General Requirements for MAME...

[SeanMallonUSAPL]

I'm planning to build a cabinet with a dedicated Windows based MAME computer system. I'm planing on using games that not only are graphics heavy but I want to add HDD games as well.

The problem is, is that I don't have computers with enough in the ways of graphics and processing speed. Memory is not a problem (2TB) and I'm looking for the following information...


What kind of graphics card do you suggest?
What kind of processor do you suggest?
What kind of display do you suggest?


The first two are the most important to me.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. :confused:

[ulaoulao]

For Mame you do not need a gfx card. Mame is purely driven by CPU. Get the fastest INTEL based chip you can afford. Also note:

Does MAME benefit from SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) / HT (Hyper-Threading) / dual cores?

Yes. MAME's most demanding drivers (pretty much any game with 3D polygons) will automatically use multiple cores (currently 3 is the most optimal; we hope to lift that bottleneck in the future). Additional ways to thread wider may be implemented in the future.- source mame faq - worth a read http://wiki.mamedev.org/index.php/FAQ:Performance