Running Emulators on Older PCs

Hey sorry about the double post (same post earlier in different thead) i just figured out how to start a new topic:o

Anyways my question i wanted to post has to do with n64 emulation, i'm aware that there are many different emulators avalible and currently Project64 works quite well for me, but i'm soon going to run all my emulations off an older PC, i think it's a P2. I'm confident that it will run Zsnes, nestopia, and Fusion just fine, but project64 i'm not quite sure of. At this time I'm unable to test on it so i just went ahead and downloaded all the n64 emulators avalible. Is there any n64 emulator that would run best on an older PC like a pentium2 running windows98 and a sub par graphics card?

What do you think of my other choices of emulators, i quite like Zsnes but i'm not that big on Fusion (it just seems to appear really dim to me) and nestopia i hardly use.

1 more thing, as i am new to n64 emulation or any type that would require analog control, what would be the best gamepad / emulator to replicate analog?

wow, pentium 2. Why?

I dont think its strong enough to play project 64.

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Originally Posted by datadayne

wow, pentium 2. Why?

I dont think its strong enough to play project 64.

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is it strong enough to run any other emu?
What if i overclocked the cpu or graphics card?

Heres my thinking...

ok, so I went to sleep over to my friends house, I wanted to play project 64.
So I put it to a disk so I didnt need to install it on his computer. When I tried, It didnt work, his computer was a pentium 3.

If it does turn out to work on your computer, then it might run really slow.

(im curios, why are you changing to pentium 2?)

Nintendo 64 emulation requires at least a Pentium III processor, a GeForce 2 or similar video card and 128 MB of system RAM.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by datadayne

Heres my thinking...

ok, so I went to sleep over to my friends house, I wanted to play project 64.
So I put it to a disk so I didnt need to install it on his computer. When I tried, It didnt work, his computer was a pentium 3.

If it does turn out to work on your computer, then it might run really slow.

(im curios, why are you changing to pentium 2?)

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my main computer is a laptop so i figured i could make use of the old computer that i picked up for free. Anyways i just got it and the specs don't look good
celeron 466mhz
64mb ram
4mb ATI rage II
ouch!... at least it was free, but i must be dreaming if i'm thinking of running project64,
oh well it can probably run Zsnes fine.

Direct3D cannot run with a 4 MB video card, so don't expect anything beyond SNES to run.

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Originally Posted by Butters

Direct3D cannot run with a 4 MB video card, so don't expect anything beyond SNES to run.

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i know i know, i've pretty much abandoned the idea.

BAH ZA!!! i've just come up with an idea, i'll use the old celeron466 to make an arcade machine.
>---**rushes off to read up on MAME**--->

:confused:

MAME requires even more than a Nintendo 64 emulator. It can't even run smootly on my Celeron 850 MHz.

Does that not depend on what type of games he wishes to run on MAME? I would reckon as long as he avoids the newer Streetfighters and Killer Instincts etc, he should have fun building a retro MAME project on an older PC. I mean, I can't speak from experience here, but if you stick to the old classics you should be okay, even with a newer MAME32.

Somebody's bound to correct me on this....

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Butters

:confused:

MAME requires even more than a Nintendo 64 emulator. It can't even run smootly on my Celeron 850 MHz.

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even if it's only used to run older games? all i'm interested in running is games from the 80's (donkey kong, pacman, galaga...ect) and some from the mid 90's (street fighter 2, killer instinct, samurai showdown...ect) if i can figure out how to do light gun games i'd like to have virtua' cop, police trainer...ect. nothing too amazing. The SNES versions of these titles (SF2, KI) work fine on it, but of course zsnes doesn't require direct3D, does mame?
I read an article about converting an old table top arcade machine to a mame system and the guy only used a pentium1, but all he ran was 80's games.

In that case, yes. That's possible.

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Originally Posted by Butters

In that case, yes. That's possible.

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i've heard that i should probably be running an older version of mame because of my archaic computer.

Dont know, I played PJ64 at half speed on my old Duron 900 Mhz. I dont know much about the Pentiums.

Celerons are crap CPUs so that's the first strike against your system. Low clock speed is the second.

As long as you stick to old classics like people have said, you should be able to run most games fine in MAME32. Also, if you have a problem running NeoGeo games at full speed, look for an emulator called NeoRageX. I could run almost any game with it on my old Cyrix MII 233mhz w/64MB RAM. And as far as I know DirectX/3D should run fine on a 4MB graphics card. That's what they had back in the day for 3D

Even ZSNES can give problems when you have a PII. On my old PC (PII 266), some games like Secret of Mana would run pretty slow when there were a lot of enemies on the screen. I would also suggest using at least a PIII.

I don't know, my laptop has a celoron and it runs MAME just fine, along with GBA and what's done of the DS. I mainly use it for work though, my gaming computer usually takes the blow for my emulators.

Older versions of Mame will run perfectly well on older hardware. For very old computers PIII, PII etc then I would recommend a version prior to 0.69 for a PII and prior to 0.106 for a PIII.

The current Mame version (0.114) won't like an old PC regardless of the game you are trying to run on it, since they did the major code overhaul a few versions back (0.107 I think).