Best OS

[ingeanous]

What's the best operating system for a Gamex cab? XP SP2? The reason I ask, is my HD is flaking out and I'm getting a lot of corrupt file errors and I'm going to rebuild from scratch. I've got everything from 3.11 to Vista....

Ing

[Nologic]

XP Pro\Home\MCE SP2 or Win2K\3 SP5 or other

Kind of depends to some degree what your plans are...

I prefer XP Pro SP2

[bkenobi]

I haven't tried any other OS than WinXP Pro SP2 with GameEx. However, my personal opinion (not having used Vista myself more than for a couple minutes) is that WinXP Pro SP2 is the best choice currently for a stable work environment with compatibility to standard programs.

Win2k3 should be nice and stable, but I don't know that it has all the components that WinXP does since it's more of a server OS.

Vista crashed on me after just 5 minutes of playing with it and my wife's company abandoned it after <1 week due to too many problems. They went back to...WinXP SP2.

Win2k would work as long as you can get drivers for you hardware and .net works with it (as it should).

I wouldn't go back to Win98 unless I had to, but I would avoid WinME like the plague (MS wishes they never released it). Win98 doesn't support USB 2.0 (unless there was a new driver released that I'm not aware of), so that might make a difference to you.

Anything prior to Win98 won't natively support USB, so that might be a problem.

[Creek]

For a cab, I'd also recommend WinXP Pro SP2, with a customized boot screen, and a hidden shell.

I have a long running project of setting up a machine as media center, also running GameEx, and for that, I prefer Vista's media center. So far, I haven't encountered any problems, that I couldn't resolve in one way or another.

[Tom Speirs]

I recommend XP SP2 for GameEx.

It should run fine on Win98 SE (note the SE), 2000, XP, Server 2003, and Vista, and 64 bit version of the latter 3.

I have not tested the older OS's for a while with latest GameEx version though. Windows 98SE and 2000 might however be good options for really old hardware though.

Since I did all the work on Vista compatiblity a year ago, it should run great on Vista, although I dont recommend because of the compantibility of anything you might be running from GameEx.

[chriss]

  ingeanous said:

What's the best operating system for a Gamex cab? XP SP2? The reason I ask, is my HD is flaking out and I'm getting a lot of corrupt file errors and I'm going to rebuild from scratch. I've got everything from 3.11 to Vista....

Ing

i wouldn't really recommend 3.11

i got xp and the system is starting up very fast (there's not much on there except gameex and mame, i even disabled the modern xp style and switched back to the win 2000 look)

i guess with xp you'll probably not run into any driver issues as you could experience with vista!

so take xp sp2 (or even sp3 but i don't see a reason for that)

[ingeanous]

Thanks guys, I think I'll go with XP SP2. That's what I had running everything good on. I was using the "lite" version. The only issues I had was getting the .net framework to install correctly. This time I think I'll try the regular version.

Ing

[emphatic]

I use XP Pro SP2 in my cab. It boots up directly into Gamex under 30 seconds. I think that's really fast. I've uninstalled a lot of unneeded programs/features and ran the free GameXP application ( http://www.theorica.net/gamexp.htm ). I have installed Bootscreen with a MAME bootskin ( http://www.wincustomize.com/skins.aspx?lib...amp;search=mame ) that matches my marquee. Changed the logon background colour to black ( http://www.tweakxp.com/article36800.aspx ) and installed InstantSheller. That's all I did, I guess you could optimize more and hey, if you find out some easy tweaks, let me know.

Emph

[DJ Infinity]

I use 64bit Vista Ultimate and Game Ex runs fine. I haven't ran into any probs with any of the emulators I use.

Now you talk about tempermental OS with software and compatibilty issues try 64 Bit XP with SP2/ I will never do that again. (well maybe for 64 bit compiling since only VS 2005 only works for that)