A dedicated emulation system

[Harrison]

You don't need a state of the art PC for emulation. My emulation system is an Athlon XP 3000+ with 1GB of ram running Windows XP. Any system over 2GHz with 512MB of ram will run most emulators perfectly. Also the graphics card doesn't need to be cutting edge by today's standards either. Mine is using an ATI radeon 9800 Pro.

For an emulation system I would personally go for a full computer instead of a laptop. The main reason is you can locate the arcade controls right in front of the monitor. You could also make it look authentic by running the graphics through an older CRT monitor instead of an LCD as the older lower resolution arcade games do look better on a CRT than an LCD.

The other advantage of a full computer is you can upgrade it later, add more hard drives to store more rom sets etc... It would also work better in a cabinet if you did decide to make one at a later date, or get hold of an old real arcade cabinet and convert it.

[Submeg]

So how big would a HD need to be to run:
-Amiga
-NES
-SNES
-Arcade?

[Harrison]

If you wanted to hold the compete rom sets for each you mean?

If you were not going to store the CD based games then a 200GB HD would be enough for those 4 systems. However if you did want to have every Amiga game then you would be looking at more as the full Amiga set with all CDTV, CD32 and other Amiga CDs will easily fill 300GB. Without the CD based games 200GB HD would be fine.

The best place to have a look to get an idea of the HD space needed for different rom sets is pleasuredome.org.uk as they list the complete sets.

The other issue is that once you get into emulation and have a few full sets, then you will want more. N64 for example which fills roughly 7 DVDs or 22GB. Or CD based games systems, which fill a lot more.

[Submeg]

Woa, thats a lot of stuff. How expensive are large HDs these days? We should have a thread for part costs somewhere...

[Harrison]

250GB HD is about £40-50 at the moment I think. Seagate is probably the best make to go for, although Maxtor have always been good for me.

[Submeg]

Thats an alright price, hope they are around that mark down here

[Harrison]

If you are building a new system then try to go for SATA Harddrives as they save a lot of hassle. No jumper settings are correct positions needed on any IDE cables. You just connect the SATA cable and power to the drive and it works.