Will too many games slow down my GameEx machine?

[cz2000]

Pretty much as the title says. I would love to have all my PC games installed on my dedicated GameEx computer but Im worried that they will clog up the registry and system directories which is annoying because I spent a lot of time stripping down Windows XP removing unnecessary things.

Basically I want to have as many PC Games as possible and have the computer start fast as possible. Any suggestions?

[chriss]

you could just have 2 partitions, one for xp , one for the games! that's how i have it.

a lot of games do not necessarily slow down your machine. The indexing in gameex might take a little longer. just be sure to defragment your hard drive from time to time.

[cz2000]

Thankyou for your reply chriss but I can't see how installing on a different partition will solve my problem. My GameEx machine has 2 1TB Hard drives and the games are installed on the second drive but the registry on the first drive is still littered with 100's of registry entries and junk like Installshield installation manager and all sorts of Registration links. Maybe its just my imagination but I think its noticeably slower than before I started installing all the PC games.

[chriss]

my point was, that a smaller start up partition with only the os on it can be faster than having a big partition. access speeds decrease the more files you have on a partition.

I use a 10GB boot partition with XP on it and I just installed the necessary things (gameex, directx, firefox)

most emulators don't need to be installed so there is nothing written in the registry. The PC games I have don't need to install either (sins of solar empire, hod3, virtual tennis). Things like the install shield wizard are necessary windows updates to install new pieces of software, so I wouldn't consider this litter.

i wouldn't worry too much about PC games slowing down the machine, just make sure you know what the games will install (eg. do you need punkbuster or the yahoo toolbar?)

If you have friends like bonzi buddy or gator (if you still remember these guys) then you have a problem. they'll hang out in your ram and will just try to make your life harder. use spyware terminator to check if there is any spyware slowing down your system

How long does gameex need to start up? for my setup it takes like 40 sec-1min... you could probably tweak it more but I'm a bit scared of these Make-Windows-Better tools... they fucked up my system before...

[cz2000]

Only about 35-45 sec but up to a minute almost now after installing 30 games. Ive been monitoring what the games install to and many silently add new fonts or audio video codecs as well as changes my dreaded registry changes. Some games I have noticed can still run after I remove their registry entries but many have a check when the game starts, and of course fail to work.

What Im really wondering is would installing 100+ PC games be viable speedwise.

For everybody else on the forums with PC games on their machine I would love to know both how many you have installed and if youve noticed any speed difference.

*edit* Im running a lite version of windows XP made with Nlite no adware or spyware or anything. And you had me smile bonzi buddy. Very first piece of spyware/addware I remember.

[topkat]

The usual performance tips apply to a gameex-setup as well:

- NEVER install things you don't need (like browser-bars, desktop-searches, explorer shell-extensions, printer monitors, other useless tray-icons etc.)

- Avoid VISTA (my personal opinion)

- Anti-Virus is a must, but use a lightwight one like antivir

- The more ram the better

- Set up a fixed sized pagefile (around 3x the size of physical memory)

- Defrag your drives

- Seperate OS and data

- Use up-to-date drivers and codecs

If your PC is going to be dedicated mameex-system, I would suggest to reinstall it from scratch. Get a small drive to for the OS and pagefiles. Use your 2 terabyte-drives in a RAID-array(either striped for speed or mirrored for error tolerance). Install the driver you need (by hand if possible, using device-manager and *.inf-files only), install codecs, and try to avoid/disable any unneeded gadgets. Switch to old win2000-desktop-theme and you should be ready to fly.

Once I ran winxp on an old p3/512 mb ram surprisingly well.

[chriss]

nice tips, topkat

so you wanna install 100+ games? thats a lot

if you want to play a lot of old games than they will be emulated (eg by dosbox/dfend) so no need to worry about performance.

i have ~10 PC games running on my cab and it didn't affect the performance as far as i can tell (didn't really check before/after)

[Palmore]

I'm currently running 30,000 games on my cab (mostly ROMs / emulated games).

But I do have upwards of 30+ PC games installed and configured. (I just came across the Cab Friendly Games List here, so this weekend and into the next 2-3 weeks I'll be adding ALOT more PC games).

As for registry woes, try 2 things.

1. I have a "beater" box that I install and test games out on to see if they are "cab friendly" and can be used via Keyboard only. Once validated, I just copy the game folder over to my arcade. 99.999% of the time the games load and run just fine with out having to run the installer.

2. If you are really trying to keep your regiesty clean, have you ever used RegMon by sysinternals (well, M$ now since they bought them.) that and FileMon are great windows tools.

3. Defrag Defrag Defrag, 2 1TB drives, and 30+ up to 100+ game installs will leave you grinding away searching for those precious blocks of data for your game. Defrag often, or grab a copy of Diskeeper for your cab.

4. As stated, OS should be on 1 Hard drive (not the same hard drive diferent partition, you gain nothing but ease of a windows reinstall. You are still hitting the same platters with the same read/write head.) Best practice would be....

1 HDD for your OS 10-20GB (20 being optimal, as with the amount of patches etc M$ releases you don't wanna be cramped on space.

1 HDD for your swap/page file, again it's great to have a separate spindle for this, thus paging does not hit your OS or Games drive. This can be a 4GB drive and format it out to a 3.5GB page file (should suffice, although typically best practice is 1.5x-2x physical RAM) 3.5GB again though will be enough (heaven help us if you are paging more than 4GB at anyone time.) ALso be sure to set the Min/Max for your page file to the SAME, it's a performance hit when Windows decides to grow or shrink this page file... you don't want that to happen in the middle of a game session.

1 HDD (or of course more) for Roms / Games. Not only does this give your system a 3rd spindle to dedicate to your games, it also makes life easier when you have to reinstall windows... now your games are on a segmented volume and you can leave them as is, just wipe windows on drive 1 and reinstall and point back to your roms drive.

Feel free to use NLite or XPLite to trim down your Win XP install, just make sure you know what you are turning off and what will break when you disable that feature

Topkay makes a good suggestion with Striping your 2 1TB drives, you will get better performance if you stripe those disks (preferably via a hardware controller with the XOR hardware on board, and not via the Windows OS.) But then your are at the mercy of loosing all data if 1 of the 2 drives fail on you.

Anyone toy with the /3GB switch in their boot.ini to see if you gain any perfomance / RAM utilization benefits on a cab?

[bkenobi]

I agree that different drives are best, but is recommending these small drives really a good thing?

For example, I took a 20GB drive out of the closet when I was putting my file server together for exactly this reason. The drive is plenty big for a basic WinXP install with all patches and all programs that are needed. I then have the hardware RAID card manage the RAID5 array. Everything works fine except for one thing...the system drive is loud and slow. Since nobody makes a 20GB drive these days, the only options for that would be old units that are either pulled or NOS. If it's pulled, you are taking a chance that you will get to set everything up again when it dies. With either, though, you will end up with a slow (by today's standards), loud, energy hungry (well, that depends I guess) drive. Oh, and it doesn't go into idle very well as the drive continually wants to spin up and then down at seemingly random times.

If you are looking for a 4GB drive, you are even worse off! I have several smaller drives in the closet as well (2GB, 2GB, 5GB, 8GB, 10GB, 20GB, several larger...). Those 2-5GB drives are from the late 1990's. I haven't checked specs, but I'm pretty confident they won't be very fast or quite either.

Basically, I agree that separate drives is best, but I'm not sure that you will get the full benefit if you use those small drives over combining everything on one modern drive. I haven't done any testing though, so I could be wrong.

PS: Here's a chart showing HDD size over time. I think it shows approximate ages for my drives

PPS: I guess there is one way to get a smaller drive without getting old equipment... If you get a laptop drive, you can get down to ~30GB pretty easily. The problem there is that the cost/GB is MUCH higher than buying a larger desktop drive. Anyway, just my 2 cents...

[Palmore]

Understandable, I guess I was missunderstood (or misstyped lol)

I was more or less base lining the minimum size required for those drives.

But, keep in mind, you can get a PATA WD Raptor 10k RPM drive in the 36 (or was it 32GB) size, still a fairly new drive, yet excellent performance! (I picked one up a couple years back for my Mediacenters OS drive)

Also lets not forget SSD. Solid State Drives are smaller size and are getting pretty fast (although you are still limited to the bus speed of the host system) But you take alot out of your seek times with SSD drives. (they are just $$$$ lol)

I also have a few SCSI 3 Ultra 160 10k drives that aren't extremely old, and in my case hardly used... Just going off what I have sitting around in my basement lol

wanna see what I mean with stuff in the basement?

Needless to say, Ben Kenobi is correct is saying those size drives are hard to find, and typically old and crusty. But if you are looking for bare minimum requirements, there ya have them =)

[Tempest]

  Quote

Needless to say, Ben Kenobi is correct is saying those size drives are hard to find, and typically old and crusty. But if you are looking for bare minimum requirements, there ya have them =)

He's not really saying, but we're pretty sure BKenobi's first name is BOB.

This is just kinda of a running joke here on the forums...

I like that last picture, looks like you need to go buy some more stuff!

[bkenobi]

Is that a tech support call center in your basement or is it just your wife's 900 business?

Seriously though, yes I understand that you could just use bigger more modern drives. I'm just thinking that most people are limited to the amount of money they can throw at their hobbies. I personally would have a hard time justifying purchasing 2 extra drives that will be used for ~1% of their space or less just to get an extra 1% performance boost. Okay, I might be exaggerating, but you see what I mean. I personally would at least put the system on one drive and the data on another. It helps to avoid corruption as well.

[chriss]

palmore, do you have a garage sell coming up? i would be there!

[Tempest]

  bkenobi said:

Is that a tech support call center in your basement or is it just your wife's 900 business?

LMAO