Building my first MAME system. Help?

[OtisCampbell]

I own several classic arcade machines, and decided to finally build my first multi-emulator machine.

I will be running Maximus Arcade to shuffle between my various emulators.

My main questions revolve around my computer choice. I am starting with a Dell OptiPlex 3.0Ghz Pentium 4 with 1GB of RAM. Do I have enough processor and RAM to run MAME and the other emulators?

Also, I need a video card. Do I need to spend a ton of money here, or is a basic video card enough?

Thanks!
--Otis

[FatTrucker]

That will be perfect for about 95% of the games that currently work with Mame. There are a few more recent titles that only run with fast dual cores and there are some that won't give a playable framerate regardless of the hardware.....so yes its fine.

It should be ok for just about all other emu's with the exception of Gamecube and Playstation 2 which similarly need fast dual cores, a couple of gig of ram and a decent GPU.

The graphics card is pretty irrelevant for everything other than PS2/GC emulation. Any current or last gen card should be absolutely fine.