PC Requirement for Gamex

[n2vsw]

Hi folks,

I have been reading thru some of the forum posts and would like to know if some of you could help. I am running an old version of Gamex in my Mame only cabinet. Version 6 something. The machine has a Sempron processor 1.8 ghz with 256 megs of ram. Shared memory of course but it ran fine with no problems. A friend of mine has Hyperspin setup on a portable hardrive with numerous emulators ( snes, atari, etc etc). Looks very nice but he says it wont run on a single core processor, it needs a dual core 2 ghz or better and 2 meg ram minimum. I cant justify purchasing a computer like that for a mame cabinet. Sooo what I wanted to do is copy the emulators and roms from his portable hard drive and set them up in the latest version of Gamex. The question is will it work in my current machine? I have the trusty home pc which is a Celeron Dual Core 1.6 ghz. It has 1 meg of ram in it. The wife wouldnt be opposed to using this machine for the cabinet and purchasing a new one for the home.

Do you think the trusty home pc would work or should I plan on upgrading the mame cabinet beyond the Celeron processor. Thanks for any help.

[Draco1962]

Hi folks,

I have been reading thru some of the forum posts and would like to know if some of you could help. I am running an old version of Gamex in my Mame only cabinet. Version 6 something. The machine has a Sempron processor 1.8 ghz with 256 megs of ram. Shared memory of course but it ran fine with no problems. A friend of mine has Hyperspin setup on a portable hardrive with numerous emulators ( snes, atari, etc etc). Looks very nice but he says it wont run on a single core processor, it needs a dual core 2 ghz or better and 2 meg ram minimum. I cant justify purchasing a computer like that for a mame cabinet. Sooo what I wanted to do is copy the emulators and roms from his portable hard drive and set them up in the latest version of Gamex. The question is will it work in my current machine? I have the trusty home pc which is a Celeron Dual Core 1.6 ghz. It has 1 meg of ram in it. The wife wouldnt be opposed to using this machine for the cabinet and purchasing a new one for the home.

Do you think the trusty home pc would work or should I plan on upgrading the mame cabinet beyond the Celeron processor. Thanks for any help.

You can find the minimum requirements here and I have also posted them below:

Minimum System Requirements:

Pentium 3 800Mhz CPU (or equivalent)

DirectX(DirectDraw) Compatible Video card, capable of 16 bit colour at 640X480.

[Your video card does not normally need to be too special unless using videos or DVD, although older motherboard onboard video is not recommended]

DirectSound Compatible Sound Card.

256MB Ram

Windows 2000 (SP4), XP (SP2), MCE, Vista, Windows 7

250MB Free hard drive space

Microsoft .net framework 2 service pack 1

Microsoft Direct X 9.0

Windows Media Player 9 or above

It looks like you are just under the recommended RAM with the system requirements with the first system, because of the 256 MB shared with onboard video (If you are using it on a MAME only cap and keep it to just displaying list view or still snaps instead of video snaps you will probably be OK). I have found on some of my older systems that I tend to get better video performance with an add-on video card (AGP or PCI) with at least 128-256MB RAM on the video card.

On your second system, it exceeds fairly well and should be able to handle the features in the latest version and handle most emulators beyond MAME fine. You did not indicate if it has onbaord video, shared or own memory, and what OS you wil be running.