 3D calculations as well.

At the end of the day MAME does not exist so that you can play games, MAME exists to preserve the hardware in code. The fact that it plays games is mostly there to "prove out" that the documentation is correct.

This also has the great side-effect of it being the most accurate emulator in a lot of cases, but unfortunately another side effect is that games that used 3D acceleration are emulated so slowly that they're mostly unplayable.
 
I’m an idiot. I knew that MAME didn’t do hardware acceleration, and yet I still wrote it. I’m sorry guys, the brain rot on insomnia is all too real.
 
There is still SOME benefit to having a GPU with MAME. the GPU is used for things like image scaling and shaders (such as scanline emulation). and having one means that's one less thing for the CPU to deal with thus freeing up that little extra room for additional Emulation processing. but you reach the point of diminishing returns with a GPU pretty quick. So you'll get the same benefit from a old cheap GPU than you will with a new expensive one.

If you want to run emulators like Dolphin or PCSX2 then you should be buying your GPU based on their requirements.

if you're MAME only then I recommend an old 5xxx series ATi Card for CRT_EmuDriver support.
 
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