A dedicated emulation system

[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.

[Submeg]

I just remembered that my sis is getting a laptop so the comp that used to in her room is going to replace the 500 MHz one that is sitting in the study collecting dust. But that one is only 850 Mhz, so I'll have to look into buying a new comp

[Harrison]

850MHz is fast enough for most emulation though and would lend itself well to MAME and other 8-bit and 16-bit system emulators. Running Windows 2000 on a PC of that speed would be best as XP would use up too many system resources.

It would probably struggle with some of the more recent 3D based systems, and the more recent games MAME supports, but everything else would work fine.

[Submeg]

What games are we talking? Like PSX games?

[Harrison]

It may have trouble with PSX emulation, but I did used to run ePSXe emulation on a 400 MHz P2 and it could nearly keep up, so a PC twice as fast might be OK, as long as its graphics card was ok too. I would still expect it to have some slowdown.

MAME also supports some 3D systems, include the arcade version of the Playstation that ran the Tekken and Soul Edge games. There are also other more recent systems it supports that a slower PC would struggle with.

Other systems such N64 might be OK at lower resolutions. Sega Saturn and Dreamcast emulation would probably both not run too well. Basically anything from the 32-bit or newer era might have some problems or be too slow to have fun.

If you were looking to build a new system then the socket 939 Athlon 64 range is new very affordable. You can get an AMD64 3200+ for £43.

[Submeg]

Cool cool. So what kind of games are running on MAME? The old old games,but also the new games such as Tekken...

[Harrison]

MAME emulates a LOT of Arcade machines. It supports arcade games from the start in the 70's up to 2005. Most of the arcade games from the start up to the mid 90's are emulated perfectly, whereas some of the newer games included don't currently work perfectly and their emulation is still being perfected as newer versions of MAME get released and so how well they work is constantly being improved. At the moment you can perfectly emulate 5677 games out of the 6437 total that MAME supports.

Many of the games that are currently flagged as "not working" will actually work too. They just give some graphical or audio glitches. Some don't have any sound or some are missing textures or lose graphics for a few seconds as you play.

If you only installed MAME as the only emulator on their PC it would still take you a very long time to play every game it supported! 6437 games is a lot to get through!